A New Hampshire teenager is suing his school district after he was allegedly suspended from athletics for saying there are “only two genders.”
The Exeter High School freshman said in the suit that he was hit with a one-game football suspension in September stemming from a text conversation he had with another student off school grounds.
The lawsuit was filed Nov. 4 through an attorney with the Christian organization Cornerstone Action with the claim that he stated a Catholic-based belief that there are only male and female genders, the Portsmouth Herald reported.
The kid’s lawsuit also claims Exeter’s policy on non-binary gender identity and pronouns infringes on his First Amendment rights.
The policy says students have the right to be addressed by a name and pronoun of their choosing related to their gender identities and also says those who don’t recognize others’ gender identities or pronouns are violating the policy.
The student doesn’t deny he violated the policy, the lawsuit says, according to the Herald.
“He in fact denied, and will continue to deny, that any person can belong to a gender other than that of ‘male’ or ‘female’” the lawsuit says.
The student, it goes on, “will never refer to any individual person using plural pronouns such as ‘they,’ using contrived pronouns such as ‘ze,’ or with any similar terminology that reflects values which (the student) does not share.”
The suspension came after the student had been engaged in a conversation on the bus over gender with friends over the perceived difficulty in using plural pronouns for an individual in Spanish, which uses masculine and feminine plurals, according to the suit.
A female student overheard the discussion and allegedly told the student there were more than two genders.
“No there isn’t: There’s only two genders,” the student allegedly replied.
That conversation continued in a “contentious” text exchange, which was shown to him by school administrators in printed form when he was suspended, the Herald reported.
School Superintendent David Ryan told the Associated Press the school was reviewing the complaint “and will be able to share a statement once we have completed that review.”
With Post wires