Former teacher to collect life-changing settlement after Virginia district fired him for refusing to use preferred pronouns
'I couldn’t say something that directly violated my conscience.'
A former high school teacher in Virginia will soon collect a settlement of nearly $600,000 after he was fired for refusing to refer to a female student using male pronouns.
For nearly seven years, Peter Vlaming taught French in West Point, Virginia, a city of about 3,400 residents about 40 miles east of Richmond. In the fall of 2018, a female student Vlaming already knew enrolled in his French II course.
In their previous interactions, the girl, referred to in court documents as "John Doe," had apparently accepted the use of a female French name and female pronouns, but by the time she arrived for French II, Vlaming had learned that she "desired to be called by a more culturally masculine name," court documents said.
Vlaming — whose religious beliefs uphold that "sex is fixed in each person, and that it cannot be changed, regardless of our feelings or desires" — tried to accommodate the student by avoiding pronouns in reference to her altogether and instead calling her by either her masculine English or French name.
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