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The Florida Senate has advanced a bill that would give free license for employers to misgender transgender and nonbinary employees.
Senate Bill 440, or SB 440, prohibits public employers from requiring employees to use trans people’s preferred pronouns, and would also prohibit employers from being required to use trans workers’ preferred pronouns. The bill would also remove “nonbinary” as an option from job applications and other employment forms, and would make it illegal to require LGBTQ+ cultural competence training.
Lastly, the bill strengthens protections for homophobes and transphobes, specifying that it is unlawful for employers to take action against employees for “a belief in traditional or Biblical views of sexuality and marriage, or the employee’s or contractor’s disagreement with gender ideology.”
The Senate appeared to table SB 440 two weeks ago, after extensive pushback from the public, per The Advocate. Activists have dubbed the legislation the “Don’t Say Gay or Trans At Work” bill, named after Florida’s infamous 2022 “Don’t Say Gay” bill that banned instruction on LGBTQ+ topics in grades K-12 in public schools. According to the blog Florida Politics, over 1,000 public comment cards regarding the legislation were submitted, which led the Committee to decline to hear the bill. But Senators in the Governmental Oversight and Accountability Committee voted 5-2 in favor of SB 440 last Tuesday, per Florida Politics.
Florida state Senator Kristen Arrington, a Democrat who voted against the bill, told The Advocate that the bill “really does promote government employees and contractors to harass transgender individuals by allowing them to intentionally misgender them by using disrespectful pronouns and having no consequences.” She added that it gave people “a license to discriminate free from accountability.”
“It seems that it’s [an] attempt to create a hostile work environment for LGBTQ people, particularly transgender Floridians,” Arrington told the publication.
According to the Advocate, the Senate took up the bill again because of Florida Senator Randy Fine, who is currently running for Congress as a candidate hand-picked by President Donald Trump. Per the South Florida Sun Sentinel, Fine is looking to replace former U.S. House District 6 representative Michael Waltz, who is now Trump’s head of national security. Though Fine did not introduce SB 440, he has introduced bills that aimed to ban rainbow flags from government buildings and ban children from drag shows.
The bill now moves to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
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