The Republican Supermajority in the Tennessee General Assembly has made headlines this year supporting controversial legislation involving drag shows and gender-affirming healthcare.
Tuesday night, the House K-12 Subcommittee added two additional bills to the list of those that are facing criticism from LGBTQ advocates.
Student Pronouns
The subcommittee voted to move Englewood Representative Mark Cochran’s bill forward allowing teachers to establish a pronoun policy based on a student’s permanent record. The bill would also protect teachers from facing disciplinary actions if they do not wish to refer to the student by their preferred pronoun.
Representative Cochran said the bill is intended to protect an individual teacher’s First Amendment rights and individual liberty.
“It’s very critical that we establish the policy that public school teachers and employees of public LEAS (local education agencies) do not shed their constitutional rights when they walk in the door,” said Representative Cochran. “Not only does the First Amendment protect your right to speak it protects your right not to speak. It protects you from saying something that you do not believe in.”
This bill sparked concern from Knoxville Representative Sam McKenzie who pressed back on it potentially causing disruption between classrooms.
“Isn’t this a dangerous precedent to set to have it at the classroom level? If you go on and do it, I would hate for there to be so much inconsistency and I’ll be quite frank, if you get a teacher with some bias either way, this could become very disruptive. Why not do this on a permissive and LEA level?” asked Representative McKenzie.
“It is permissive, and it does not force a teacher to make that their policy, but if a teacher chooses to make it their policy, that they’re gonna use the pronouns based on a student’s birth sex on their permanent record, they can choose to do that. If they don’t want to do that, again, that teacher would have that freedom. It is permissive, currently,” said Representative Cochran.
Representative McKenzie argued that the policy could potentially be both confusing and disruptive to the learning experience if one teacher isn’t enforcing that policy, but another is.
He also said society is already at a point where if a teacher does not want to accept something they do not agree with or believe in, they don’t have to.
“It’s going to be wildly enforced, widely and wildly enforced, and that’s kinda scary to me,” said Rep. McKenzie. “A teacher does not have to refer to a student as ‘Mr. Mrs. They/Them’, whatever. A teacher does not have to do that today. If a teacher does not want to refer to someone by a pronoun, they don’t have to. [Students] have a name on the card that they walk in the room with and they’re called by that name on their card. Today’s laws are good for both sides. I think it protects both side.”
McKenzie additionally said that the other side could argue that their rights and liberties are being taken by not having the option of being referred to by their preferred pronouns.
Cochran said he is more interested in protecting the individual teachers and argued that silence does not protect the teachers.
The legislation will be heard next in the Education Administration Committee.
Transgender Athlete Restrictions
Subcommittee members also moved Brentwood Representative Gino Bulso’s bill forward to expand last year’s legislation that required public school athletes in middle and high schools to compete in accordance with the sex they were assigned at birth.
Representative Bulso is proposing extending the restriction to private schools who become members of the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association (TSSAA).
“This is a bill that seeks to protect girls’ athletics,” said Representative Bulso.
This restriction has been heavily criticized by civil rights groups and Dahron Johnson with the Tennessee Equality Project spoke against the bill Tuesday, telling legislators that private schools already have the means to make their own policies.
“In short, this bill goes out of its way to give legislative stamp of approval to schools creating policies that serve only to divide and deny. With the onslaught of legislation targeting transgender people this year, and last year, and the bills upon which those were built on the year before that, maybe legislation like this feels like a done deal. After all, there’s no lack of folk seeking to add their brick to wall seeking to separate Tennessee’s trans and gender diverse citizens from life and the public sphere,” said Johnson.
Representative Bulso pressed Johnson on her criticism of his legislation.
“Do you agree that we should not allow boys in the girls locker room in high school athletics?” asked Representative Bulso.
Knoxville Representative Sam McKenzie also questioned Bulso’s legislation, asking if he was aware of any issue involving transgender athletes at private schools in Tennessee.
“There was tension this past summer to one of the private high schools in Davidson County, an all-girls high school that issued a letter indicating its willingness to allow boys to enter into the school and participate in accordance with the school’s extracurricular and other activities,” said Representative Bulso.
“I just think this and last year’s piece of legislation is a solution just in desperate need of a problem. We always talk about how we’re not California. We champion that. I hear it constantly. We’re not New York, we’re not all these places. But we’re taking these policies that maybe have happened in these other places and applying them to Tennessee, I just really think it’s kind of a double-minded kind of mindset. This is not a problem in our great state,” said Representative McKenzie.
