“If there is any enduring principle in our constitutional framework, it is that no government official, regardless of their status, can dictate what should be considered orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or any other matters of personal conviction. Nor can they coerce individuals to profess their beliefs through speech or action.” —Justice Robert H. Jackson West Virginia State Board of Education v Barnette (1943)
You may have experienced pressure to conform your speech patterns, and thus your thought patterns to avoid operating in bad faith, to the jargon (and assumptions) deployed by the gender ideology crowd. You may have been called a “bigot” or a “transphobe” for believing that a woman is an adult human female and that therefore a man cannot be one, since he is not a female, a designation rooted in objective scientific facts (chromosomes, gametes, reproductive anatomy). You may have have been told that now even “female” is an arbitrary category that any person can appropriate for their identity and that you must accept this fiction and affirm those who believe it.
The technocracy cannot depend on peer pressure for crimestop so changing the way you speak and think is now a government project—of course, in total contradiction with the foundation law of the republic. What is in objective fact the misgendering of individuals is being baked into the rulebooks as a rule against the misgendering of individuals. The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s technical assistance publication Protections Against Employment Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity takes liberties with a Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) to assert that “the use of pronouns or names that are inconsistent with an individual’s gender identity as unlawful harassment.” (For background on this, see my NIH and the Tyranny of Compelled Speech).
The EEOC guidance states, “intentionally and repeatedly using the wrong name and pronouns to refer to a transgender employee could contribute to an unlawful hostile work environment” and is thus a violation of Title VII. So if an individual who is obviously male identifies as a woman, employees will be required to refer to that person as a “she.” In other words, the employee is compelled by law—or at least administrative rule—to both (a) speak in a way he may not wish to (which is his right) and (b) lie. To put this another way, the employee is forced to misgender the person out of fear of discipline, marginalization, or termination.
The EEOC guidance is clearly at odds with the First Amendment and the several Supreme Court rulings affirming the plain meaning of the article. The “compelled speech doctrine” establishes the principle that the government is prohibited from coercing individuals or groups into endorsing specific forms of expression. As a result, the First Amendment not only restricts the government from penalizing individuals for their speech, but also safeguards them from being punished for declining to articulate, promote, or conform to messages sanctioned by the government.
The compelled speech doctrine finds its notable application in the Supreme Court case of West Virginia State Board of Education v Barnette (1943). In this ruling, the Court declared that a state cannot compel a child to stand, salute the flag, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. The justices recognized that students who were Jehovah’s Witnesses, due to religious beliefs, possessed a First Amendment right to abstain from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or saluting the American flag. Thus the right to freedom of conscience was affirmed by the Court. I myself appealed to this ruling throughout my public school experience when I refused to stand and pledge allegiance to the flag (I now stand and recite the pledge, but voluntarily).
The Court also applied the compelled speech doctrine in Wooley v. Maynard (1977). In that case, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger proclaimed, “The right to speak and the right to refrain from speaking are interconnected facets of the broader concept of ‘individual freedom of thought.’” The Court extended the scope of the compelled speech principle in Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston (1995), wherein it ruled that government officials could not compel parade organizers to include a gay and lesbian group and its messages in their event. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. reaffirmed the core tenet of the compelled speech principle in an even more recent case of Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (2006): “Key precedents of this Court have established the principle that freedom of speech prohibits the government from compelling individuals to express certain views.”
(For more case law, see the entry “Compelled Speech” in the First Amendment Encyclopedia, housed at my alma mater Middle Tennessee State University.)
If the man passes as a woman, other employees will naturally use the preferred pronouns. This is because humans are evolved beings with an innate capacity to determine gender with great accuracy. Thus there is likely to be no issue when a male who passes for a woman enters a female space if no women in that space know the individual is male. The individual’s right to privacy does not require disclosure of chromosomes or presentation of reproductive anatomy. It is only in cases where the individual is known to be or is obviously male that the employees are required to deny that fact. In this case, the man has failed in his attempt at a facsimile. However, instead of maintaining the integrity of sex-segregated spaces, employees are now called upon, under threat of discipline or termination, to uphold the delusion that the man is really a woman and pretend as if that the integrity of that space has not been violated. This is what is meant by the term “affirmation” in gender ideology. By demanding that employees affirm males as women, they are being conscripted into a war against fact and reason—a war that is quite obviously also against the First Amendment.
freedom and reason 