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Comment by rmilejczz | Hacker News Reader

Honest question, has anyone ever been fired, imprisoned, or killed for saying that?

My brother in law was fired from a law firm for stating (at a casual drinks night) that he believed that, legally speaking, people should not be allowed to change their gender on their birth certificate.

He had worked there for six years as a para-legal, soon to be lawyer. I don't think his cause was helped that the director of said firm had a transgender sister (or brother). He was unaware of this.

EDIT: Typo.

I think there is a law in Canada against mis-gendering people. Lot of popular tech companies have explicit CoC guideline against mis-gendering. StackOverflow recently fired a moderator for proposing to use gender neutral pro-nouns instead of individual preferred pronouns, even when there is no official CoC defined as such.

The Canadian Human Rights Act states:

> Every person who is an employee has a right to freedom from harassment in the workplace because of sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression by his or her employer or agent of the employer or by another employee.

(there is also a similar paragraph for landlords)

> “harassment” means engaging in a course of vexatious comment or conduct that is known or ought reasonably to be known to be unwelcome

https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/teacher-fired-refusi...

I don't know what really happened but assuming he just refused then I assume that will in the future more been like a teacher who refused to stop calling his black students negroes than an example of PC hysteria.

But who knows

This is not an example of someone being fired for saying or believing that there are two genders. This was someone deliberately misgendering and ungendering a trans boy (not non-binary) in class after having been ordered to stop.

The teacher felt strongly that the student's gender was biological and not something the student could arbitrarily choose to change. The teacher felt that using a pronoun other than a biologically consistent one was "lying", and it was against the teacher's religion to lie, so the teacher would not use the student's chosen pronoun. Did I miss something?

What in the world is a biologically consistent pronoun?

A pronoun operates in a purely social context.

Your response to my comment was flagged, but you seem to be laboring under some misconceptions here. While biology is what it is, the mapping from biology and other factors to social categories is determined purely socially. Categories and labels are not true or false, they are socio-political processes that can uplift or oppress minorities just like other such processes.

I would recommend reading "THE CATEGORIES WERE MADE FOR MAN, NOT MAN FOR THE CATEGORIES": https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...

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