NYC to Fine Businesses That Don’t Use Correct Gender Pronouns

Businesses in New York City face fines under a new law that makes it a violation of someone’s human rights not to use their preferred “gender pronoun”.

According to the New York City Commission on Human Rights, employees, landlords and businesses who refuse to refer to transgender people as terms such as “ze” and “hir” will be in violation of the New York City Human Rights Law.

Violations include, “Intentional or repeated refusal to use an individual’s preferred name, pronoun or title. For example, repeatedly calling a transgender woman “him” or “Mr.” after she has made clear which pronouns and title she uses.”

The notion of a business asking every customer who walks through the door if they want to be identified as “he,” “she,” “ze,” “hir,” or any other of the 71 Facebook “gender options” is of course completely absurd.

“So people can basically force us — on pain of massive legal liability — to say what they want us to say, whether or not we want to endorse the political message associated with that term, and whether or not we think it’s a lie,” writes UCLA Law Prof. Eugene Volokh.

Volokh also makes the point that some people identify as “gender fluid” and so their preferred pronoun could change on a daily basis. Some people also identify as “otherkin”. Are businesses also going to be fined for failing to refer to customers as certain species of animal?

The guideline also states that if a business discovers that its employees or patrons are “refus[ing] to use a transgender employee’s preferred” pronoun, they should be ejected or fired to comply with the law.

The draconian enforcement of gender pronouns is yet another way in which fringe identity politics movements (just 0.03 percent of Americans consider themselves to be transgender) are being hijacked to create onerous burdens on free speech.

Last year we reported on an opinion piece by Columbia University’s John McWhorter, carried by CNN, which called for people who flout rules of gender pronoun political correctness to be publicly shamed in order to compel “society-wide acceptance” of the term “ze” in favor of “he” or “she”.

We are now at the point where people are being increasingly treated like thought criminals who deserve state oppression and punishment for simply believing that there are only two biological genders.