A former California kindergarten school teacher who cited religious beliefs for her refusal to refer to a 5-year-old transgender student by a preferred pronoun is continuing her fight against the school district by filing a lead to amend in U.S. District Court.
Mirella Ramirez, a Catholic, sued the Oakland Unified School District in 2024 claiming it violated her First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and free exercise of religion.
In May, Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler of the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California dismissed Ramirez's lawsuit in a 16-page decision. She said teacher's speech was "not protected," Courthouse News Service reported.
Although We The Patriots USA, a 501©(3) nonprofit that funded Ramirez's lawsuit, initially said it would appeal Beeler's ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the group was permitted to file a lead to amend, which it did Tuesday.
"We filed a lead to amend to add in her Title VIII claims because those are religious discrimination in the workplace claims," We The Patriots co-founder and Vice President Brian Festa told Newsmax on Wednesday.
"Those were never in the original complaint because we had not obtained the right to sue letter from EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission]. ... We finally obtained that.
"When it was initially filed, the case that was dismissed was just a free speech case. But we wanted to get those religious discrimination claims in as well."
Festa, who is an attorney though not part of Ramirez's legal team, added that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act includes "strong protections against religious discrimination in the workplace."
"Even if we were to lose on the free speech claims at the Ninth Circuit, this now opens up a while other door that they haven't addressed," Festa said.
Neither the Ninth Court nor the U.S. Supreme Court has "addressed whether a teacher's use of a student's pronouns is protected speech," Beeler said in her decision.
Beeler ruled that Ramirez failed to adequately support her claims that the school district was hostile to her religion.
"The argument fails because, even accepted as true, the well-pleaded facts do not plausibly allege hostility," Beeler wrote.
The judge also said that individual school staff members also sued by Ramirez were entitled to qualified immunity from the claims. Beeler, citing differing rulings by other courts across the country, said a reasonable school official would not have recognized that forcing a teacher to use language that violated her religious beliefs is a violation of the First Amendment.
"It's totally ludicrous," Festa said
We The Patriots, which has vowed to take Ramirez's fight to the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary, has set up a Qgiv page for donations toward the teacher's legal fight.
As of early Wednesday afternoon, more than $4,900 had been raised toward a goal of $50,000.
Charlie McCarthy ✉
Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.