1 00:00:01,980 --> 00:00:06,760 If you want to control people’s thoughts, begin by controlling their words. 2 00:00:06,760 --> 00:00:09,060 That’s totalitarian thinking. 3 00:00:09,060 --> 00:00:11,760 It was once completely foreign to America. 4 00:00:11,760 --> 00:00:13,280 Not anymore. 5 00:00:13,280 --> 00:00:17,640 Increasingly, Americans are forced to use language against their will or even their 6 00:00:17,640 --> 00:00:20,980 conscience, or be prepared to suffer the consequences. 7 00:00:20,980 --> 00:00:23,540 And those consequences can be dire. 8 00:00:23,540 --> 00:00:29,260 Take for example, the issue of transgenderism, the newest “civil rights battle” of our time. 9 00:00:29,260 --> 00:00:33,880 A decade ago, few people could even tell you what the word transgender meant. 10 00:00:33,880 --> 00:00:38,400 Today, expressing the “wrong opinion” on the issue can cost you your business or 11 00:00:38,400 --> 00:00:40,360 job or both. 12 00:00:40,360 --> 00:00:45,740 Consider recent state and local actions punishing those who decline to use an individual’s 13 00:00:45,740 --> 00:00:47,260 pronouns of choice. 14 00:00:47,260 --> 00:00:54,200 In 2017, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation threatening jail time for health-care 15 00:00:54,200 --> 00:01:00,239 professionals who “willfully and repeatedly” refuse to use a patient’s preferred pronouns. 16 00:01:00,239 --> 00:01:06,509 Under guidelines issued in 2015 by New York City’s Commission on Human Rights, employers, 17 00:01:06,509 --> 00:01:12,009 landlords and business owners who intentionally use the wrong pronouns with transgender workers 18 00:01:12,009 --> 00:01:18,060 and tenants face potential fines of as much as $250,000. 19 00:01:18,060 --> 00:01:22,200 That’s a steep price for saying “he” instead of “she” or “she” instead 20 00:01:22,200 --> 00:01:26,400 of “he” or even “he” or “she” instead of “they.” 21 00:01:26,400 --> 00:01:31,439 What about the vast majority of citizens who hold the biology-based view that chromosomes 22 00:01:31,440 --> 00:01:34,180 determine your sex – male or female? 23 00:01:34,180 --> 00:01:38,640 Or those who have a deep-seated religious conviction that sex is both biological and 24 00:01:38,640 --> 00:01:41,660 binary, God’s purposeful creation. 25 00:01:41,660 --> 00:01:47,380 In December 2018, Peter Vlaming, was fired from his job as a French language teacher 26 00:01:47,380 --> 00:01:52,740 in a Virginia school district because he refused to refer to a transgender student by the student’s 27 00:01:52,740 --> 00:01:54,500 preferred pronouns. 28 00:01:54,500 --> 00:01:58,640 Vlaming’s Christian belief prevented him from bowing before the notion that the student 29 00:01:58,640 --> 00:02:03,119 who had been a ‘she’ in his class the year before was now suddenly a ‘he.’ 30 00:02:03,119 --> 00:02:07,130 Vlaming was willing to use the student’s chosen new name, but he avoided using any 31 00:02:07,130 --> 00:02:09,850 pronouns when referring to this student. 32 00:02:09,850 --> 00:02:14,989 That wasn’t good enough for the school district; they needed to hear him say the words. 33 00:02:14,989 --> 00:02:19,189 You don’t have to be religious to believe that one person can never be a “they.” 34 00:02:19,189 --> 00:02:24,959 The Supreme Court has clearly decided that compelled speech is not Free Speech. 