A plurality of millennials say that it should be a criminal offense to refer to refer to a person by the wrong gender pronoun, reports Reason Magazine:
“Referring to someone by the wrong gender pronoun (he/him, she/her) should be a criminal offense,” millennials say in a new poll….
Case in point: a new Newsweek poll on misgendering. In the poll—given to 1,500 eligible voters in the U.S. in early July by Redfield & Wilton Strategies—people were asked whether “referring to someone by the wrong gender pronoun (he/him, she/her) should be a criminal offense.”
A shocking percentage of younger survey respondents said that it should.
Younger millennials were the most likely to support criminal penalties for misgendering, with 44 percent of 25- to 34-year-old respondents in favor and just 31 percent saying misgendering should not be a crime.
California enacted a statute that criminalized misgendering in assisted living facilities for the elderly. The California Court of Appeal struck the statute down as a First Amendment violation in Taking Offense v. California, but the state Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, and the supporters of the law have filed many times more briefs in favor of it (such as tons of amicus briefs) than have been filed against it. Much of the legal establishment has lined up behind the challenged law banning misgendering.
A conservative federal appeals court panel ruled that professor had a First Amendment right not to use a transgender student’s preferred pronouns, in Meriwether v. Hartop, 992 F.3d 492 (6th Cir. 2001).
But in some progressive jurisdictions, people can be sued for “gender harassment” for repeatedly calling a co-worker by the “wrong” pronoun. The argument is that it creates a hostile work environment for a transgender person.
Using preferred pronouns can be very complicated, because there are many recently-coined gender pronouns by which transgender people seek to be addressed. “As but a small example, these pronouns include not only ‘They’ and ‘Them’, but also, e.g., Zie, Ze, Sie, Ey, Ve, Tey, E, Zieself, Hirself, Eirself, Verself, Terself, Emself, Hir, Xe, Xem, Hy, Hym, Co and Coz,” noted the lawyers for a Utah professor disciplined for failed to use preferred transgender pronouns.
Non-trangender people have no right to force co-workers to use plural words like “them” or made-up words like “xe” or “xem” to refer to them, or to violate basic grammatical rules, so trangender people should not, either. Courts have ruled that federal civil rights laws do not create a right to affirmative action or special treatment, in cases such as Coalition for Economic Equity v. Wilson (1997).
Some colleges have rules against misgendering by students and staff. Campus Reform reports that the University of New Mexico has a policy forcing school personnel (and perhaps students) to comply with preferred pronouns. Outlined in its “Policies and Procedures Manual,” UNM’s Policy 2720 declares that “the intentional or persistent refusal to respect a preferred or affirmed name or pronoun can constitute discrimination or harassment.”
