They Put Their Pronouns in Their Email Signatures. Then the University Dismissed Them.

Two residence-life staff members at a small religious institution have been terminated after they refused to remove their pronouns from their email signatures, which violated the private university’s policy.

Raegan Zelaya and Shua Wilmot, who oversaw the women’s and men’s residence halls, respectively, were informed last week by Houghton University, in New York, that they were being terminated immediately. Both were working on one-year contracts; Zelaya had already said she wouldn’t return next year, while Wilmot, who had been planning to return, was initially told last month that his contract wouldn’t be renewed.

Wilmot and Zelaya say their decision to include pronouns in their signatures was in keeping with their duty as student-affairs staff members to be inclusive and welcoming, and that the policy prohibiting them from doing so wasn’t one to which they’d agreed. Houghton officials didn’t respond to a list of detailed questions, but the university issued a statement. “While the details of individual personnel matters are confidential, Houghton University has never terminated an employment relationship based solely on the use of pronouns in staff email signatures or university-owned communications channels,” the statement read. “Houghton remains steadfastly committed to offering the Christian education that our students are promised.”

The accounts of the two now-former residence-hall advisors, who provided copies of institutional policies and messages they exchanged with Houghton’s leaders, paint a picture of a private religious institution struggling to navigate changing gender norms and to acknowledge LGBTQ+ students’ presence on campus while also hewing to church doctrine. Houghton is a rural institution in Western New York, located about an hour southeast of Buffalo. It is affiliated with the Wesleyan Church and enrolls about 800 students, who are required to attend chapel services and abstain from alcohol and drug use. It defines itself not as conservative or liberal but as “solidly Biblical” and as “looking at every issue — abortion, racism, marriage, social justice — through a Biblical lens.”

According to the university’s website, “Sometimes, this means affirming positions currently called conservative. For example, we privilege the understanding of marriage as between a man and a woman, and the sanctity of life from conception to natural death.” But, the site adds, the university also believes in men’s and women’s roles in ministry and in “healing the scars of racism in America.”

‘You Have Misread the Message’

The seeds of the two residence advisers’ terminations began with a series of policy directives. The first came in February 2022 in an email from Houghton’s president, Wayne D. Lewis Jr., to faculty and staff members, which Wilmot shared with The Chronicle. It said that requiring students to share their pronouns would be forbidden in any course, program, or activity. Students, Lewis added, were free to share their pronouns if they chose, but Houghton employees could not require them to do so. “We affirm the Biblical truth that each of us is made in the image of God and as such, deserving of love, respect, and dignity. The position of the College on gender identity and gender expression, however, is unchanged; that gender assignment is a divine prerogative and not separate from one’s biological sex,” Lewis wrote. Requiring that students do so, he wrote, “sends an inaccurate message to Houghton students; signaling that the College affirms or embraces a position on gender identity and expression which it does not.” (Houghton transitioned from a college to a university in July.)

Wilmot agreed with the policy, which he said would prevent students from being forced to out themselves, but not with Lewis’ justification. That amounted to ignorance and erasure of transgender and intersex people, he wrote in an email to Lewis. “One of my degrees is in Human Development, and having studied human biology, sexuality, and gender (at a Christian institution), the statement that gender assignment and biological sex are not separate jumped out at me,” he wrote. “Sex is not as simple as male/female (nor is gender), and this communication seems to effectively erase the ~1/450 people born with congenital sex chromosome abnormalities.”

Lewis said his position on the matter was derived from Wesleyan Church guidance, according to a March 2022 response that Wilmot shared with The Chronicle. “If you have at all read into my message an intent to belittle, degrade, or be disrespectful to persons who identify as LGBTQ, you have misread the message,” he said. The president added that it was fair to disagree with the church’s position, but that, as a condition of their employment, employees were expected to be “supportive of The Wesleyan Church’s theological and doctrinal positions.”

Then, in September 2022, Lewis created a new policy: Staff members would now be required to use a standardized email signature, without any additional information included, such as Bible verses, slogans, one’s Houghton graduating-class year, or pronouns, Lewis wrote in an email that Wilmot shared with The Chronicle.

