00:00:00.000Hey, everybody, on the special episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, brought to you by our partnership with Alliance Defending Freedom.
00:00:05.000And again, Alliance Defending Freedom, they need your help.
00:00:08.000They need your help to step up to go to charliekirk.com and click on the ADF banner at the top of the page, or you can phone your gift to 888-670-1599.
00:00:19.000They come in and support people like the guest on our program today, Monica Gill, who's a teacher at Loudoun County High School.
00:00:24.000They come in heroically, they come in courageously, they come in quickly to support the people that are being abused and targeted by the, let's just call them bad folks.
00:01:45.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:53.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:05.000Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:02:08.000We are so honored to have with us today a very important story with someone who is honestly a hero who is standing up against the indoctrination of students in schools across the country, specifically in Loudoun County public schools.
00:02:25.000And all of this is made possible thanks to our amazing partners at the Alliance Defending Freedom, which we are doing everything we can to help them out.
00:02:33.000You guys can go to charliekirk.com and help out the Alliance Defending Freedom.
00:02:39.000We're going to talk about that throughout this episode.
00:02:41.000I want to welcome right now to our episode and our conversation today, Monica Gill, who is from Loudoun County Public Schools, who is standing up against what has been happening here and is a teacher in the Loudoun County public school system.
00:02:55.000Monica, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:03:23.000So at the Loudoun County Public Schools, many people kind of know the outrage that has been happening in recent months, especially over the last year in regards to critical race theory and in all the different kind of measures that have been put forward.
00:03:39.000Monica, you are suing Loudoun County public schools in Loudoun County Circuit Court represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom.
00:03:47.000What is your complaint against Loudoun County Public Schools?
00:03:52.000Well, largely, you know, the issue is just of such a huge magnitude because what's happened here is our school board is pursuing policies that are ideological.
00:04:03.000And this policy in particular, 80-40, is harmful to kids.
00:04:08.000You know, we have thousands of teachers and students who interact with each other every day in very loving and respectful ways.
00:04:15.000And we can do that without having a policy like this, which forces teachers and students to say things that are harmful to kids, say things that they don't believe and things that are just, quite frankly, not true by just, you know, a kid saying, hey, I want to be addressed by this particular pronoun.
00:04:52.000And, you know, I can't be a party to that because these are our most vulnerable.
00:04:57.000And so that's one of the reasons why I wanted to get involved in this case.
00:05:01.000And so the school board adopted a policy that will harm students and is based on unsettled science that basically now forces you to say something that is anti-reality, anti-science, and could violate your very basic rights.
00:05:17.000So I want to ask a question here just about kind of the legal aspect of this, of the law.
00:05:23.000And I guess I'll start with you, Tyson, is that kind of where does the law, like where do you think this case can be most effective?
00:05:33.000In essence, kind of what, where has the school board overreached the constitutional limits when it comes to teachers' rights?
00:05:42.000What it's done, Charlie, is, as Monica said, it adopted a policy, which is this kind of one-size-fits-all policy, which essentially grants students the complete right to dictate what everybody else, both staff, teachers, and students at school get to, you know, how they are referred to these other students.
00:06:01.000And so what it's doing is it's forcing teachers and staff and other students to say things that they think are untrue by essentially saying, you know, referring to a boy as a girl or a girl as a boy, or using up any number of the hundreds of made-up pronouns that any student wants to come up with and acting as if gender is this social construct as opposed to a biological reality.
00:06:27.000So what it's doing is it's violating the freedom of speech of teachers and also their free exercise of religion under the Virginia Constitution.
00:06:50.000But essentially what it says is that any student without any substantiating evidence can go to the school and tell them what they, you know, how they want to be treated.
00:07:01.000And if they are a boy, they can be treated as a girl immediately without any substantiating evidence.
00:07:05.000That is for all bathrooms and locker rooms.
00:07:13.000And so essentially what it does is it puts the school and school administrators at the mercy of children, many of those children who are suffering from gender dysphoria and other mental issues.
00:07:25.000And it's doing that without any parental involvement and without any medical diagnosis.
00:07:30.000And it allows them to change that at whim.
00:07:32.000They can do it one way in one class and another way in another class, do it one day, one way, and then change the very next day.
00:07:40.000And teachers are expected to abide by those demands and cannot question it.
00:07:44.000And the punishment is up to termination.
00:07:48.000I want to remind everybody back a couple years ago, four or five years ago, then an unknown man, Jordan Peterson, warned that what was happening in Canada, which was, I think, Senate Bill 26 or something with a six in it, that was he was a college professor at the University of Toronto and was being forced to call his students by a certain pronoun, exactly the same type of policy.
