California court overturns law requiring nurses to correctly pronoun trans patients

[lfromnj]

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna1468

Yes there was a legal penalty in prison involved.

[Bootes Void]

Great ruling

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Good ruling.

[Pyro]

The court ruled that deadnaming trans seniors constitutes "an ideological disagreement with another person’s expressed gender identity," and therefore is somehow protected as free speech. Lunacy. This is textbook transphobic discrimination. No, free speech does not extend to verbally debasing seniors in nursing homes and care facilities. I pray this is struck down in a higher court to spare trans elders some mental and psychologic abuse.

[DrScholl]

You cannot disagree with what someone's gender is, especially in a work environment. If you have a problem keep it to yourself and do your damn job.

[bagelman]

There should be no prison time or public criminal charge for such an offense. It's not free speech though and should be punishable by management.

[John Dule]

waaaah i support free speech but that doesn't mean you can say what you want

[Horus]

Not sure if it's a "good" ruling, but it is certainly the correct ruling.

[Hammy]

If you can't exercise a very basic courtesy towards patients that requires literally zero effort, you don't belong in any sort of job dealing with the public.

[John Dule]

If you can't exercise a very basic courtesy towards patients that requires literally zero effort, you don't belong in any sort of job dealing with the public.

This is also true. Why would you take a hospitality job if you're going to spend your time getting into "ideological disagreements" with the people you're supposed to be helping? This is like self-parody Ben Shapiro-tier crap.

[BlueSwan]

If you can't exercise a very basic courtesy towards patients that requires literally zero effort, you don't belong in any sort of job dealing with the public.

Agreed. However, this should be decided by the employer and not be something that is defined by law and certainly not something that is punishable by law.

[Donerail]

The court ruled that deadnaming trans seniors constitutes "an ideological disagreement with another person’s expressed gender identity," and therefore is somehow protected as free speech. Lunacy. This is textbook transphobic discrimination. No, free speech does not extend to verbally debasing seniors in nursing homes and care facilities.

Of course there's an ideological disagreement here — it's being covered by national media and it's the subject of a thread on this blog, and the state made a special law to criminalize it, none of which would be happening if there wasn't any underlying ideological disagreement.

None of that's to say that the ideological message being conveyed can't simultaneously be discriminatory, or offensive, or otherwise objectionable; one of the aspects of content is that it can offend. But the state's argument related to the quote you pulled was that there was no "content" regulated here whatsoever, employing some very strange logic that a pronoun, in general, can never carry any meaning, whatever the context, because its function is to replace a noun. That argument was, I think, rightly shot down.

If you can't exercise a very basic courtesy towards patients that requires literally zero effort, you don't belong in any sort of job dealing with the public.

Agreed. However, this should be decided by the employer and not be something that is defined by law and certainly not something that is punishable by law.

There are lots of laws that define and punish workplace speech. Whatever your employer thinks, you cannot sexually harass a coworker, for instance, or make racially demeaning comments to a customer. California already has a robust civil process that exists to address discrimination by businesses and their employees. If the legislature wanted to uphold this requirement, they could have slotted into the same framework. Instead, they decided to impose a criminal penalty, for reasons that are still not very clear to me.

[Ferguson97]

If you can't exercise a very basic courtesy towards patients that requires literally zero effort, you don't belong in any sort of job dealing with the public.

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

I wonder if the free speech gang will uphold the rights of nurses to call patients racial slurs because of “ideological disagreements”.

[emailking]

I think that should result in termination (assuming done intentionally) but it shouldn't be against the law.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

If you can't exercise a very basic courtesy towards patients that requires literally zero effort, you don't belong in any sort of job dealing with the public.

You can argue that but arguing arguing it should be punishable by prison time is quite a stretch.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I wonder if the free speech gang will uphold the rights of nurses to call patients racial slurs because of “ideological disagreements”.

If they do that they should be subject to workplace discipline no doubt. They shouldn't go to prison for it though.

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

I wonder if the free speech gang will uphold the rights of nurses to call patients racial slurs because of “ideological disagreements”.

If they do that they should be subject to workplace discipline no doubt. They shouldn't go to prison for it though.

I agree. But I think it should be illegal.

[Alben Barkley]

The court ruled that deadnaming trans seniors constitutes "an ideological disagreement with another person’s expressed gender identity," and therefore is somehow protected as free speech. Lunacy.

You cannot disagree with what someone's gender is

I wonder if the free speech gang will uphold the rights of nurses to call patients racial slurs because of “ideological disagreements”.

I think it should be illegal.

Authoritarians are deranged. Fortunately none of you will ever have the control over people and their minds that you so obviously, desperately desire. And fortunately there is still enough sanity and principle left in the courts of this country to strike down attempts by your like-minded comrades in Commiefornia to implement such control.

That being said, it is true that people who refuse to do their jobs and treat patients with respect can be fired or punished in the workplace for it. But that’s a concern of the employer, not the state. The rush to make everything a criminal offense punishable by the state is seriously disturbing. As is the left’s mockery and downplaying of free speech as somehow a right-wing concern these days. I wish I could say this thread was the first time I’d seen that but sadly it’s far from it.

[DrScholl]

The court ruled that deadnaming trans seniors constitutes "an ideological disagreement with another person’s expressed gender identity," and therefore is somehow protected as free speech. Lunacy.

You cannot disagree with what someone's gender is

I wonder if the free speech gang will uphold the rights of nurses to call patients racial slurs because of “ideological disagreements”.

