(Chicago, IL – July 16, 2024) – Today, the American Freedom Law Center (AFLC), along with Notre Dame Law Professor Gerard Bradley, filed a “friend of the court” brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in the case of Kluge v. Brownsburg Community School Corporation.
The brief was filed in favor of the appellant, Mr. John Kluge, a teacher in the Brownsburg Community Schools. As summarized in Mr. Kluge’s opening brief:
John Kluge had a sterling record teaching music theory and orchestra at Brownsburg High School—until the school district ordered him to use students’ names and pronouns based on their gender identity.  Because affirming transgenderism violates Mr. Kluge’s Christian faith and harms students, he requested a religious accommodation under Title VII: calling all students by their last names, like a coach, and allowing another staff member to hand out gender-specific uniforms.
Brownsburg granted this accommodation, which treated all students the same and allowed Mr. Kluge to remain silent on transgenderism at school, and his classes ran smoothly. Â But after a few teachers, parents, and students grumbled, Brownsburg decided no exceptions were allowed beginning the next school year, revoked the accommodation, and forced Mr. Kluge to resign, ending his teaching career.
AFLC’s “friend of the court” brief was filed on behalf of several doctors and other medical professionals in the areas of pediatrics, pediatric psychology, endocrinology, pediatric endocrinology, and family medicine.  Their professional commitments to the well-being of children who report discomfort with their being a boy or a girl led them to offer their expert opinions in this case, one in which Mr. Kluge, a public school teacher, was effectively discharged for dissenting from harmful and unscientific gender-identity policies for children.
The brief forcefully demonstrates that medical and scientific research do not support the school district’s policies, and, in fact, demonstrate that they are exceedingly harmful to children.
As stated in the conclusion of AFLC’s brief:
The policies imposed by Brownsburg schools upon Appellant institutionalize an ideology which places children who experience a sex-discordant gender identification to serious risk of irreparable bodily harm.
These policies are, moreover, based upon a lie; in fact, two of them. One is that someone can be born in the “wrong body.” The other is that one can change one’s sex. The first is a basic metaphysical mistake, for each of us is our body: one can no more be “born in the wrong body” than one can be born as the wrong person.  The second is and forever shall be technically impossible.
Kluge Amici Brief - Filed