No, this is not a headline from The Onion, and you’re not in the Twilight Zone.
Eh, then again, maybe you are. Feels like it most days.
A bill has already passed in the California Senate and is making its way to the state Assembly that would criminalize “discrimination” against transgender seniors – including failing to use a person’s preferred pronoun, or preventing men from using restrooms with elderly women, regardless of whether the man identifies as a woman himself.
The proposed legislation would modify the state’s existing discrimination code for nursing homes and assisted care facilities to include various gender identity practices, including mandating that the facility use a person’s preferred pronoun, and allow them to have sexual relations with the partner of their choosing, if other non-trans residents are permitted to do the same.
According to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Long-Term Care Facility Residents Bill of Rights,” or SB-219, nursing homes and care facilities can be found criminally liable if they “Willfully and repeatedly fail to use a resident’s preferred name or pronouns after being clearly informed of the preferred name or pronouns.” If the bill is signed into law, then violating it could result in a $1,000 fine and up to a year in jail.
The law also Prohibit[s] a resident from using, or harass[es] 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."
So essentially, if Harold wants to use Sally’s bathroom, he can, regardless of whether he presents as a woman. What a brilliant mandate to impose on facilities tasked with the care of vulnerable elderly women! What could possibly go wrong?
Well, if you’ve got an IQ higher than above 34, your answer is probably, “A lot of things.” UCLA First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh agrees, telling the National Review that this bill is the first step toward criminalizing the failure to use a person’s preferred pronoun in all aspects of public life and adding it’s “pretty unlikely that, if this law is enacted, such prohibitions would be limited just to this [nursing home] scenario.”
While California is the first liberal cesspool to breed such madness on a state level, similar laws have already been going into effect across smaller arenas for some time now. Last year, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio handed down a up to $250,000 penalty for businesses that don’t abide by the city’s 31 recognized gender pronouns (although that’s fairly exclusionary – according to Facebook, there are more than 50.)
If you happen to live in California and aren’t up to speed on your gender pronouns, you’d better catch up quick. If it helps, feel free to learn from MRCTV’s struggle with pronouns. We gave it our best shot.