"Uncharted waters, indeed."

You make good points about how fundamentally important public pronoun use is, but I guess what most disturbs me about this case and others like it is the presumption of intersection with religion.

Non-binary pronouns are fundamentally not a religious subject. I mean, many human languages don't even have gendered pronouns, so the argument that using a non-gendered pronoun must violate religious principles is tenuous at best.

The breadth of human experience aside, the Christian ideas these three middle students (or actually the adults in their lives including lawyers) are basing their arguments on are completely novel. If you'd asked any Christian leader anywhere a decade ago if Christianity was opposed to gender-neutral pronouns, you'd have got a head scratch in response.

Opposition to gender neutral pronouns within conservative American Christianity is brand new, no more than a handful of years old. Of course, people claim it's rooted in older ideas and traditions, but that's hardly obvious and it's certainly not pervasive in Christianity.

So claiming the religious liberty not to be polite by conforming to rules of courtesy that apply across the board in the school district to students and staff, is a really troubling development.

Generally in the United States, religious people are supposed to abide by "generally applicable" laws and regulations, so long as their particular beliefs were not targeted because they are religious beliefs.

This principle is why, for example, religious people are not allowed to withhold necessary medical care from their children. The laws that mandate such care are "generally applicable" rather than targeting certain Christian sects that encourage members not to seek medical care.

That standard is really important, because we (well, most of us) don't want to live in a society where anybody who claims a religious exception to laws and regulations can decide not to follow them. The downside to that is probably obvious.

So what we have with this pronoun case is a group of very conservative Christian activists pushing hard to claim that gender-neutral pronouns are so antithetical to their religious beliefs that the "generally applicable" rule should not apply to them. They're trying to manufacture a legal principle to protect public incivility to trans people based on novel religious ideas, notwithstanding far older legal principles that suggest they have no case.

If they win, not only will this be a defeat for trans people, but a further strengthening of religious "privilege" and the erosion of the rule of law.