00:08:14.000Jordan Peterson then went out into the streets and was heckled.
00:08:30.000And that's the Canadian Constitution, right?
00:08:32.000They don't respect the Bill of Rights.
00:08:34.000And Jordan Peterson was trying to say, you don't understand this is going to be the decline of the West if we do not have the ability to recognize basic fundamental science.
00:08:45.000And also, as soon as you control my speech, you force me to do something, then you are picking up the gun on the table and you are becoming the autocrat and you are becoming the tyrant.
00:08:56.000So Monica, walk us through in as much detail as you're comfortable sharing, what compelled you from hearing this policy to now wanting to sue your employer?
00:09:09.000Well, you know, obviously it was a long process coming to it, but, you know, I think the thing that really gets me the most is that there really is an honest debate going on right now about how best to care for kids who suffer from gender dysphoria.
00:09:25.000And our school board has essentially picked one side in that debate and they have mandated it for everyone, for the entire school system, making all teachers and students complicit in that.
00:10:01.000I mean, I'm not the expert that my lawyer is on the First Amendment, but I am a government teacher and I know enough to know that it is always wrong and it is always harmful for government to force and mandate people to say things that they don't agree with and to be complicit and participate in activities that they think is wrong.
00:10:19.000And so again, you know, we have to stand against this.
00:10:23.000This is not right what our school board is doing.
00:10:27.000And it's trickled down to this local level.
00:10:30.000And it just, it means we have got to stand against it or we lose everything, just like you said.
00:10:37.000And so you've taught transgender students in the past and you've had great relationships with them.
00:10:45.000So I've definitely had transgender students in the past.
00:10:47.000I have loved and respected each one of them.
00:10:50.000I think that those feelings were very much mutual.
00:10:54.000And when I've had them in the past, if they wanted to go by a different name, I certainly would call them by that name.
00:10:59.000But I never affirmed to a boy that he was a girl or to a girl that she was a boy because it's just, it's not true.
00:11:08.000But, you know, even though I can't affirm that a boy is a girl or that a girl is a boy, what I can do is what I've been doing for the last 26 years.
00:11:15.000And that is embracing with open arms and having love and respect for every single student who walks across the threshold into my classroom.
00:11:25.000And I really feel like that's my mission, Charlie.
00:11:27.000I mean, I have painted above the threshold of my classroom.
00:11:45.000And the whole point of that is that, again, this is my mission.
00:11:48.000I know how hard it was to be in high school, to have yourself just trying to figure out your identity, to be pushed in little boxes by your peers.
00:11:59.000And I just want these kids to know that they're seen and they're loved.
00:12:04.000And it doesn't matter what little boxes they're shoved into by their peers.
00:12:08.000It doesn't matter what their peer status is.
00:12:10.000It doesn't matter what grades they have, if they have an A in my class or an F in my class, that they hear at least once in the day that somebody loves them unconditionally.
00:12:20.000And I treasure being that voice to them.
00:12:23.000So I guess the question is then, is this a solution in search of a problem?
00:12:29.000Was this a widespread problem in the school district?
00:12:33.000Was where there were a bunch of men who think they're women who are suffering from a very serious mental problem, gender dysphoria, which you're right.
00:12:40.000They deserve care and compassion for deep-seated mental issues, which I think they should be given that.
00:12:47.000But was this some sort of massive crisis?
00:12:49.000Or is this something that was proposed to either provoke a response or to try and micromanage somebody's speech, either of you?
00:12:57.000Well, I think, Charlie, one of the things you're seeing, you guys are, you know, TPUSA, I know you guys are involved in these school board issues across the country.
00:13:05.000And what you're seeing is this is not an isolated issue, but it's not because there is a huge problem.
00:13:11.000It is being driven by outside influences who are coming in and trying to mandate a radical ideology and trying to change people's beliefs.
00:13:47.000The issue is outside forces trying to mandate one ideology.
00:13:51.000And one thing that's really important, Charlie, to understand is this.
00:13:54.000The law that caused this in Virginia specifically says that they must adopt a policy that's in accordance with evidence-based best practices.
00:14:06.000And instead of doing that, the Department of Education adopts this model policy, which literally allows a kindergarten student to tell their teacher that they want to be referred to as a different gender without any parental involvement, without any medical diagnosis, and then forces all teachers to participate in this social transition.
00:14:27.000And we know that social transition will lead to cross-sex hormones, to hormone suppressants, and then on to surgery.