“I understand that this decision will be disappointing for some of you. Please know that this decision was not made lightly or carelessly. Recognize, however, that this decision does not represent a shift for Houghton,” Lewis wrote. Pronouns, he noted, hadn’t historically been used by the university’s employees in their communications, even though he recognized that the practice had become more common outside of the orthodox Christian community. “We respect the right and decision of our friends and colleagues in other contexts to share their pronouns,” he wrote, “but Houghton employees will not do so using Houghton email, videoconferencing, or print media, or when representing the University.”

A Harder-Line Stance

Many Christian institutions find themselves navigating unfamiliar waters when it comes to issues of gender identity. Jonathan S. Coley, an associate professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University who studies LGBTQ activism at Christian institutions, said that when he began tracking Christian institutions’ policies a decade ago, only 10 percent included “gender identity” or “gender expression” in their nondiscrimination policies.

But by the time he updated his data last summer, that had changed: Half of Christian institutions included gender identity or expression in their nondiscrimination policies, and 62 percent had done the same for sexual orientation. Yet 21 percent of institutions, he found, had explicitly discriminatory language about transgender issues in their policy documents.

The more inclusive institutions, Coley said, tended to be Catholic or mainline Protestant. “They’ve come to a place as institutions where they are comfortable opening their doors to everyone they see,” he said. That approach, and the decision to include gender identity and expression in a nondiscrimination policy, might go against the doctrine of a university’s affiliated denomination. But, Coley said, “I think they don’t see being a Christian university as something that compels them to mandate that every student and every employee follow” that doctrine.

Meanwhile, evangelical Christian and Latter-day Saints institutions tended to take a harder-line stance; Coley classifies Houghton as evangelical, since the Wesleyan Church is part of the National Association of Evangelicals. For those institutions, he said, “being a Christian university means trying to hold every student to the beliefs of their denomination and trying to make sure that every student engages in behaviors that align with the beliefs of their denomination.”

The situation at Houghton is a sign that a “subset” of Christian institutions will take similarly repressive steps in the future, Coley said. But in doing so, institutions could be risking their survival. As the demographic cliff approaches, enrollments are likely to dip, and for a college-age population that’s broadly accepting of LGBTQ rights, policies like Houghton’s could be a turnoff when applying to college. For many students, discriminatory policies are especially personal; Coley cited a Gallup poll that found that one in five members of Generation Z identifies as LGBTQ, and data from the Religious Exemption Accountability Project that said more than one in 10 students at conservative Christian institutions did so.

Demonstrating Inclusiveness

These crosscurrents appear to be at work at Houghton. Wilmot took issue with the directive about email signatures; he hadn’t agreed to it when he signed his contract, and he’d had his pronouns in his email signature since he started at Houghton in the fall of 2021. (Zelaya, who started at the same time, said she couldn’t recall when she’d added hers to her signature but that it was before Lewis’ September announcement.) So, Wilmot decided, the “he/him” that appeared below his title in his outgoing emails would stay.

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In January, Zelaya and Wilmot said, they were called to a meeting with their supervisor, Katie Breitigan, the associate dean for residence life and housing, who told them she’d noticed they continued to use their pronouns in their email signatures. “We were both just like, OK, we’re going to keep them,” Wilmot recalled. Another meeting between the three of them, two weeks later, went much the same way. (Breitigan did not return a request for comment.)

Then the matter was escalated to Breitigan’s boss, Marc Smithers, then the vice president for student life and dean of students, who met with Wilmot. By this time, Zelaya had already decided to move on, partly because of the university’s treatment of LGBTQ students. Wilmot said Smithers asked him to consider removing his pronouns or resigning, and tried to offer a similar example in which a policy might conflict with an employee’s beliefs: An RA might not agree with the policy about students not being allowed to drink even when they’re of legal age, but they still have to agree to that policy. “But I told him that’s a false equivalency,” Wilmot said, “because drinking and an inclusive practice are very different things.”

Feeling stressed about the meeting, Wilmot removed the pronouns from his signature. But after a few days of internal struggle, Wilmot decided to restore them. Five years from now, he wondered, would he “look back and be like, Why did I back down so easily?”

