New Tennessee law expands protections for employees, parents in school pronoun disputes

In a win for free speech and parents’ rights, Tennessee added more protections for educators and public employees who refuse to use preferred pronouns and opened the door for lawsuits against schools and employers that do otherwise.

Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, signed the measure last week. It explicitly allows parents of unemancipated minors to file civil actions against schools or employers that implement pronoun policies or allow the use of certain names or pronouns without parental consent. 

The Volunteer State passed its first pronoun law in 2022, which primarily focused on protecting teachers who did not want to refer to students by pronouns that didn’t align with their biological sex or a name not related to their legal name. 

Those protections, including the right to freedom of speech, are now extended to state employees and contractors, who cannot be compelled to use specific pronouns. 

Republican state Rep. Mark Cochran said he introduced the bill to protect teachers and students from “coerced speech,” WRCB-TV reported. The law works both ways, preventing teachers from requiring students to refer to them by pronouns not associated with their birth sex or a name not associated with their given name. 

The measure protects individuals from retaliation, penalties or lawsuits for refusing to use a person’s preferred pronouns, while allowing lawsuits against public schools, higher education institutions and the state for violating the law. 

“No one should lose their job or face punishment at school or work for declining to say something they believe is false,” said Matt Sharp, Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel, in a release praising the bill. “In no world is it acceptable for the government to discipline students or force good educators or other public servants out of a job all for the sake of promoting gender ideology.” 

The law is in stark contrast to a proposal in Colorado that would expand the state’s anti-discrimination law to include “chosen name” and “gender expression,” effectively compelling speech and exposing individuals, schools and businesses to legal action for noncompliance, according to Heritage Action for America, which is urging Gov. Jared Polis to veto it after it passed in the Legislature. 

Colorado’s HB 1312 requires schools to revise dress codes and naming policies to affirm all expressions of gender and chosen names, regardless of the reason, placing added burdens on educators and administrators. Heritage says those mandates risk infringing on the religious liberty of faith-based schools and individuals by penalizing them for adhering to beliefs about sex and gender that conflict with state-imposed language and identity norms. 

California has also passed legislation allowing students to change their pronouns or name without informing parents, but many red states are stopping the pronoun push from the pro-trans left. 

Since 2022, 10 states have passed laws protecting people from being forced to use pronouns that don’t align with a person’s biological sex: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Montana, North Dakota and Tennessee. 

All are Republican-controlled except Kentucky, which has a Republican Legislature but a Democratic governor. Kentucky is also the only one of those states without a broad school choice program.