The sacking and eventual banning from teaching of evangelical Christian teacher Joshua Sutcliffe over what the BBC calls a “transgender row” generated a lot of breathless headlines. With claims from the press that Sutcliffe was sacked for misgendering. But as Sarah Clarke writes, there’s always more to the story than the headlines will tell you.
News Coverage of cases like Sutcliffe’s, including the BBC’s, has attempted to position these stories via Sutcliffe’s claim that his “right to freedom of speech and religion” is under threat. Sutcliffe has been supported in his legal fight by the ultraconservative Christian Legal Centre, the legal arm of Christian Concern, who have previously shown their principled commitment to freedom of speech by bringing legal cases against “blasphemous” works of art.
“Sacked for misgendering” is a phrase that, for a lot of (cis) people, might bring to mind the spectre of some poor, innocent teacher being drummed out of his profession for simply forgetting to use the correct pronouns for a child. A quick look at the most recent judgement about Sutcliffe’s cases is instructive here. In Sutcliffe v Secretary of State for Education [2024], Justice Pepperall says (paragraph 2):
“This case is not about a teacher who accidentally failed to follow a school’s policy of referring to a transgender pupil by the child’s chosen pronouns or even about a teacher who reconciled his religious convictions with such policy by choosing to avoid pronouns altogether and referring to the child by name. Rather, it is about a teacher who deliberately used female pronouns to refer to a transgender male pupil both in the classroom and then on national television in such a way that he would be “outed” without any apparent regard for a vulnerable child who was thereby caused significant distress. Further, it is about a teacher who told his class that homosexuality is a sin and implied that homosexuals might be cured through God without any apparent regard for the gay and lesbian children in his class and who made them feel that their teacher regarded them as worthless.”
In other words, no a Christian teacher was not sacked for the simple fact of misgendering a trans pupil, but for a consistent pattern of deliberately behaving in a way that would cause that pupil (called Pupil A in the judgement) distress, including going on breakfast television to give an interview where he discussed confidential information about Pupil A in a way that put him at real risk of harm.
Sutcliffe was found to have “failed to treat [Pupil A] with dignity and respect, and had failed to safeguard Pupil A’s wellbeing” (paragraph 27). Sutcliffe additionally promoted anti-gay conversion therapy in class to pupils (paragraphs 34–35) and, bizarrely, showed pupils at another school he worked at a video from right wing YouTube Channel PragerU (paragraph 36) that promoted that channel’s extremely conservative views on the acceptable range of male gender expression.
Joshua Sutcliffe was sacked and eventually banned from teaching for mistreating pupils in his care, safeguarding failures through disclosing confidential information about pupils to the press and for promoting his extremist anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-feminist political views to minors who he was in a position of power over and responsibility for.
Okay so maybe Joshua Sutcliffe wasn’t sacked for the mere act of misgendering a pupil but for a pattern of harmful behaviour that included misgendering, but what about other teachers? In another recent case that received significant press coverage, we were told by national newspapers like the Telegraph and the Independent that teacher Kevin Lister was banned from his profession and sacked for misgendering by “refusing to use [a] student’s preferred pronouns.”
Lister, who taught at New College Swindon, took his former employer to an employment tribunal after he was sacked. Once again, the teacher in question lost in court and is now barred from teaching because of his behaviour. Was this all over some accidental misgendering or his gender critical beliefs? No.
According to the principal of the college at the time, Lister “consistently humiliated” a trans student (student A), refusing to use the student’s name and instead pointing at him, behaviour that would be universally recognised as incredibly rude and, coming from an authority figure, a form of quite nasty bullying if the student in question weren’t trans, whereupon it becomes a matter of “freedom of speech.”
According to student complaints discussed in Lister v New College Swindon [2024], as Lister’s transphobic behaviour towards student A continued, Student A’s attendance suffered as he avoided Lister’s lessons (paragraphs 5.33–35). Kevin Lister was sacked and banned from teaching for humiliating and mistreating a trans student for months in a way that hampered that student’s education.
Once again, Lister’s views were not only anti-trans (which would be bad enough on its own) but appear to be generally anti-LGBTQ+, with many of his public statements being clearly homophobic. From information in the judgement, Lister’s public social media posts included claims that “Gay relationships were not ‘as valid’ as straight ones “by definition”” (paragraph 5.56) and that same sex couples should not “inflict” themselves on a child by reproducing. This particular bigotry does not appear to have manifested in Lister’s workplace behaviour from available evidence, but seems worth noting.
So what if we go further afield? In Ireland, according to Mail Online, teacher Enoch Burke was not only sacked but “jailed indefinitely” for refusing to use a trans student’s pronouns.
According to Niamh McShane, the principal at Wilson’s Hospital School in County Westmeath, Enoch Burke was suspended by the school after disrupting a religious service to object to a request for all staff to address a student by their name and they/them pronouns.
According to McShane, Burke was “disrespectful”, stood close enough to her that she could feel spittle on her face as he made his “diatribe” and attempted to follow her after she walked away from him, leaving her feeling “hunted.”
As is standard for safety reasons during disciplinary proceedings at schools, Burke was asked to stay away from the school while he was suspended. Burke refused to do this, repeatedly returning to school grounds, resulting in the school being forced to seek a court order barring him from doing this. Burke was jailed for repeatedly and flagrantly violating this court order. Once the school closed over the summer holidays, Burke was released and has now resumed his campaign of turning up at a school he doesn’t work at anymore as kids arrive for open day.
Enoch Burke and his entire family are, if you can believe it, fundamentalist evangelical Christians with a long history of anti-LGBTQ+ activism. I don’t think he should have been jailed at all, prisons aren’t capable of solving bigotry, but the facts of the situation matter. Burke was not sacked or jailed over pronouns, he was suspended for allegedly behaving in a disruptive and disrespectful manner at work and jailed for, essentially, trespassing in a school during teaching hours.
Again and again, we’re treated to overwrought headlines about a teacher being drummed out of their job for misgendering a student. Again and again it turns out that isn’t the whole story and the papers are doing a whole lot of PR work for extremist bigots who behave in truly shocking ways to minors in their care and their colleagues. It’s never “just” misgendering.
In the era of social media, where many people read only the headlines of articles before forming opinions about the events described and sharing them with their friends and followers, misleading headlines like the ones I’ve shown here could easily create the impression that teachers are being sacked and even sent to prison all over the place just for getting students’ pronouns wrong, despite the fact that as far as I can tell this has never once happened.
I don’t think this is accidental. Much like the excited and completely untrue claims that JK Rowling could be arrested for being hateful online earlier this year or the frequent claims by transphobes facing consequences for their behavior that they only said sex was real, the narrative of the teacher sacked for mere misgendering has been invented for a reason.
Public, politically active transphobia maintains a conspiracy theory in which a relatively powerless minority who disproportionately live in poverty, trans people, exercise a massive amount of social power. Able to destroy lives and hand down prison sentences on a whim. It has to do this because if trans people (or the vaguer subject of conservative conspiracy theories about LGBTQ+ people and feminism, “gender ideology”) don’t wield that kind of power but you still spend all of your time raging against us, then maybe you’re just a jumped up maths teacher bullying a teenager or a journalist helping that bullying teacher extend his cruelty onto the national stage.
And nobody with a conscience wants to be either of those people.
Anti-LGBTQ+ organisations like the Christian Legal Centre are pursuing a deliberate legal strategy of trying to make it as difficult as possible for schools to safeguard trans youth effectively. Positioning any consequence for any harmful behaviour as “being sacked for misgendering” or a “freedom of speech” issue is just one of the ways they do this, and it’s important to recognise it and how the press are collaborating with it.
