The U.S. Government has mandated the use of preferred pronouns in every workplace in America in a clampdown on ‘discrimination’ against transgender people under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. John Murawski in UnHerd has more.
As of this week, failing to respect a queer person’s non-binary pronouns is the newest form of workplace discrimination recognised under the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act in the United States.
The new pronoun mandate for workers, employers and even customers was issued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as part of the civil rights agency’s first move in a quarter-century to bring its workplace guidelines up to date with legal precedent and evolving social norms.
The 189-page document, which is technically legally non-binding but spells out the agency’s policies on investigating discrimination complaints, says that misgendering must be repeated and intentional, not a slip of the tongue, to rise to the level of workplace harassment. In its guidelines, the EEOC also decreed that it’s discriminatory for an employer to deny a transgender person access to a bathroom they feel best matches their gender identity, even if that invades the privacy of the other workers, or, in some cases, conflicts with another employee’s religious convictions.
The new standards were adopted on a 3-2 vote, along party lines, after the investigatory panel received some 37,000 public comments on the updates proposed last October.
With this dramatic decision, it’s no exaggeration to say that queer theory — the provocative academic idea that rejects the normativity of heterosexuality — is now firmly ensconced into U.S. law and American society, at least in the bluest and most urban areas with the most educated residents and top-paying jobs.
The EEOC’s decision is the consequence of decades of queer scholarship and legal manoeuvring to gain civil rights protection and social acceptance for behaviours once deemed as deviant but increasingly seen as liberated from archaic, repressive conventions. The agency said banning misgendering and bathroom restrictions for trans people “logically extends” from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock ruling that added sexual and gender identity as a protected category under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
Worth reading in full.
Depressing stuff. Hard to understand how in a supposedly federal system like America, the central Government can stipulate that every workplace in the country – and customers as well – must conform to confused people’s gender fantasies. But there you have it.
Personally, I blame Neil Gorsuch, the supposedly conservative originalist Justice who joined with the liberals in Bostock (he actually wrote the majority opinion) in arguing that constitutional protections for sex applied equally to gender identity. His facile logic? That it is impossible for an employer to make an adverse employment decision based on “transgender status” without thereby discriminating “because of sex”, since a man who suffers adverse treatment because he “identifies” as a woman is treated differently than he would be if he were a woman who “identifies” as a woman. Er, yes, Neil. But the point is he isn’t a woman. This point of mere biological fact was lost on such a lofty legal mind, unfortunately – and now a country of 350 million is living with the idiotic and tyrannical consequences.
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