California legislators are set to vote this week on a bill that could criminalise use of the wrong pronoun to refer to a transgender individual. The new law would allow transgender individuals living in care facilities like nursing homes to use bathrooms in line with their preferred gender (so a man who identifies as a woman could use the women’s bathroom), and would punish any caregiver who “knowingly” uses the wrong gender pronoun to refer to one of their patients.
Using “he” instead of “she” could incur a $1,000 fine and up to a year in jail for gender-based discrimination and harassment. The law, which says “knowingly,” does not seem to identify a specific standard, leaving interpretation of motive up to authorities.
According to law professor Eugene Volokh, the law itself seems too vague, and it’s likely California wouldn’t enforcement to nursing home caretakers only. Writing in National Review, Eliott Kaufmann said the “focus on nursing homes, one suspects, was chosen not because there is an epidemic of elderly transgender people being ‘misgendered’ by their caretakers, but simply because the elderly make for a particularly sympathetic test case.”
The state senator who authored the bill, Scott Weiner, would not exempt religious organisations from the law. “Everyone is entitled to their religious view,” Weiner said. “But when you enter the public space, when you are running an institution, you are in a workplace, you are in a civil setting, and you have to follow the law.”
