38 Trial Lawyer • Spring 2024 for the first week. If Soell would not agree to these conditions and wanted to “announce” their gender, then the district had to approve every word and Soell had to agree to let the district send a letter home to all parents about Soell’s gender. If Soell did not agree, they could not return to the classroom. Scripted Faced with that Hobson’s choice, Soell returned to the classroom, forbidden from referring to gender at all. Worse, they had to use their old name, reinforcing the false perception that they were female and participating in their own mis-gendering. On top of that, the district required that when children asked questions like, “are you a boy or a girl?,” Soell had to respond, “we all have private lives and it would not be appropriate to talk about our private lives during the school day.” No other teacher was required to tell students that whether they were male or female was a private fact not suitable for public discussion. Indeed, children had asked Soell if they were a boy or a girl many times before they came out as transgender, and the district had never required that they say it was a “private” matter. Just before Soell arrived for school on the appointed day, the principal called a meeting for all staff. He told teachers and staff that they were not permitted to use “Leo” in front of students, to share anything about Soell’s name change, or use Soell’s pronouns in the presence of students or parents. If a student asked about it, the teachers were told to respond that it was a private issue and direct them to counseling. When Leo Soell came to me with this story, it was eerily familiar. The GreshamBarlow school district’s eagerness to erase Leo Soell’s identity, forbid any acknowledgement of it and force them into the Privacy Continued from p 37
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