A former high school snowboarding coach filed a federal lawsuit last week alleging his First Amendment rights were violated when he was fired for expressing his views on transgender-identifying athletes.
The 31-page complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) — a faith-based legal advocacy group — on behalf of David Bloch, along with a motion for preliminary injunction seeking Bloch’s immediate reinstatement.
“On February 8, 2023, Coach Bloch and his team were waiting in the lodge for a competition to start. That day, his team was to compete against a team that had a male snowboarder who identifies as a female and competes against females,” the lawsuit states. While in the lodge, Bloch says he overheard a conversation between two of his student-athletes and briefly joined in.
Bloch “affirmed that as a matter of biology, males and females have different DNA, which causes males to develop differently from females and have different physical characteristics.” He added that “biological differences generally give males competitive advantages in athletic events” — something you must pretend is deeply controversial, despite the fact that a large majority of Americans agree.
According to a new Gallup survey released in June, nearly 70 percent of U.S. adults believe transgender-identifying athletes “should only be allowed to compete on sports teams that conform with their birth gender” as opposed to their “current gender identity.” Meanwhile, a Pew Research Center study from last year found that 6 in 10 Americans “say a person’s gender is determined by their sex assigned at birth.”
“The conversation was respectful among all parties and lasted no more than three minutes. It took place entirely outside the presence of the transgender-identifying snowboarder,” the lawsuit states. “Coach Bloch’s team and the team with the male who identifies as a female competed without incident. After the competition, the two teams and their coaches, including Coach Bloch, shared a bus home.”
But it didn’t matter. Bloch had committed wrongthink.
The coach was allegedly handed a notice of termination the very next day by Windsor Central Supervisory Union Superintendent Sherry Sousa. He was accused of violating the school district’s harassment, hazing, and bullying (HHB) policy as well as a related policy of the Vermont Principals’ Association (VPA), which oversees high school sports in the state.
Bloch was also “barred from future employment” with the district.
“No one should lose their job for speaking the truth. The First Amendment protects the rights of all Americans to peacefully share their beliefs without fear of government punishment. This means that government officials cannot terminate an employee simply because he expresses a belief that they do not like,” ADF said in a statement.
Specifically, the lawsuit argues that the HBB and VPA policies, as well as a Vermont statute requiring school boards to adopt such policies, “contain content and viewpoint discriminatory, overbroad, and unconstitutionally vague definitions of harassment that … censor protected speech.”
The complaint notes that Bloch is “a practicing Roman Catholic who believes that God creates males and females with immutable sex. His understanding of science complements his religious beliefs. Coach Bloch believes, based on scientific evidence, that there are only two sexes, which are male and female, and that sex is determined by a person’s chromosomes.”
Views like these terrify elites and the corporate press. In a May article, The Washington Post bemoaned that “Most Americans don’t believe it’s even possible to be a gender that differs from that assigned at birth” and worried that (God forbid) some in the country “have become more conservative on these questions.”
It’s worth highlighting the irony that those requiring you to deny the reality of sex today are often the very same people who spent the past three years demanding you “follow the science!”
Suffice to say, these are not good-faith actors; they’re liars and propagandists interested only in advancing a political agenda. Regard them as such.
