Calling Him a “Her” or Calling Her a “Him” in NYC Could Mean $250,000 in Fines

Photo: Spiked Review

In NYC if you call her a “he” or “Mr.” you could be fined a staggering $250,000 thanks to the newly updated law on “Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Expression.”

To see draconian political correctness in all its beauty, look to New York City who, thanks to Mayor Bill De Blasio, can now penalize property owners who “misgender” employees or tenants.

Read the new law here.

Incidents that are found to be “willful and malicious” have property owners facing up to $250,000 in fines, while standard violations of this law will result in lower $125,000 fines. For small business owners, a mistake in identifying someone who looks like a man but insists on being called a woman, and insists on using the woman’s bathroom whenever they wish, while wearing high heels and a wig and clown makeup at work if they desire, can lead to fines costly enough for bankruptcy. Getting their gender wrong could  now be a financially crippling mistake of gender mis-identification.

Photo: Kevin Winter / Getty Images

But it’s not as simple as referring to transmen as “he” or transwomen as “she,” either. This legislation dictates that if someone prefers, property owners have to use “zhe,” or “hir” and any other preferred pronoun they wish.

The law forces employers and all covered entities to use an individual’s preferred name, pronoun and title (such as Ms./Mrs.) regardless of the individual’s sex when they were born, their anatomy, their gender, their medical history, their appearance, or their sex indicated on their personal or professional identification.

 A few situations where property owners open themselves up to fines of a quarter million dollars, if they:

• Refuse to allow someone to use single-sex facilities such as bathrooms consistent with their gender identity (not their anatomical sex)
• Failing to provide employee health benefits for “gender-affirming care”
• Imposing different uniforms or grooming standards based on sex or gender (such as requiring female bartenders to wear makeup, or permitting females but not male residents at a drug treatment facility to wear wigs and high heels).

As Spiked Online editor-in-chief, Brendan O’Neill calls our Crisis of Character in the west, NYC is doing its best to ensure identities are now grounded only in subjective interpretation – if you feel it then now you are legally “it.”

You may “feel” like a woman so we must treat you as a woman even though you may look and have the anatomy of a man. Or, you may “identify” with being a man on Monday’s, Wednesday’s and Friday’s so we must refer to you as “he” or “him” or “zhe” or “hir” on these days and we also must allow you to use our men’s bathroom and dress and act like a man on these days if that is what you desire. That is now law in NYC.

New York state is now forcing society to recognize the subjective identities of individuals, regardless of how absurd or surreal they may seem or based on any physical reality. In NYC, identity is no longer a matter of common sense and courtesy, it can now change at any time simply because someone feels it.