(OPINION) The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has rolled out a new gender pronoun policy that one Heritage Foundation expert and former HHS official says violates employee rights and will result in firings for “misgendering.”
“HHS and the federal government is requiring its employees to speak falsehoods,” Roger Severino, the Heritage Foundation’s vice president for domestic policy and the former head of civil rights at HHS during the Trump administration, told Fox News Digital.
Severino first broke the story on X, formerly Twitter, last week. He wrote that HHS “imposed a transgender pronoun mandate on its employees who will now be forced to deny biological realities with their own words or face firing” and he included a screenshot of an email sent to employees at the department.
Severino told Fox News Digital that the First Amendment protects federal employees from being required to speak falsehoods, being compelled to adopt a state-approved ideology, and requiring people to deny their own faith.
“These policies would require all of those things,” said Severino, a Harvard Law School graduate. “All employees should be addressed [by] the names and pronouns they use to describe themselves,” the email to HHS employees stated as part of its push for “Gender Identity and Non-Discrimination Guidance” that it says protects “employee rights and protections related to gender identity.”
Severino says the push began with two White House executive orders, one in January 2021 and one in June 2022, that were framed as ways to combat “gender discrimination” on the base of “gender identity.”
“All applicants and employees should be addressed by the names and pronouns they use to describe themselves. Using correct names and pronouns helps foster workplaces free of discrimination and harassment,” the U.S. Office of Personnel Management guidance states.
“This practice also creates an inclusive work environment where all applicants and employees are treated with dignity. The isolated and inadvertent use of an incorrect name or pronoun will generally not constitute unlawful harassment, but, as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has explained, continued intentional use of an incorrect name or pronoun (or both) could, in certain circumstances, contribute to an unlawful hostile work environment.”