00:14:36.000But if they are allowed to go with, you know, they are treated and assisted and not going through social transition, 80 to 90% of them by puberty will choose their biological sex.
00:14:49.000But the Department of Education has ignored all of that.
00:14:52.000Loudoun County has ignored all of that and is instead forcing teachers like Monica to participate in this social transition, which is going to harm their students.
00:15:01.000I just want to remind everybody, if you are moved to try to do something about this tragedy, go to charliekirk.com, Alliance Defending Freedom Banner.
00:15:10.000It's a way that you guys can get in on that.
00:15:12.000We're going to get into how ADF has kind of come to the rescue here in a second.
00:15:17.000I just want to remind everybody, because this is so important, because the other side, they have the ACLU, they have all these groups, unlimited resources to go sue on the other side of this, right?
00:15:28.000So where I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, Palatine High School kind of became ground zero for the bathroom issue.
00:15:37.000Tyson, you probably know it very well.
00:15:40.000And the ACLU came in with millions of dollars and PR campaign and all of it.
00:15:46.000So now men can go into female restrooms in Palatine High School, female locker rooms, and basically the end of female sports as we know it.
00:16:21.000Did you try to get this fixed in other ways first?
00:16:25.000Well, I have been actually speaking to the Loudoun County School Board for a couple of years now, really since August of 2019 when they started this whole equity, diversity, and inclusiveness initiative.
00:16:41.000And I've been speaking about all of it, from critical race theory to the transgender policy.
00:16:48.000And honestly, it has been pretty much met with silence, which is very frustrating.
00:16:56.000And when it got to the point where Tanner Cross was put on leave for the things that he said, that, of course, just got me even, you know, more, you know, fire in my belly over this issue.
00:17:09.000And I've known Tanner also for a long time.
00:17:12.000So when the opportunity came and I was able to be a part of this, I just said, I have to take a stand along with Tanner, my brother, you know, and Kim as well.
00:17:26.000So it is a big deal, I can say, that it wasn't really a hard decision, actually, because after two years of really fighting and being frustrated and not being heard,
00:17:40.000to finally have someone come and say, hey, you know, we've got you on this and we have the resources and the manpower and the knowledge and everything that you need to actually take this fight to the next level and God willing win, I was on board.
00:18:03.000So I want to just kind of catch our audience up.
00:18:06.000Tanner Cross is a PE teacher or was at Leesburg Elementary School and spoke out against a proposed policy at a public school board meeting.
00:18:15.000And then two days later, he was put on administrative leave and his actions were labeled as disruptive.
00:18:21.000Now he's suing the school board for violating his freedom of speech and free exercise of religion and has been temporarily reinstated to his position while the case continues.
00:18:31.000Since this meeting, the policy has been adopted and forces teachers and school officials to violate their deeply held religious beliefs by saying things they don't believe and are untrue.
00:18:41.000And so let me ask a question, Monica, and then I have a question for you, Tyson, which is on the ground in Loudoun County public schools, are parents starting to get fed up with this?
00:19:39.000But I think for me, the most heartening thing has been the students who have come to me and said, thank you so much, Mrs. Gale, for taking a stand for us.
00:19:48.000And I think the important thing about what they're saying is they realize that the stand is for them.
00:19:52.000That as much as it is about, you know, my free speech rights and my, you know, freedom of religion and Tanners and kins, it goes beyond that.
00:20:00.000This is really about these kids and what's best for them.
00:20:04.000It's the larger picture of my fiduciary responsibility as a teacher who loves them to do the things that are right and best for them.
00:20:13.000Well, and you've been doing a wonderful job of that, but the school district feels as if they need to insert themselves into your way you're teaching students.
00:20:23.000Soon they will say that you're not able to tell your students you love them because you told me that's what you say, because that's the next thing.
00:20:49.000They were trying to not only dictate how he referred to the student in her presence, but said that outside of her presence, he must do that.
00:20:57.000And if they heard he was avoiding the use of a pronoun and using her name, he would still be fired.
00:21:02.000So they're trying to control everything.
00:21:04.000This isn't just about interaction with the students.
00:21:09.000We currently represent Professor Nick Merriweather, who's a 20-year philosophy and religion professor at Shawnee State University.
00:21:16.000He was punished for not referring to a male student as a female.
00:21:20.000And they argued that his speech is not at all protected.
00:21:24.000He had no protection in the classroom at all.
00:21:26.000They were trying to dictate everything he said in the classroom.
00:21:29.000That's completely contrary to everything that the Supreme Court has said about what professors they said we have to protect the marketplace of ideas of our schools.