35 00:02:24,959 --> 00:02:29,909 In West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), the Supreme Court upheld 36 00:02:29,909 --> 00:02:33,519 the students’ right to refuse to salute an American flag. 37 00:02:33,520 --> 00:02:40,280 Justice Robert Jackson wrote: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, 38 00:02:40,280 --> 00:02:46,080 it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, 39 00:02:46,080 --> 00:02:51,900 religion or other matters of opinion” And, Jackson went on to say, the state can’t 40 00:02:51,900 --> 00:02:55,540 force people to say things they don’t believe. 41 00:02:55,540 --> 00:02:58,220 But this is precisely what’s happening. 42 00:02:58,220 --> 00:03:03,700 People are forced to refer to others as “ze,” “co,” or “thon” – yes those are 43 00:03:03,700 --> 00:03:05,740 now considered pronouns. 44 00:03:05,740 --> 00:03:10,700 What might otherwise be a courtesy now has criminal consequences. 45 00:03:10,700 --> 00:03:15,420 In most contexts, I would have no problem addressing others in any manner they chose, 46 00:03:15,420 --> 00:03:18,140 and I’m sure most Americans feel the same. 47 00:03:18,140 --> 00:03:23,940 But the Constitution’s protection of free speech neither begins nor ends with good manners. 48 00:03:23,940 --> 00:03:29,680 It extends all the way from rudeness to meekness, protecting those who hurl insults and those 49 00:03:29,680 --> 00:03:32,970 who would prefer to say nothing at all. 50 00:03:32,970 --> 00:03:38,780 If the state can compel the use of certain words, it can force those who differ into silence. 51 00:03:38,780 --> 00:03:42,950 It can force its citizens to parrot beliefs they do not hold. 52 00:03:42,950 --> 00:03:47,359 The Fairfax County School District in Virginia removed the phrase “biological gender” 53 00:03:47,360 --> 00:03:52,560 from its curriculum and replaced it with the phrase “sex assigned at birth.” 54 00:03:52,560 --> 00:03:58,300 This is how the left legislates away the concept of biological sex without ever having to make 55 00:03:58,300 --> 00:03:59,620 the argument. 56 00:03:59,620 --> 00:04:02,420 Without ever having to convince anyone. 57 00:04:02,420 --> 00:04:06,940 They’re trying to make ‘sex assigned at birth’ as trivial and malleable as ‘name 58 00:04:06,959 --> 00:04:12,980 assigned at birth’—as if some doctor arbitrarily chose for you on the day you were born. 59 00:04:12,980 --> 00:04:17,310 To the extent that the transgender movement seeks to promote compassion for those who 60 00:04:17,310 --> 00:04:21,709 struggle with their biological sex, we should be grateful for it. 61 00:04:21,709 --> 00:04:26,729 To the extent that it seeks to use government power to regulate our perspectives — commanding 62 00:04:26,729 --> 00:04:31,500 that we ignore biology and common sense — we should resist it. 63 00:04:31,500 --> 00:04:33,280 This is no small issue. 64 00:04:33,280 --> 00:04:37,910 The Constitution guarantees Freedom of Speech so that political issues can be worked out 65 00:04:37,910 --> 00:04:39,860 in the public square. 66 00:04:39,860 --> 00:04:43,400 But the activist left doesn’t want that conversation to occur. 67 00:04:43,400 --> 00:04:48,760 They want to force the adoption of their conclusions before the argument even begins. 68 00:04:48,780 --> 00:04:52,080 Compelled speech is the tactic they’ve chosen. 69 00:04:52,080 --> 00:04:53,880 It’s unconstitutional. 70 00:04:53,880 --> 00:04:55,380 It’s undemocratic. 71 00:04:55,380 --> 00:04:57,389 And it’s wrong. 72 00:04:57,389 --> 00:05:02,780 If gender activists prevail, we may be left with a world we neither recognize nor like 73 00:05:02,780 --> 00:05:04,490 very much. 74 00:05:04,490 --> 00:05:07,340 We won’t be able to communicate our displeasure. 75 00:05:07,340 --> 00:05:09,240 We will have lost the words. 76 00:05:09,240 --> 00:05:12,620 I’m Abigail Shrier for Prager University.