His decision brought on another meeting in Smithers’ office. Wilmot says he told Smithers that his role is to care for students well, and that demonstrating his inclusiveness, through things like mentioning his pronouns in his email signature, was part of that. “I think that anybody should protest injustice, even if they’re standing alone in that,” Wilmot says he told Smithers, whom he described as being understanding of his position. But Wilmot still wasn’t willing to comply with the policy, or to resign. So the matter went up the chain of command, to Lewis, the president, and human resources. (Smithers did not respond to a request for comment.)

The answer came a few days later: Smithers told Wilmot his contract wouldn’t be renewed. Wilmot said he understood the final decision to have been Lewis’, and that it was a direct result of his refusal to remove his pronouns from his signature. Wilmot figured he’d be able to finish out the year. But that was not to be.

Just under two weeks before the last day of classes, Wilmot and Zelaya were called to Smithers’ office and told they were being dismissed immediately. Both of their termination notices, parts of which they read aloud in a YouTube video recorded by a student, cited their refusal to remove their pronouns from their signatures “in violation of institutional policy.”

But there were other reasons, too. For Zelaya, they included fallout from the closure of the university’s multicultural center, and her critical comments to the student newspaper on the subject. In an apparent reference to Zelaya’s comments to the student newspaper, Lewis wrote in a letter to the campus, which a Houghton spokesperson shared with The Chronicle, that “a customer at any company has the right to say whatever she likes about the company’s service and products, but the company’s employees are not permitted to trash it.” He added: “When current employees publicly misrepresent the institution, its positions, and its values, or argue against the beliefs and doctrine of the institution, they open the institution to reputational and material harm.”

A secondary reason for Wilmot’s dismissal stemmed from an email he sent last week to Wayne Schmidt, the Wesleyan Church’s general superintendent, which followed a letter Wilmot had sent Schmidt in February expressing concern with what he said was misinformation in the church’s guidance on gender identity. Written in 2014, it calls gender assignment a “divine prerogative” and notes that “gender confusion and dysphoria are ultimately the biological, psychological, social and spiritual consequences of the human race’s fallen condition. This state of depravity affects all persons individually and collectively.”

That guidance, Wilmot wrote to Schmidt in February, was “outdated and theologically problematic.” At the time, he said, Schmidt promised he’d keep the letter on file for future consideration. But when, in mid-April, he hadn’t heard back from Schmidt, he decided to send a follow-up, this time in the form of a letter to the church’s General Board that he asked Schmidt to forward. The board members’ contact information wasn’t available online, Wilmot said, and he thought asking Schmidt to forward it on his behalf was more “peaceable” than posting it online as a public letter. “I don’t want to jump right to publishing it as an open letter to the GB, so I will appreciate it if you forward it to the members,” he wrote to Schmidt. It was that line, he said, that Houghton officials — with whom he had not shared the correspondence with Schmidt — perceived as a threat.

Seeking Accountability

The dual dismissals had immediate repercussions. The night she was terminated, Zelaya posted on Instagram a statement about the “heart posture” that led her to keep her pronouns in her email signature and to “speak on the importance of safe spaces for minorities on this campus.” And on Friday, Smithers, the dean who’d fired both staff members, turned in his own resignation, according to a memo from Lewis to the university community that Wilmot provided.

Zelaya hasn’t spoken to Smithers, but expressed sympathy about the position he was is in, having to “back decisions that he can’t explain,” she said. “I can only say that that must be really hard for him, to always have to be the bad guy and to be perceived as this person who is giving out proclamations without being able to explain what context is happening.”

Zelaya said she’s been chagrined by some of the negative responses to her Instagram post, like those saying that Houghton is a Christian institution and if she disagrees with its values, she should leave. “I think it’s important to say, a, I was leaving,” she said. “But b, I think if anything, Shua and I were trying to hold this institution accountable to their values.”

Her intention and Wilmot’s, she said, was never to imply that everyone ought to include their pronouns in their email signatures or to impugn others for not doing so. “We were just trying to make this a place where the least of these feel like there’s a space at the table for them, and trying to love people with curiosity and grace rather than judgment and condemnation,” she said. “And that feels pretty in line with the values of this institution.”