Michigan Could Put You in Prison for ‘Misgendering’

In Canada “misgendering” an individual is considered a hate crime ever since the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code were amended in 2017 to include “gender identity” and “gender expression” as protected classes. In 2019, a father in British Columbia was found guilty of “family violence” for not referring to his daughter by her preferred pronouns.

We can’t write this off as Canadian craziness anymore. A recently passed bill in Michigan, HB 4474, seeks to make it a felony to “intimidate” someone by using the “wrong pronouns,” also known as “misgendering.”

According to the bill, “‘Intimidate’ means a willful course of conduct involving repeated or continuing harassment of another individual that would cause a reasonable individual to feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened, and that actually causes the victim to feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened.”

The bill does not define harassment but defines gender identity or expression as “having or being perceived as having a gender-related self-identity or expression whether or not associated with an individual’s assigned sex at birth.”

In other words, the state literally wants to force citizens to “affirm” the gender identity of transgender people. If the bill becomes law and you don’t affirm the gender identity of transgender or non-binary people, you risk a fine of $10,000 or as much as five years in prison.

Those accused of misgendering people could potentially get their sentence reduced if they submit to woke re-education. The bill states that a sentence can be reduced by no more than 20% if the defendant agrees to community service “intended to enhance the offender’s understanding of the impact of the offense upon the victim and wider community.”

In a vote of 59-50, the bill was successfully passed by the Democrat-controlled state House and now moves to the Democrat-controlled State Senate, where it will likely pass, and inevitably Gov. Gretchen Whitmer will sign it.

So Michigan could throw you in prison if you refuse to use someone’s “preferred pronouns.” If you’re like me, you couldn’t care less what someone’s preferred pronouns are, so if you encounter a person who is a biological male, you’ll refer to him as such. If she’s a biological female, you’ll do the same.

While I’m sure that, if the law passes, it will immediately face challenges in the courts, the idea that such a bill could pass in a state house is disconcerting. Whenever it has the power to do so, the radical left seeks to not only ban certain forms of speech but also to compel speech. Frankly, this isn’t anything new.

The Supreme Court just decided on Friday that Colorado’s anti-discrimination law effectively compelled speech by forcing a graphic designer to create wedding websites for same-sex marriages against her religious beliefs. Make no mistake about it: the radical left will keep trying things like this, and if we don’t fight like hell to preserve a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, free speech will be a relic of the past.