Members and supporters of the LGBTQ community attend the "Say Gay Anyway" rally in Miami Beach, Florida on March 13, 2022.
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The Florida Senate revived legislation that would restrict the use of preferred pronouns for public employees.
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A committee on Tuesday took up a “don’t say gay or trans at work” bill that would require public employees to be identified in form as either male or female, and which would bar employers from directing workers to use pronouns besides he or she.
That action took place just a week after Equality Florida activists showed up en masse at the Florida Capitol and celebrated the seeming death of the legislation.
But the Florida Senate’s Government Oversight took up the measure again at the discretion of Florida state Sen. Randy Fine, an anti-LGBTQ Republican currently running for Congress.
The bill left many members of the public distraught at the potential opening of the workplace to discrimination.
“I don't understand the purpose of this. This bill is hurting my family,” said Robert Lee, a Florida man who drove to Tallahassee to oppose the bill on behalf of his gender-nonconforming children. “It's hurting my children, who are nonbinary. I really wish that we as a state could focus more on our insurance costs instead of just pointless little bills like this.”
Anti-LGBTQ organizations said the bill will prevent state employers from firing employees who are morally opposed to using “they/them” pronouns.
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“This bill will protect the conscience rights of employees who work for the state or state of local governments by ending pronoun mandates,” said Joh Labriola, a lobbyist for the Christian Family Coalition. “It ends coercive pronoun mandates. It doesn't take anyone's rights away.”
But Florida state Sen. Kristen Arrington, a Democrat on the committee who voted against the bill, said that’s not true. She noted the bill as written would require every employee on government documents to now be identified as either male or female.
“The bill really does promote government employees and contractors to harass transgender individuals by allowing them to intentionally misgender them by using disrespectful pronouns and having no consequences,” Arrington said. “And this is a license to discriminate free from accountability. It seems that it's attempt to create a hostile work environment for LGBTQ people, particularly transgender Floridians.”
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Florida Sen. Stan McClain, the bill’s Republican sponsor, said the legislation simply aimed to protect the rights of employees to decline to use pronouns they disagree with.
“There's just no we're not going to allow state employees to be coerced by their employers or subcontractors going forward,” McClain said.
He said the bill uses the same language as other statutes passed in prior years, a seeming reference to Florida’s don’t say gay law, which prohibits teachers from using preferred pronouns in the classroom.
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