They don’t realize that this opens them up to be called damn near anything the students want to call them.

Also, askong students what they prefer to be called predates the trans panic the idiots are experiencing. See, back in my day, someone named Gershwin Boyd Merryweather might be called Bubba by everyone that knows him. You call him Boyd, or Gershwin, or even Merryweather, he might not respond because that’s not the name his brain recognizes as meaning him. So the teachers were smart enough to ask students what they go by.

Hence me being called Mike in jr high chool despite not having the name michael at all because I gave up correcting teachers that couldn’t say my real name (which isn’t Mike or Michael lol). In high school, I just responded to call me sasquatch. That was what most of my friends had started calling me because I either look or smell like one (whuch depended on which friend you ask lol).

Believe it or not, other than my English teacher who could pronounce my traditional irish name correctly, and one old geometry teacher that said, and I quote “I will call you no such silly thing. Select another name, please.” everyone called me that in school after freshman year. The principal called me to the office by sasquatch once.

So, no, I don’t buy this bullshit at all.

And, even if it wasn’t bullshit whole cloth, it isn’t religious bullshit, because there’s nowhere in the fucking bible that says you can’t fucking be a decent human being and call people what they prefer to be called.