Nearly half of millennials believe that misgendering a transgender person should be considered a crime, according to a new poll conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies for Newsweek.
According to Newsweek, “44 percent of those aged 25-34 think ‘referring to someone by the wrong gender pronoun (he/him, she/her) should be a criminal offense.’”
Thirty-one percent (31%) of millennials surveyed disagreed with the notion that it should be a crime and the remainder reported they "neither agree nor disagree" or "don't know."
Newsweek also stated, “[t]his view remains popular for those aged 35-44, among whom 38 percent think misgendering should be illegal, whilst 35 percent disagree and 26 percent either don't know or didn't express an opinion.”
It was quite a contrast to the population at large, where 65% of Americans said it should not be considered a crime, only 19% thought it should be, and the remainder were unwilling to give a definitive answer.
Perhaps the rise of anti-science support among millennials for criminalizing “misgendering” someone comes from the prevalence of influencers and politicians supporting this idea.
Transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney once said it should be “illegal” for people to refer to him by his biologically-correct pronouns.
“Like, the articles written about me using ‘he’ pronouns and calling me a man over and over again, I feel like that should be illegal. I don’t know, that’s just bad journalism,” Mulvaney said in October of 2022.
Even worse, we have now seen left-wing politicians and legislators push for bills and laws that would make this a reality.
According to the Daily Signal, in June, the Michigan House passed HB 4474. It is legislation that would make it a felony hate crime offense to cause someone to “feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened” with words, deliberately “misgendering” someone being an example, subject to a possible penalty of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
The poll of 1,500 U.S. eligible voters was conducted for Newsweek on July 6 by Redfield & Wilton Strategies.