UCLA Student Paper Says Misgendering is Too Harmful for Free Speech

UCLA Student Paper Says Misgendering is Too Harmful for Free Speech

Mind you, these exceptions only flow in one direction. Leftists will still be allowed to call conservatives Nazis.

The College Fix reports:

Aspiring journalists still want First Amendment exceptions for hurt feelings

A month ago, The College Fix reported on Defending Education’s lawsuit against the University of California system for allegedly requiring the use of “preferred pronouns.”

The lawsuit asserted that a student “who uses ‘he’ or ‘him’ when referring to a biological male who identifies as a female will be punished for ‘misgendering’ that student.”

Defending Education Senior Legal Counsel Sarah Parshall Perry noted colleges certainly can act to prohibit true harassment — “targeted, severe, and pervasive conduct that interferes with a student’s education” — but can’t “weaponize vague harassment policies to regulate viewpoints on matters of public concern, such as biological sex and gender identity.”

Like the UC Sexual Harassment, Anti-Discrimination, Prevention and Education training, for example, which states “[i]ntentionally calling someone their name used before transition, as opposed to their lived name, is called dead-naming, and may be a form of sexual harassment.”

UC Diego even teaches that disagreeing with transgender ideology creates a “hostile environment.”

Perry said — correctly — that “any sort of dissenting speech,” in this case “biologically accurate pronouns or expressions of disagreement with gender ideology,” aren’t harassment but First Amendment-protected speech.

But the editorial board at the UCLA student paper Daily Bruin — students who eventually may end up working at The New York Times, CNN and the like — last weekend offered up an oh-so-typical We believe in the First Amendment BUT in opposition to the Defending Education lawsuit:

The First Amendment is a crucial part of University campuses. The Editorial Board holds that UC campuses must remain centers of productive and authentic discussion and collaboration. The Defending Education lawsuit fails to consider that tolerating non-gender-affirming language would be corrosive to that ideal.

The editors, led by Editor-in-Chief Alexandra Crosnoe (pictured), cite a 2022 UCLA nationwide study which showed a third of transgender individuals “reported unfair treatment” by university personnel, as well as “a federal administration that targets their rights.”

They don’t specifically say what transgender “rights” the Trump administration is “targeting” other than noting the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (emphasis added) “abruptly closed its gender-affirming healthcare program last year in response to federal pressure.”

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