Lessons about pronouns were once guaranteed to put students to sleep. Now they’re keeping lawmakers awake. Because some pronouns have gender, conservatives want to inspect that gender the same way they want to make sure that prisoners are in the right cell, that athletes are on the right team, or that you are using the correct toilet.
Here’s what your government has been up to. Over the last decade, Tennessee passed a law banning the use of taxpayer funds “to promote the use of gender neutral pronouns.” That seems overbroad, considering that I, me, we, us, you, your, yours, it, its, they, them, and their are all gender neutral pronouns. You can only use these pronouns if your fellow Tennesseans don’t pay for them, though there’s another wrinkle to that law: nobody knows what a gender neutral pronoun actually costs.
Here’s another. South Dakota prohibited state employees from putting pronouns in their bios. Violate that law and you could lose your job. And that includes the governor, a state employee, who could lose their job if they write on their official web page, “Email me at governor@sd.gov.” Because me is a pronoun. Use it (the pronoun it) and lose it (your job).
In 2025, North Dakota passed an emergency law, a bit gentler than its neighbor to the south, declaring that no school or teacher may either require or prohibit “an individual from using a student’s preferred gender pronoun.” Pronouns are one thing, but bathrooms are quite another. That same law prohibits North Dakota’s students “from using a restroom that does not coincide with the student’s biological sex.” The legislature earlier rejected a bill that would levy a $1500 fine each time an employee referred to someone using a pronoun that did not reflect that person’s birth-certificate-sex.
When the great state of Iowa eliminated Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the state’s three public universities in 2023, it added a no-pronoun rule: “No employee, student, or other faculty member is required to state their pronouns.” The University of Iowa had supported gender pronoun choice since 2016, but Iowa’s president upped the ante on pronoun avoidance: “We also will be prohibiting anybody from requiring pronouns, and that will be added to all syllabi for all courses as of the fall.” (Requiring that statement in a syllabus is using compelled speech to ban speech, which as you'll see below, raises all sorts of constitutional questions.)
Iowa State University took a different approach to the no pronoun rule, affirming both free speech and academic freedom: “No employee, student, applicant, or campus visitor is compelled to disclose their pronouns. Anyone may voluntarily disclose their own pronouns.” Unfortunately, in the current political climate in the U.S., a statement like that could cost someone at Iowa State their job.
A 2023 Florida law defines sex (in case you were in doubt), flatly stating, “a person’s sex is an immutable biological trait and . . it is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to such person’s sex.” The law further prohibits state employees or employers from asking for, or telling anyone, their false pronouns.
And an Alabama bill introduced in early 2025 would “would prohibit classroom instruction or discussions related to gender identity or sexual orientation from being provided to public school students in prekindergarten through twelfth grade [and] also prohibit . . . teachers and education employees from referring to a student by pronouns inconsistent with the student’s biological sex at birth.”
If passed, such legislation would ban the use of words like boy, girl, man, woman, mother, father, brother, sister, husband, wife, Mr., Miss, Mrs., Ms., king, queen, prince, princess, hen, rooster, and any other word suggesting sex or gender (not to mention banning sex education classes mandated by a different state law). A 2024 statute already requires Alabama students to use bathrooms “based on biological sex.” But if all gender words are prohibited, then bathrooms can't have signs indicating which gender they serve, so how will students know which birth-sex bathroom they’re supposed to use? And teachers would be prohibited from telling them if they ask!
A bill before the Arizona legislature would let a parent challenge any books that “promote gender fluidity, gender pronouns or [that] groom children into normalizing pedophilia.” There’s a Catch-22 here: the Arizona Department of Education would decide whether to ban a book, despite the fact that the Language Arts Standards developed by that same department require all first graders to learn about and be able to “use personal, possessive, and indefinite pronouns,” which requires a familiarity with the concept of gender.
That Arizona bill didn’t pass, but other states that have actually banned gender pronouns have similar language arts requirements and similar limitations on teaching about sex and gender. That means that teachers could face legal jeopardy if they adhere to the state’s education benchmarks and teach six year olds that pronouns like he and she have something to do with sex and gender, as if six year olds didn’t know that already.
