California Legislature Passes Bill To Punish Elder-Care Workers Who Don’t Use Trans Pronouns

There was a time when I thought no rule of grammar could possibly inspire more ardent debate than the Oxford comma. But California once again proves me wrong.

State representatives elected by the special, especially tan snowflakes of the Golden State have just passed the nation’s first state laws governing pronoun usage.

SB 219, which passed the State Assembly on September 12 and has already passed the Senate, proposes to fine or jail employees of long-term or intermediate care facilities who repeatedly and willfully refuse to use a preferred gender pronoun:

This bill would enact the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Long-Term-Care Facility Resident’s Bill of Rights. Among other things, the bill would make it unlawful, except as specified, for any long-term care facility to take specified actions wholly or partially on the basis of a person’s actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) status, including, among others, willfully and repeatedly failing to use a resident’s preferred name or pronouns after being clearly informed of the preferred name or pronouns.

There Are No Religious Exemptions In SB 219

Although this technically wouldn’t criminalize using the wrong pronoun, violating this item in the patient’s “bill of rights” for Residential Care Facilities for the Elderly would carry a fine of up to $1000 or a year in jail. As Amy Swearer noted in the Daily Signal, in true California style, SB 219 carries no religious exemptions—not for nursing homes run by religious institutions, nor even individual doctors. The only exception it makes is for “professionally reasonable clinical judgment.”

Additionally, facility staff may not “Prohibit a resident from using, or harass a resident who seeks to use or does use, a restroom available to other persons of the same gender identity, regardless of whether the resident is making a gender transition or appears to be gender-nonconforming. Harassment includes, but is not limited to, requiring a resident to show identity documents in order to gain entrance to a restroom available to other persons of the same gender identity.”

In other words, a provider concerned about protecting vulnerable residents could be fined for stopping a man, who may very well fit “stereotypical expectations of how a man… should appear or act” from entering the women’s restroom. The bill also would make it unlawful to refuse to move a person who identifies as a woman into a room with other women, or vice versa.

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