Until a few months ago Madeline Kirksey was a manager at the Children’s Lighthouse Learning Center, a private school in Katy, Texas, where she had a sterling record as both a teacher and administrator.
And then Kirksey made an inexcusable mistake. She refused to refer to a six-year-old girl as a boy.
Sally, the girl in question, had attended the school for several months, but after her parents picked up “Sally” from school on Friday, when they dropped her off at school the following Monday, they told school officials to refer to her as “Johnny,” and she was sporting a new boy’s haircut. Kirksey refused to call her Johnny or recognize her as a boy, and therefore was fired.
In the wake of her firing, the school distributed a set of guidelines to all teachers explaining how “transgenderism” among the students was to be addressed henceforth. The guidelines were drawn up by the International Foundation for Gender Education (IFGE), which promotes “the understanding and acceptance of All People: Transgender, Cis-gender, Transsexual, Crossdresser, Agender, Gender Queer, Intersex, Two Spirit, Hijra, Kathoey, Drag King, Drag Queen, Queer, Lesbian, Gay, Straight, Butch, Femme, Faerie, Homosexual, Bisexual, Heterosexual, and of course – You!”
The IFGE guidelines instructed the teachers to defer to the students with respect to which pronouns — he, she, it — they prefer to be addressed by, as well as to advocate on the students’ behalf should their parents find their transgender preferences objectionable. Teachers, IFGE’s guidelines say, “are often more knowledgeable” than parents about children, and that parents can be “terribly cruel to their children who express transgender inclinations.”
Kirksey was later asked about these guidelines and replied that supporting a decision made by the parents of an innocent six-year-old girl regarding her gender was tantamount to child abuse because it would confuse the child as to her sexual identity, and almost certainly result in the child being ridiculed and harassed by her fellow students.
It also, Kirksey said, violated her own religious beliefs, so she hired legal counsel and is suing the school on religious discrimination grounds. Additionally, she filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, citing an anti-discrimination claim against the school, not because she happens to be African-American, but because of wrongful termination based on her religious beliefs. Both Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Texas Labor Code prohibit employers in Texas, including employees of private schools, from engaging in such discrimination, and both require reasonable accommodation of religious beliefs.
As an interesting aside, as “Johnny,” the girl later joined the boy’s football team but after getting hit in practice, she burst into tears and said, “I’m really not a little boy.”