00:21:38.000They said that our nation will shrivel up and die if we begin controlling what the teachers are able to say in the classrooms and their interactions because we can't explore truth.
00:21:48.000We can't explore these big ideas and the solutions to our big problems if the government comes in and starts saying what you can say in those classrooms.
00:21:58.000Yeah, and that's exactly where we are headed on that.
00:22:13.000The court granted the injunction, reinstated Tanner to the classroom.
00:22:18.000He was able to finish out the year, which was great.
00:22:20.000They appealed that to the Virginia Supreme Court.
00:22:22.000And about three weeks ago, the Virginia Supreme Court affirmed the injunction and held that the school had likely violated Tanner's rights and that he was rightly reinstated, which is very encouraging.
00:22:33.000We then added Monica and Kim as plaintiffs to challenge the policy directly.
00:22:37.000We filed a motion for a preliminary injunction.
00:22:39.000We're asking the court to order the school to not force these teachers to speak messages that they disagree with.
00:22:47.000And we're waiting on the court to schedule that hearing.
00:22:49.000So we're hoping within the next week, the court will schedule a hearing and we'll hoping to have a ruling on that within the next couple of weeks.
00:22:57.000And so, Monica, I want to ask you just a broader question because speaking out is not something many people are comfortable doing.
00:23:06.000Talk a little bit about some of the backlash you've received.
00:23:09.000I'm sure some of the negativity, because so many people email us on our podcast, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:23:16.000They say, Charlie, I don't know if I could do it.
00:23:19.000You know, I want to live my comfortable life.
00:23:54.000I spent many years being afraid of speaking up, being afraid of speaking up about my conservative values at school, even to a certain extent among my colleagues about my faith.
00:24:05.000I've always been pretty open about being a Christian in the classroom with my students.
00:24:10.000But when they pushed this initiative, when they started to push this equity, diversity, and inclusion initiative in August of 2019, all I can say to you, Charlie, is that literally I went from a place of fear to righteous anger, you know, that like be angry, but don't sin and saying, okay, well, then now what do I do?
00:24:34.000And literally, I just felt the Lord remove all my fear.
00:24:39.000And since then, I just said to him, I'm going to be obedient.
00:24:42.000Anything that you ask me to do, any door you ask me to walk through, I will walk through it.
00:24:48.000And, you know, now I'm on the Charlie Kirk show.
00:24:53.000And the Lord will bless anyone that stands courageously in his name.
00:24:57.000Monica, I do want to ask you to expand on a little bit because we've been focused on your lawsuit and your complaint on the gender kind of tyranny, which is really important.
00:25:06.000The pronoun language tyranny, I should be more specific.
00:25:09.000Talk more about this equity, diversity, inclusion, because that has actually been the majority of the outrage from some of the public pressure, at least what I've seen.
00:25:19.000So that is, you know, just the larger umbrella of things that are falling under the policies that they're pushing, which are, again, ideological.
00:25:28.000So it includes the policy 8040 as well as their critical race theory agenda, which essentially is using our teacher training as an opportunity to indoctrinate teachers with the basic ideology of critical race theory and then expecting, you know, implicitly expecting that to trickle down into the classroom.
00:25:52.000And of course, we're seeing the impact of that as well.
00:25:55.000So again, this school board is pressing policies that are ideological.
00:26:05.000This really is definitely Marxist ideology being pushed on our kids.
00:26:11.000They are trickling it down into the classroom to indoctrinate them.
00:26:15.000And as I said, we're seeing the interactions with kids intensify in ways that are negative because of both critical race theory and the transgender policy.
00:26:25.000And this is not the way to do education.
00:26:28.000This is not the way to teach kids how to interact with one another and how to navigate relationships.
00:26:33.000And again, that would be why I'm, you know, so thankful for Tyson and ADF.
00:26:38.000And as I said, the Lord putting me here, not just on the Charlie Kirk show, but in this court case and giving me the opportunity to fight for the kingdom.
00:26:49.000So let me ask you one other question, Monica, about that.
00:26:53.000How many years have you been teaching in Loudoun County Public Schools?
00:26:57.000So I believe this is my 20th year in Loudoun, but I did teaching for 27 years.
00:27:03.000So let me ask you, as someone who's been teaching for 27 years, you know what you're doing.
00:27:08.000You know how to build people of good character.
00:27:11.000How has education changed from the top down where you've seen it go in a direction that you probably never thought it would go?
00:27:19.000Yeah, that's a great question, Charlie.
00:27:22.000I can say that I've really watched the culture in education shift dramatically.
