By Bella McManus

The “Compelled speech is not free speech” bill passed in the Wyoming legislature on Feb. 27 and will take effect July 1. The bill prohibits the state of Wyoming from requiring the use of preferred pronouns. 

Andrea Covert, the regional director of GEAR UP at Casper College, said she isn’t expecting a huge impact from the bill on campus.  

“Casper College faculty operate with integrity. We’re people-minded, and we honor diversity,” Covert explained, indicating the mission, vision and values for the campus. 

She said she believes it will be a rare occurrence to meet someone unwilling to honor a person’s preferred pronouns. 

“I think this bill represents a minority feeling in the state,” Covert said. “I don’t think it honors Wyoming values, and I don’t think it’s necessary.” 

She went on to say that since we’ve never been able to enforce what people can and cannot say, this bill is fear-mongering and a bullying tactic that people will use as an excuse not to honor pronouns.  

Art Washut, a criminal justice instructor at Casper College and a Wyoming house representative, explained that the bill is more of a “prevention, preemption type of law rather than a response law to something that’s already occurring in Wyoming.” 

He said he doesn’t anticipate a lot of pushback against the bill once people understand why it was passed.

Covert said, “I think here on campus, people are operating with more respect and treating people with higher levels of dignity than that, and so I really think that this is not going to have a huge impact.” 

The main pushback against the bill, she believes, is that people are going to wonder if this bill is really a priority issue for Wyoming. 

Ava Ostrander, a current CC student and member of Campus Ventures, agreed that the effects of the bill deals with the respect that people are willing to extend to others. She says that it really comes down to how willing you are to treat others’ opinions respectfully without letting their beliefs impact your own. 

The people who disagree with transgender values, Covert thinks, are the ones who felt it necessary to create a bill that is essentially allowing them to “lead with hate and not treat people in a respectful, proper manner.”

People feel forced into using preferred pronouns, Covert said, because they “fear what’s different and what they maybe don’t understand,” said Covert. “I don’t think folks fully understand misgendering — how deeply it cuts and how much it hurts people — and so I really think it just comes from a lack of understanding and awareness.”  

Ostrander said, “I know a lot of people who would say, ‘well, I just don’t understand… therefore my actions are going to be disrespectful because I’m not going to tolerate this. I’m not going to stand for what I don’t agree with,’”

She believes that there’s a way to disagree with someone and still respect them and treat them with love. 

Covert said she sees it as unfortunate that businesses will no longer have the backing of the law to make sure people are treating each other with respect and using the proper pronouns. 

Washut said that the bill only prevents employees from getting fired or disciplined for not adhering to someone’s preferred pronouns, but there are no laws prohibiting the use of preferred pronouns, or prohibiting people from requesting that certain pronouns be used. He said it can sometimes be easy to accidentally refer to someone using pronouns they would rather not be called, and he raised the question, do we really want to fire someone for that?

He said there may be instances where an employee may use the bill as an excuse to treat a coworker poorly by repeatedly misgendering them and creating tension in the workplace. If that were the case, he said, at some point the federal government may get involved and decide what is the best way to deal with those situations. 

At that point is it really about the pronouns, Washut asks, or is it “about just being a jerk” and creating a hostile work environment? While the law says you don’t have to use preferred pronouns, a company’s policy may say you still have to be respectful in the workplace.