A new poll shows just how far support for free speech has fallen, especially among young people.
A plurality of millennials thinks “misgendering” — not using someone’s preferred pronouns — should be criminalized, according to a survey Newsweek published Saturday.
The Redfield & Wilton Strategies poll finds that 44% of those aged 25 to 34 think “referring to someone by the wrong gender pronoun (he/him, she/her) should be a criminal offense.”
Just 31% of this demographic disagree, while 25% were undecided.
This radical position is more popular than you’d think among those aged 35 to 44, too, with more of these respondents supporting the criminalization of “misgendering” than opposing it.
In a somewhat surprising twist, Gen Z respondents were significantly less likely than millennials to support pronoun censorship.
Among those aged 18 to 24, only 33% supported making “misgendering” a criminal offense; 48% disagreed.
All these groups of young people were much more likely than Americans overall to support the suggested censorship.
The poll found just 19% of the public overall agrees with making “misgendering” illegal.
This survey, and the many like it, suggests young Americans are turning their backs on freedom of speech in pursuit of “inclusivity” and “tolerance.”
But they clearly haven’t thought this out very well, or they wouldn’t be making this dark shift toward censorship.
For one, the courts would almost certainly strike down such a proposal as a violation of the First Amendment.
While misinformed progressives sometimes suggest otherwise, there is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment, and it clearly protects words others find offensive, even slurs.
There’s no reason to believe that, if litigated, pronouns would be treated any differently — so they really couldn’t do this even if they wanted to. (Unless, of course, progressives are successful in their attempts to pack or otherwise delegitimatize our judicial system and remove its ability to block their unconstitutional proposals.)
But constitutional hurdles aside, young Americans shouldn’t even want to start banning or criminalizing offensive speech.
Such a Pandora’s box might be first opened by progressive politicians seeking to protect transgender people’s feelings from being hurt if they are “misgendered,” yet it certainly wouldn’t stop there.
There are many words, phrases and arguments that woke young people use that conservatives or even moderates might find offensive.
Progressives use the term “cisgender” to describe non-transgender people, for example, but many people increasingly take issue with this label and don’t want it used to describe them.
Do they have the right to legally ban people from calling them “cis”? After all, it offends them and their sense of gender identity.
Such a ban, which would infuriate young progressives, is really just the other side of the coin some of them want to flip.
In the same vein, Gen Z slang like “OK, boomer” and “Karen” is sometimes interpreted by older Americans — who, in my view, aren’t taking a joke well and are being a bit snowflakey — as “offensive” or “ageist.”
But under the same logic young progressives would use to prohibit misgendering, much of their slang and vernacular could be criminalized as well.
Finally, if your goal is actually to get people to respect transgender Americans’ pronouns, coercion and force aren’t the way to do it.
The Newsweek survey also found that more Americans are willing to accommodate a transgender person’s preferred pronouns than would refuse to do so.
But Americans really don’t like being told what to do.
When preferred pronouns stop feeling like a request and start feeling like an order, through cultural pressure or government coercion, you can expect more people to dig their heels in and refuse to go along with them, when they otherwise might’ve simply done so to be polite.
So young Americans’ support for the criminalization of “misgendering” is flawed and counterproductive in just about every way imaginable.
Unfortunately, that makes it pretty typical for millennial and Gen Z political activism these days.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a Gen Z journalist, YouTuber and co-founder of BASEDPolitics.