00:27:28.000And I would say in the last five years, it has been very dramatic in terms of the kid culture and just the number of kids that I have now who suffer from all kinds of mental health issues, anxiety, depression, versus the number of kids that I had when I first started teaching 27 years ago.
00:27:53.000The number of kids who suffer from gender dysphoria or same-sex attraction, again, I may have had a handful of those in my first few years teaching.
00:28:08.000The number of kids who suffer from, you know, suicide ideation now compared to 20 years ago.
00:28:14.000Again, all of these things increasing.
00:28:17.000I think a lot of it probably has to do with the level of time they spend on their phones and social media and being influenced by that wider culture.
00:28:27.000But within education itself, I slowly started to see things kind of wear away at teachers and our ability to really instill good character.
00:28:39.000I think it's important to understand like in education, we keep saying, oh, we have to teach character, but you don't teach character.
00:29:01.000And over the last probably 10 years, I've noticed all of those things started to kind of trickle away.
00:29:07.000You know, we had a time period where, you know, we can't grade homework.
00:29:11.000We, you know, we can't create anything that would be considered a behavior, like not putting your name on your paper, which seems like a very simple thing, but those little things all taken away add up over time to now, you know, you have expected me in this classroom to not only educate kids, but also instill good character in them.
00:29:33.000But you've taken away all of the tools that I have to be able to do that job well.
00:30:06.000Yeah, ADF is the world's largest law firm that focuses on the protection of freedom of speech, free exercise of religion, marriage and family rights, parental rights, and the right to life.
00:30:18.000And we've had phenomenal success thanks to the Lord's blessings.
00:30:21.000We've had 13 victories in the last 11 years at the U.S. Supreme Court.
00:30:27.000We've participated in our 25 years in more than 64 victories at the U.S. Supreme Court in some way or another.
00:30:35.000And we've got more than 70 attorneys that are working every day providing free legal advice to people like Monica and Kim and Tanner, because these cases many times will last for years and they incur millions and millions of dollars in fees.
00:30:51.000Even almost nobody can afford to do that because we're not talking about damages.
00:30:56.000Monica's not going to recover any damages for this.
00:30:59.000This is just standing up for her legal rights.
00:31:01.000And the important thing about this is Monica stands not just for her.
00:31:05.000It's for every teacher across the country.
00:31:07.000It's for every parent across the country who doesn't want their student to be forced to speak messages they disagree with.
00:31:12.000These are broad principles that are going to protect everybody.
00:31:15.000And Monica's willing to stand for that.
00:32:37.000Yeah, can I just add like one last thing in terms of just sort of a broad 10,000 foot view of this issue?
00:32:44.000And that is that, you know, we have sort of got to get back to the basics of language, that language matters, that words have meaning, that words convey meaning.
00:32:55.000And so if teachers and students are forced to use a pronoun for another student that is not in alignment with their biological sex, then we're conveying to that student that gender is fluid.
00:33:13.000That's not in alignment with their inner biology.
00:33:15.000And that's not in alignment with reality.
00:33:17.000So the best thing that we can do to love and care for any individual is to speak to them in language that is true, precise, and in conversance with reality.
00:33:30.000And if we really think about it, I think these kids in some ways are in rebellion against the fact that every single one of us, we actually have a word stamped inside of us.
00:33:41.000The word stamped inside of us, the abbreviated version is either XX or XY.
00:33:48.000But if you unravel that abbreviation, you get the human DNA strand, which scientists say is 3 billion letters long.
00:33:56.000If you stack those letters up, they are 7,000 times taller than the Empire State Building.
00:34:05.000How then can as human beings, we have the audacity to look at that word, the longest word known to humanity, and think there's no author behind it.
00:34:15.000There's no precise definition behind that word.
00:34:19.000We could define that word however we want.
00:34:22.000When we do that, we're actually living in a lie and we've lost ourselves.
00:34:26.000And I think heartbreakingly for me, what I see with many of the transgender kids that I've had in the past is that that's what's going on with them.
00:34:34.000They think that they can redefine who they are.
00:34:41.000You'll hear them say things like, well, I'm just trying to be my true and authentic self.
00:34:46.000And my question is always, is that really what's happening?
00:34:49.000Are you really trying to be your true and authentic self?
00:34:52.000Or are you in rebellion against your true and authentic self?
00:34:56.000The word stamped inside of you and the adults around them are doing them no good service by pushing it, saying, yes, go this direction rather than equipping them with the tools they need to embrace the reality of who they are.
00:35:16.000They're actually erasing who they are and losing their true identity rather than embracing it.