The California Supreme Court has upheld a law that protects LGBTQ+ long-term care residents from discrimination, abuse, and harassment. A lower court had claimed employees First Amendment rights meant they could deliberately misgender residents, but that ruling has been reversed.All individuals deserve to live free from harmful, disrespectful rhetoric that attacks their sense of self, especially when receiving care necessary for their continued well-being, Californias Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement after the decision. State law prohibits discrimination and harassment in the workplace. I am glad that the California Supreme Court agrees with us on the importance of these protections and has affirmed their constitutionality. Related Federal appeals court revives Texas drag ban and lifts injunction The decision is based on the LGBT Long-Term Care Residents Bill of Rights, originally authored by state Sen. Scott Wiener (D) and signed into law in 2017. The bill included various provisions for LGBTQ+ people, including making it so that trans residents had to be housed in rooms that aligned with their gender identity and what has become known as the pronoun provision.That provision, alongside other proscriptions against discrimination, aimed to prevent employees willfully and repeatedly failing to use a residents preferred name or pronouns after being clearly informed of the preferred name or pronouns. Never Miss a Beat Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights. Subscribe to our Newsletter today Both of those aspects of the 2017 bill were challenged before they could go into effect, with a group called Taking Offense filing a lawsuit with a superior court to block those provisions. Court documents note that Taking Offense defines itself, in its own words, as a group with a singular anti-trans motivation: to oppose efforts to coerce society to accept [the] transgender fiction that a person can be whatever sex/gender s/he thinks s/he is, or chooses to be.In that original case, the Superior Court rejected Taking Offenses arguments. However, the case went to theCourt of Appeal,where five of the justices agreed, with concurrence from the other two, that the Pronoun Provision impinged on employees free speech protections. However, the Court of Appeals upheld the law regarding transgender residents getting rooms aligned with their gender identity, noting that Taking Offense failed to establish a violation of equal protection rights. In the California Supreme Courts decision to uphold the original pronoun provision, the court stated that it should be analyzed, and upheld, as a regulation of discriminatory conduct that incidentally affects speech. It should not be subject to First Amendment scrutiny as an abridgment of the freedom of speech.The California Supreme Court had signaled during hearings back in May that the decision would likely go this way. After hearing the arguments from both the state and Taking Offense, Justice Goodwin Liu said, To say this is censorship of speech is a bit of a stretch for me. Similarly, Justice Kelli Evans pointed to various courts history of upholding workplace harassment bans on racist slurs, saying, Im having a hard time seeing how this is different. Even the courts most conservative justice noted that there was no argument for compelled speech, as, under the law, employees could simply avoid using pronouns altogether and werent required to use the persons correct pronouns; they were simply prohibited from using the wrong ones.Subscribe to theLGBTQ Nation newsletterand be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.