A federal judge in Los Angeles has issued a preliminary injunction limiting the University of California’s (UC) ability to enforce its anti-harassment rules against students who use names and pronouns that reflect biological sex when referring to classmates who identify as transgender. In a court order from Sept. 15, U.S. District Judge Fred W.
Slaughter, a Biden appointee, granted in part a motion by the nonprofit advocacy group Defending Education (DE), which sued on behalf of four anonymous students at UCLA, UC Irvine and UC San Diego. The students wish to use names and pronouns consistent with a person's sex “repeatedly and at all times,” both in and out of class, to express their belief that sex is binary and that gender identity is not a separate category.
The challenged language appears in an FAQ accompanying UC’s Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment Policy.
The FAQ stated that prohibited conduct “includes intentional or repeated use of a name or pronoun inconsistent with the individual’s gender identity (i.e., misgendering).” One example in the UC document described a person who identifies as a man who is repeatedly called by a “dead name” or mockingly referred to as “Miss” or “Ms.” UC later revised the FAQ and removed a similar scenario from required training.
But the court evaluated the original version and found that the policy still covered the students’ planned speech. “The court finds that DE’s interpretation of the policy is the correct one because it tracks UC’s own materials about the policy,” the judge wrote. Relying on two recent appellate decisions — Bates v. Pakseresht from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Defending Education v. Olentangy, decided by the full 6th U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals — he held that the rules “compel speech and [are] viewpoint-based.”