Florida Education commissioner seeks sanctions against elementary teacher for requiring children to use non-binary pronouns

The Education Commissioner of Florida, Anastasios Kamoutsas, filed a formal administrative complaint against Emily Caylen Grace, a support teacher at Talbot Elementary School, seeking sanctions against her educator certificate for requiring students to call her "Mx" instead of "Mrs." or "Miss."

According to the official document, during the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school years, Grace “asked and/or encouraged and/or failed to correct elementary students addressing her using the non-binary prefix Mx rather than Ms. or Mrs. as appropriate for [Grace’s] sex as determined at birth.”

Kamoutsas alleges that these facts constitute a violation of the Principles of Professional Conduct for the teaching profession and of the state administrative rule related to the use of titles and personal pronouns in educational institutions.

In a Wednesday posting on X, the commissioner wrote, "No schoolteacher can make elementary school kids use fake pronouns in Florida. This isn’t hard.”

Similarly, Florida's Attorney General James Uthmeier also weighed in on X: "We enforce our laws here in Florida. There is zero tolerance for teachers who want to play in the pronoun Olympics and force dangerous ideology on our kids.”

For his part, Governor Ron DeSantis wrote, “We are not running the pronoun Olympics in the state of Florida.”

The complaint requests that the Educational Practices Commission impose a sanction against Emily Caylen Grace's certificate.