Some of these state laws invoke the Constitution’s free speech guarantee, then, like Lucy and the football, they abruptly take away that guarantee. Arkansas Act 542, passed in 2023, echoes the classic language of the Supreme Court decision in Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), that teachers and students don’t “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate”:
Faculty members, teachers, and employees of public schools and state-supported institutions of higher education do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at work.
The act then addresses pronouns:
The selection and use of pronouns in classrooms, on campuses, and elsewhere is a matter of free speech and academic freedom because it communicates a message on a matter of public concern and shapes classroom discussions and debates.
But it then goes on to strip away those very speech protections:
A faculty member, teacher, or other employee of a school . . . shall not address an unemancipated minor or student with a pronoun or title that is inconsistent with the unemancipated minor’s or student’s biological sex [without written consent of a parent or guardian].
In addition, the Arkansas law bans teachers from addressing any student by a name not on that student’s birth certificate, a restriction found in other states’ laws as well that carries a built-in absurdity. For example, attempting to follow Florida’s gender restrictions to the letter, the Orange County Public Schools notified parents that they must file a formal request if their student wants to be addressed either by a different name or by a nickname, since nicknames aren’t on birth certificates:
If the student is named Robert, but likes to be called the nickname Rob, the form must be filled out authorizing teachers and other personnel to call Robert the nickname Rob.
And if that Orange County student is trans and changes their name to reflect that change, then the parent must fill out yet another request:
If the student’s legal name is Robert, but the student identifies as a transgender girl and uses the name Roberta, the parent may authorize a teacher or other personnel to call the student Roberta.
Schools may be obsessed with red tape, but there’s yet another wrinkle in the Orange County policy: the school will allow a parent-authorized student name, but it can reject a parent-authorized student pronoun:
While the teacher and other personnel would utilize the name Roberta when requested by the parent, under the recently adopted House Bill 1069, the teacher or other personnel may elect not to utilize the pronoun ‘she/her’ when referring to Roberta.
Since Florida’s law takes precedence over the laws of grammar, in order to stay legal, Florida’s English teachers will wind up saying “Roberta . . . he,” honoring the parent-approved name but ignoring the pronoun agreement rule that’s been a staple of classical grammar for centuries, the rule that says a pronoun must agree with the noun it refers to both in number and in gender.
One final point. The First Amendment’s free-speech guarantee also protects you from compelled speech. That means you can’t be forced to say something that violates your deeply held beliefs. To use the example that led to the 1949 Supreme Court ruling on compelled speech, you can’t be forced to take a secular oath like the Pledge of Allegiance if you believe that only religious oaths are valid.
In 2020, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Alito suggested an expansion of this protection against compelled speech, a position that many of these new state laws later adopted. In his dissent in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, a case about the rights of trans employees that had nothing to do with pronouns, Alito spent seventy pages arguing what could be said in seven words, that the Constitution says, “You can’t make me say your pronouns.”
In fact, once upon a time legislators wanted to do exactly that: make you say a new pronoun. In 1920, women voted in a presidential election for the first time. Two years later, Mississippi state senator W. A. Ellis proposed “an Act creating, defining, and legalizing” three new gender neutral pronouns, hesh, himer, and hiser, “arising out of the exigencies of the times on account of woman’s new political freedom.” SB 423 failed to pass by just one vote. That same year, a delegate to the Missouri Constitutional Convention, Kansas City judge A. N. Gossett, proposed an amendment recognizing the common-gender pronoun idn, arguing that the word was useful for drafting laws. Like Ellis’s bill, Gossett’s amendment did not pass.
Pronouns do reflect a person’s gender, and honoring a person’s pronouns is a matter of respect and politeness, a way of saying “I’m including you.” Using someone’s pronouns won’t contaminate you or change your own gender. In fact, pronouns alone can’t actually change anyone’s gender. If you think they could, then why, during the centuries when we used generic he, didn’t everybody become male?
