Dear Mr. and Mrs. Jones:

Over the course of this school year, it has become apparent to the educational staff at Green Valley Elementary School that your child, Michael, has been using nonstandard pronouns, including all of thee, thy, thou, thine, and ye.

This letter is being provided to you in accordance with Iowa state law, to ensure that you are informed about and may address the situation.

This is just guidance from the Iowa DoE. This has been a law for a year now, but the DoE wouldn’t put out official guidance on it, making school districts scramble to figure things out on their own.

If a student even asks a hypothetical “if I were to ask to be called by…”, parents have to be notified. Generic notice was given to our GSA that students that were unsure if their parents were supportive should ask to be called by their last names to avoid being deadnamed.

As a teacher, every student became a “they”, all my seating charts were done by last name, and I had to refuse calling students nicknames unless it was noted in our official system. As a trans teacher, I was targeted by a parent who tried to set me up. A student asked to be called by a shortened name where it was unclear if it was a different gender from their given name (think like Chris for Christina). They did not ask any other teacher to do this, and their parents refused to sign anything allowing it. So I refused, and parents tried to escalate it. Fortunately my admin is amazing and just removed the student from my class.

Side note: the same year they did this, they also passed a law that mandated that the student mental health survey that the CDC puts out every year be replaced by their own Iowa version. The only difference? They removed questions about sexual orientation and gender identity questions. These questions include things like “how often have you had thoughts of killing yourself” and “how often do you feel down or depressed”. We know, statistically, that these laws will increase suicidality among queer students, but now we don’t have any way to prove that the laws they passed had that effect. It’s downright evil.

So the parents can start using the new pronouns right?

…right?

Cue every kid in Iowa telling teacher their pronouns are Fr/Fi/Fo/Fum for a laugh.

Every last student should change their pronouns multiple times daily. Make their system as useless as the bigots who put it in place.

I’d change my pronouns every fucking day if they insist on reporting. Make sure the administration knows too. Spam the damn system.