Let me start with the most important point: it is not a crime to misgender someone in Michigan. Debates over whether misgendering someone should be against the law are really beside the point. Recent reports have claimed that the Michigan legislature has passed new legislation that criminalizes using a person's wrong gender pronouns, making such misgendering a felony punishable by law. These reports have created quite a brouhaha. But here's the thing: They are not true.
Unreliable, extremist-right media outlets (deemed "low credibility" by the Media Bias/Fact Check website) are manufacturing a crisis where there is none, with the express intent to raise the ire of people who may not have a good, fact-based understanding of the nature of gender and gender identity. The proposed law is not in fact law yet, it is a bill that was passed by the Michigan House of Representatives, but the state Senate still needs to pass it. If it does, the bill would then need to go to the governor for approval.
What the Michigan legislature actually does propose is to add categories to an existing law against ethnic intimidation. It would add sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, physical or mental disability, age, and ethnicity to the already included categories of race, color, religion, gender, and national origin. Nothing else would change. Gender pronouns are not even mentioned in the bill.
As a philosopher who specializes in ethics and equity, I find the legislators' instinct here to be morally right and good. They should not be getting grief for trying to keep vulnerable people safe. The problem with the Michigan bill is not its content, but rather the way it is being distorted and used by extremist-right groups to fuel misunderstanding by falsely alleging that misgendering someone would be a felony.
This is part of a larger social and political moment in some U.S. states to restrict people's human rights. I repeat: The problem with the Michigan bill is not its content; the problem is what the backlash against the fabricated version of the bill, along with other widespread disinformation campaigns are doing to U.S. politics.
In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, June marvels at how quickly the U.S. morphed into the repressive totalitarian nation of Gilead by allowing, even if tacitly, the extremist far-Right to become mainstream. "We lived, as usual," she says, "by ignoring... Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it."
Societies undergoing democratic decline usually erode gradually. We begin to see things like the proliferation of disinformation; the facile dismissal of facts, evidence, and the free press; and the degradation of civil liberties, just as we are witnessing across the US.
Connected to this is an overall assault on truth. There should not be any debate about whether gender identity is binary. (It's not.) There is no "other side" of an issue if topics have been settled, with a right answer emerging through scientific and ethical inquiry—which is the case with gender identity.
But who gets to decide what's true? Won't it just depend on your political views?
That's the thing about truth: It is not partisan. We can rely on the evidence generated from scientific and ethical inquiry to help us distinguish between what's reasonable and true from what's not. What is important here is where the preponderance of the evidence lies, which ideas and perspectives are tenable and which are not, and whether the speech and ideas we are contesting are true or false.
Rebecca Solnit points out that political liberals and moderates simply cannot meet far-right extremists halfway, as if each political platform is equally worthy of consideration. There can be a right answer and people can still disagree about it.
The extremist far-right's lies about the Michigan bill—and more broadly about gender identity—quite literally place transgender people in harm's way, not to mention how they exact a toll on the overall health and wellbeing of trans persons. Good for Michigan legislators for trying to do something positive in the name of truth and human dignity.
Michele S. Moses is Professor of Educational Foundations, Policy and Practice, University of Colorado Boulder.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
