The U.S. Government has mandated the use of preferred pronouns in all American workplaces.

The mandate has been put in place to clampdown on ‘discrimination’ against transgender people under the 1964 Civil Rights Act

Starting this week failure to respect a person’s non-binary pronouns will be the newest form of workplace discrimination under the act.

Unheard reports: The new pronoun mandate for workers, employers and even customers was issued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as part of the civil rights agency’s first move in a quarter-century to bring its workplace guidelines up to date with legal precedent and evolving social norms.

The 189-page document, which is technically legally non-binding but spells out the agency’s policies on investigating discrimination complaints, says that misgendering must be repeated and intentional, not a slip of the tongue, to rise to the level of workplace harassment. In its guidelines, the EEOC also decreed that it’s discriminatory for an employer to deny a transgender person access to a bathroom they feel best matches their gender identity, even if that invades the privacy of the other workers, or, in some cases, conflicts with another employee’s religious convictions.

The new standards were adopted on a 3-2 vote, along party lines, after the investigatory panel received some 37,000 public comments on the updates proposed last October.

With this dramatic decision, it’s no exaggeration to say that queer theory — the provocative academic idea that rejects the normativity of heterosexuality — is now firmly ensconced into U.S. law and American society, at least in the bluest and most urban areas with the most educated residents and top-paying jobs.

The EEOC’s decision is the consequence of decades of queer scholarship and legal manoeuvring to gain civil rights protection and social acceptance for behaviours once deemed as deviant but increasingly seen as liberated from archaic, repressive conventions. The agency said banning misgendering and bathroom restrictions for trans people “logically extends” from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock ruling that added sexual and gender identity as a protected category under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.