“Confirmed Judges, Confirmed Fears” is a blog series documenting the harmful impact of President Trump’s judges on Americans’ rights and liberties. It includes judges nominated in both his first and second terms.
In a 2-1 opinion, Trump judges Kevin Newsom and Andrew Brasher of the Eleventh Circuit court of appeals reversed a preliminary injunction allowing a transgender teacher to call herself “Ms. Wood” in the classroom and effectively upheld the Florida law that requires teachers to use only pronouns that align with their gender at birth. Judge Adalberto Jordan, nominated by President Obama, strongly dissented from the July 2025 decision in Wood v Florida Dept of Education.
What happened in this case?
Katie Wood is a transgender woman who has taught high school math in Hillsborough County, Florida since 2020. She has “identified herself as Ms. Wood in her communications with students” and has written “’Ms. Wood’ and ‘she/her’ on her classroom whiteboard and syllabi.” In 2023, however, Florida passed a law that prohibits teachers from providing to a student “his or her preferred personal title or pronouns” if they “do not correspond” to the teacher’s sex at birth.
Wood filed suit in federal court, contending that the statute violated her “First Amendment right to free speech.” The district court agreed, and issued a preliminary injunction against the Florida law. The district court explained that Ms. Wood’s pronouns “owe their existence not to her professional responsibilities as a math teacher, but instead to her identity as a woman” both “inside and outside the classroom.” Florida appealed to the Eleventh Circuit.
How did Trump judges Newsom and Brasher rule and why is the result harmful?
Trump judge Newsom wrote a 2-1 opinion, joined by Trump judge Brasher, that reversed the district court and effectively upheld the Florida law. Newsom maintained that all Wood’s communications with students were “government speech” that the state can control, and that Wood has no First Amendment right to use “Ms. Wood” or “she” or “her” in communicating with them.
Judge Adalberto Jordan, who was nominated to the Eleventh Circuit by Barack Obama, strongly dissented. He explained that the record and past precedent showed that Wood’s “use of her preferred personal title and pronoun constitute private speech on a matter of public concern rather than government speech.” She has a First Amendment right, he went on, to “use her personal title” to “identify herself” as “part of her name.”
The Florida law, Jordan wrote, has “nothing to do with curriculum” or legitimate school issues and “everything to do with Florida attempting to silence those with whom it disagrees on the matter of transgender identity and status.” A similar rationale, he noted, could justify the state requiring that “married female teachers use the last name of their husbands in the classroom” or other mandates that clearly violate teachers’ free speech rights. In addition to its obvious significance to the rights of Katie Wood and the First Amendment, this case illustrates the importance of our federal courts to health, welfare and justice and the significance of having fair-minded judges on the federal bench.