I think it should be illegal.

Authoritarians are deranged. Fortunately none of you will ever have the control over people and their minds that you so obviously, desperately desire. And fortunately there is still enough sanity and principle left in the courts of this country to strike down attempts by your like-minded comrades in Commiefornia to implement such control.

That being said, it is true that people who refuse to do their jobs and treat patients with respect can be fired or punished in the workplace for it. But that’s a concern of the employer, not the state. The rush to make everything a criminal offense punishable by the state is seriously disturbing. As is the left’s mockery and downplaying of free speech as somehow a right-wing concern these days. I wish I could say this thread was the first time I’d seen that but sadly it’s far from it.

You're from a state that elects Bitch McConnell and you're calling folks deranged? You cannot just misgender someone at work because you feel like it. It isn't your call because you do not know how someone truly feels within their own body.

And remember, you have free speech, but people also are free to curse you out or even slap you if you call them out their name. I've seen plenty of cases where people have received no charges for whooping somebody for calling them names or verbally attacking them.

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. Transphobia affects people in real life.

The opinion said that transphobia is “potentially offensive” but doesn’t “necessarily create a hostile environment”. In what world does your nurse consistently insulting and disrespecting you because they “ideologically disagree” with basic facts about you not create a hostile environment?

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

The court ruled that deadnaming trans seniors constitutes "an ideological disagreement with another person’s expressed gender identity," and therefore is somehow protected as free speech. Lunacy. This is textbook transphobic discrimination. No, free speech does not extend to verbally debasing seniors in nursing homes and care facilities. I pray this is struck down in a higher court to spare trans elders some mental and psychologic abuse.

Reading more into it and it actually is really pernicious. By this token, anti-Muslim slurs could be considered “an inartful way to express ideological disagreement with another person’s” religious beliefs. The whole premise of the opinion is that misgendering and deadnaming people is merely a somewhat uncouth way to express a legitimate belief (i.e. transphobia). Whatever one thinks about California constitutional law or civil vs criminal procedures or what have you, such deference would never be afforded to bare racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, etc.

[Donerail]

Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. Transphobia affects people in real life.

The opinion said that transphobia is “potentially offensive” but doesn’t “necessarily create a hostile environment”. In what world does your nurse consistently insulting and disrespecting you because they “ideologically disagree” with basic facts about you not create a hostile environment?

You're being absurd, and I'm starting to question whether you actually read the opinion. The California law “criminalizes even occasional, isolated, off-hand instances of willful misgendering—provided there has been at least one prior instance—without requiring that such occasional instances of misgendering amount to harassing or discriminatory conduct. . . .  [T]here is no requirement that the resident even be aware of the misgendering.”

In what world is speech you're not aware of sufficient, on its own, to create a hostile environment? As the court points out, this is a much broader standard than is used for any other sort of workplace harassment complaints. It's certainly not the least restrictive means to regulate the speech in question here.

And yes, this is how it would work for racism, sexism, anti-Semitism — literally any other sort of workplace harassment. We want to prohibit, for example, persistent Islamophobic comments directed at a specific coworker, but we also want to allow people to speak freely about religion in general. I’m sure you can imagine a lot of comments that might fall somewhere in the middle, which is why we require any sort of content-based speech restriction to use the least restrictive means to achieve its goals, and why we have an entire civil administrative structure for handling these complaints.

The legislature chose to disregard that existing structure, which affords the accused some measure of due process to figure out if the comments were sufficient to create a hostile work environment, in favor of a sweeping criminal standard that extends to isolated comments made in private. That's the definition of an overbroad restriction on speech.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

The court ruled that deadnaming trans seniors constitutes "an ideological disagreement with another person’s expressed gender identity," and therefore is somehow protected as free speech. Lunacy.

You cannot disagree with what someone's gender is

I wonder if the free speech gang will uphold the rights of nurses to call patients racial slurs because of “ideological disagreements”.

I think it should be illegal.

Authoritarians are deranged. Fortunately none of you will ever have the control over people and their minds that you so obviously, desperately desire. And fortunately there is still enough sanity and principle left in the courts of this country to strike down attempts by your like-minded comrades in Commiefornia to implement such control.

That being said, it is true that people who refuse to do their jobs and treat patients with respect can be fired or punished in the workplace for it. But that’s a concern of the employer, not the state. The rush to make everything a criminal offense punishable by the state is seriously disturbing. As is the left’s mockery and downplaying of free speech as somehow a right-wing concern these days. I wish I could say this thread was the first time I’d seen that but sadly it’s far from it.

You're from a state that elects Bitch McConnell and you're calling folks deranged?

Why does that matter? Alben voted against McConnell.

[TheReckoning]

Authoritarians are deranged. Fortunately none of you will ever have the control over people and their minds that you so obviously, desperately desire. And fortunately there is still enough sanity and principle left in the courts of this country to strike down attempts by your like-minded comrades in Commiefornia to implement such control.

That being said, it is true that people who refuse to do their jobs and treat patients with respect can be fired or punished in the workplace for it. But that’s a concern of the employer, not the state. The rush to make everything a criminal offense punishable by the state is seriously disturbing. As is the left’s mockery and downplaying of free speech as somehow a right-wing concern these days. I wish I could say this thread was the first time I’d seen that but sadly it’s far from it.

You're from a state that elects Bitch McConnell and you're calling folks deranged?

This has to be the worst “own” I have ever seen on this whole site.