The California Supreme Court appeared likely Tuesday to uphold a state law that makes it a crime for nursing home workers to deliberately and repeatedly refer to a transgender resident with a name or pronoun that differs from the one they prefer.
The 2017 law by Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, was declared unconstitutional in 2021 by a state appeals court, which ruled that it violated freedom of speech. But in a one-hour hearing Tuesday, the high court’s seven justices all seemed to agree, for differing reasons, that the law could be enforced.
The law regulates the conduct of employees in order to protect “access of residents of these care facilities,” said Justice Goodwin Liu. “To say this is censorship of speech is a bit of a stretch for me.”
The regulation of speech .. in California.
