For South Carolina’s attorney general Alan Wilson, his priorities in 2025 are starting off with leading a legal battle over gender pronoun rules in U.S. public school districts.
Beginning with the Olentangy Local School District in Columbus, Ohio, the national conservative group Parents Defending Education filed a lawsuit in May 2023, arguing that the policies mandating the use of transgender students’ preferred pronouns violated the First Amendment. Last July, the group asked a federal court for an injunction on the policies, which had been declined.
After the injunction request went to the Sixth Circuit court, the majority of a three-judge panel also declined, stating that the policies didn’t “compel” certain speech. The circuit judges ruled that students could simply avoid using pronouns when referring to transgender classmates. Since the rules also generally banned all gender or sexual identity-based discrimination, the court compared them to common school prohibitions on racial slurs.
Citing this case as the background for his new anti-LGBTQ+ campaign, Wilson is joining together with conservative leaders and groups across 23 states, including South Carolina and Ohio, to erase pronoun policies in every school district.
“That is something that we cannot abide in Ohio, South Carolina or any state in this country,” Wilson said of the Olentangy District rulings, during a segment on Fox News’ The Faulkner Focus.’ “Yes, the lawsuit has gotten struck down, or we have lost at the district court and the court of appeals level, but this is one of those cases that I think is best served by going to the US Supreme Court.”
By pointing to a 1969 U.S. Supreme Court case, which ruled that teachers and students don’t shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate, Wilson argues that the school district in Ohio is trying to force all students to say things that many might not believe in.
“Parental rights groups are doing what I think groups around the country are all doing, and it’s trying to protect their children from being compelled to not only violate their First Amendment rights inside the schoolhouse,” Wilson stated, “but this policy, the one in Ohio in particular, would do the same thing outside of school. If you were at a mall on a Saturday or you were texting a friend or putting something on X or Twitter or whatever, you could be penalized when you showed up at school on Monday morning for using the wrong pronoun that someone found offensive.”