21 September 2026 - 1:00pm
A federal judge has temporarily blocked the University of California (UC) from punishing campus members of a conservative nonprofit for using sex-based pronouns or birth names rather than those corresponding to a transgender person’s gender identity. The ruling is narrow, but it could prove enormously consequential.
Judge Fred W. Slaughter concluded that the plaintiffs are likely to prevail on their claim that UC’s policy violates the First Amendment by compelling speech and discriminating on the basis of viewpoint. His injunction protects Defending Education members who use sex-based pronouns in a “commonplace way”. It explicitly leaves UC free to punish genuine abuse and harassment of transgender students.
Slaughter, a Joe Biden appointee, is not operating in a vacuum. Last year, the Ninth Circuit ruled in Bates v. Pakseresht that Oregon violated the First Amendment when it required a prospective adoptive parent to “respect, accept, and support” a child’s gender identity in ways that included prescribed language. The court found that the rule both compelled affirmative speech and restricted contrary speech.
The reasoning behind the UC ruling could spread. Slaughter’s decision itself binds neither every UC student nor other universities. But the Ninth Circuit precedent on which he relies binds federal courts throughout that circuit. If courts increasingly distinguish between harassment and the mere refusal to affirm another person’s gender identity, public colleges will have to take notice.
This should not be difficult. People should be free to identify and present themselves as they wish, and deliberately humiliating someone is cruel. But cruelty and disagreement are not synonymous, and the government cannot eliminate the latter simply by relabelling it as harassment.
Transgender issues have become so politically charged that partisans often behave as though ceding an inch means surrendering the entire argument. One way to lower the temperature would be for progressives to acknowledge just how broad and varied the category “transgender” actually is. Even the trans writer Julia Serano describes “transgender” as an umbrella term encompassing people with widely differing identities and presentations. Yet policies such as UC’s can pressure people to speak as though subjective identity must override their own perception of sex. The problem becomes even more obvious when the identity others are being compelled to affirm is itself subjective and lacking any single agreed-upon definition.
A government institution punishing people for naming what they perceive to be reality is clearly authoritarian. It is one thing to ask someone to call a male person “she”. It is another for a public university to put disciplinary authority behind that request.
Of course, some people intentionally “misgender” transgender people simply to be mean. Yet coercion is a terrible strategy for producing tolerance. Institutional overreach can create precisely the resentment advocates presumably hope to reduce.
That tension between preventing harassment and compelling affirmation is likely where the next fight over university policies will lie. UC argued in court that its harassment policy would not punish commonplace or isolated use of sex-based pronouns without “something more”, while the university says its policy is meant to address discrimination and harassment, not protected speech. Universities may increasingly frame such restrictions not as explicit commands to use particular words, but instead as applications of broader hostile-environment rules.
Courts will then have to police the boundary. A university can protect transgender students from abuse without appointing itself the arbiter of what every individual must believe — and say — about sex.
