Four students. Ten campuses. One question the University of California would rather nobody ask out loud: can a state school punish you for saying men and women are, in fact, men and women?
On June 18, Defending Education filed a federal lawsuit against the UC Regents, President James Milliken, a slate of UC Office of the President and campus officials at UCLA, UC Irvine, and UC San Diego, and, in their capacity as ex officio Regents, Governor Gavin Newsom, Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis, Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond. The claim is straightforward. UC’s Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment Policy, revised this past December and effective since January 1, does not just address genuine harassment. It punishes students for believing, and saying, that biological sex is real and unchangeable.
What the Policy Actually Says
Buried in UC’s Hostile-Environment Provision is language broad enough to swallow ordinary disagreement whole. “Sex-based conduct” includes “acts of verbal, nonverbal, or physical aggression, intimidation, or hostility based on gender, gender identity, gender expression, sex- or gender-stereotyping, or sexual orientation.” There is no requirement that the conduct be “sufficiently severe, persistent or pervasive that it ‘limits’ or ‘interferes with a person’s’ educational experience,” the standard the Supreme Court actually set in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education. Just “unwelcome,” “persistent,” and in the eye of whoever feels offended.
Then there’s FAQ #14, which spells out exactly what UC considers harassment: using someone’s given name instead of a chosen one, or referring to someone by the pronouns that match their biological sex instead of their gender identity. UC calls this “deadnaming” and “misgendering.” The lawsuit calls it what it is: a demand that students speak a script written by campus administrators, or stay silent.
There is no time limit on reporting a violation. A student could report a classmate a year later for something said in a study group. Faculty and staff are required to report suspected violations even if they never witnessed them. And the mandatory training every UC student must complete to register for classes tells students flatly that a student who continues calling a transgender classmate by her birth name and biologically accurate pronouns has created a “hostile environment.” No option on the quiz to say otherwise.
Four Students Who Stopped Talking
The complaint centers on four students, identified only as A, B, C, and D, at UCLA, UC San Diego, and UC Irvine. Their stories are almost identical, and that is the point. Each believes people are created male or female, that this cannot change, and that affirming otherwise would mean lying about something they hold to be true both scientifically and as a matter of faith. None claims any ill will toward classmates who identify as transgender or nonbinary.
And each has learned to keep quiet. One skips the “preferred pronouns” question in class icebreakers and hopes nobody notices. Another looks classmates in the eye and says only “you” to avoid a pronoun that would violate his conscience. A third describes leaving a public restroom rather than saying out loud what she believes about who belongs there. A fourth was cornered at a social gathering and made to apologize for a stray “her” before her classmates would let the conversation continue.
These students also complain that they have to keep quiet expressing their objection to allowing males who identify as female to compete in women’s sports, an issue just ruled on by the US Supreme Court.
This is what a speech code does when it works as designed. It does not need to punish many people. It only needs enough of them to know the cost of speaking, so that the rest learn to stay silent on their own.
“These students deserve real credit,” said Greg Burt, Vice President of California Family Council. “UC has left them with only two options: repeat a lie about who they are, or say nothing at all. Choosing silence over dishonesty isn’t the same as standing up and speaking the truth, but no student should be forced into that choice in the first place. We are teaching an entire generation that the safest way to get a degree is to keep the truth to yourself. That is not education. That is training in cowardice, and it should alarm every parent in this state.”
The Constitution Does Not Bend to Campus Orthodoxy
The lawsuit leans on a principle the Supreme Court laid down over eighty years ago, in the middle of a world war, when the Court told states they could not force schoolchildren to salute a flag against their conscience. As the Court put it then, no official can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, religion, or matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess that orthodoxy by word or act.
That principle has not expired. The Court has since made clear that speech on public university campuses gets no less protection than speech anywhere else in American life, and that the whole point of protecting speech is to shield the ideas that someone, somewhere, finds hurtful. Compelling a student to affirm a claim about gender identity she does not believe is compelled speech, plain and simple, and the First Amendment has never tolerated the government putting its thumb on that scale.
Courts already agree, and recently. The Ninth Circuit found a nearly identical “affirm gender identity” mandate imposed on prospective adoptive parents in Oregon likely unconstitutional and ordered it blocked while the case proceeds. The Sixth Circuit, with its full bench of judges hearing the case together, blocked a K-12 district’s preferred-pronoun policy just last year. Both courts said the same thing UC needs to hear now: the government does not get to pick a side in the debate over sex and gender identity, and it certainly does not get to force one side to change how it speaks while it protects the other.
Why This Matters Beyond California
This is not really a fight about pronouns. It is a fight over whether the state can compel its citizens, through its universities, to affirm a belief about human nature that Scripture and biology both reject: that sex is a matter of feeling rather than fact. God made mankind male and female. That truth does not become “hostile” or “aggressive” the moment a university decides it is unwelcome.
Parents send their children to UC campuses to be educated, not indoctrinated into confessing a creed they were never asked to believe. A public university has no business turning a science lab, a dorm hallway, or a class discussion into a loyalty test on gender ideology. If the SVSH Policy and FAQ #14 stand, the lesson for every Christian student in the UC System is unmistakable: keep your convictions to yourself, or risk your degree.
Defending Education is asking the court to declare the Hostile-Environment Provision and FAQ #14 unconstitutional and to permanently block UC from enforcing them. California Family Council will be watching this case closely, because the outcome will not stay confined to ten UC campuses. Every public university in the country enforcing a “misgendering is harassment” policy is one ruling away from having to answer for it.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spent eight years in a Soviet labor camp for the crime of writing letters that questioned Stalin. When he was exiled from his homeland in 1974, the last words he left behind for the countrymen he could no longer speak to were about this exact choice, the one facing students at UCLA, UCSD, and UCI today. He did not ask ordinary Soviet citizens to march in the streets or risk prison. He asked for something smaller and, he believed, more decisive: refuse to say what you do not believe. Live not by lies, he told them. He understood that a regime built on compelled affirmation cannot survive the moment enough of its citizens simply decline to repeat its lies.
California is not the Soviet Union. But the mechanism UC has built runs on the same fuel: get enough people to affirm a falsehood, or at least stay quiet about it, and the falsehood starts to function as truth. Christians in this state now face a smaller version of the same test Solzhenitsyn described, not in a labor camp, but in a dorm room, a classroom icebreaker, or a campus quiz that offers no box to check for “this isn’t harassment, it’s just true.” The answer has not changed. Do not participate in the lie. Say only what you actually believe, even when silence would be easier and even when the truth costs you something.
