California's Supreme Court upholds LGBTQ+ protections for elders in long-term carehttps://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/11/californias-supreme-court-upholds-lgbtq-protections-for-elders-in-long-term-care/ 🔗Faefyx Collington (10 Nov 2025)
The California Supreme Court has upheld a law that protects LGBTQ+ long-term care residents from discrimination, abuse, and harassment. A lower court had claimed employees' First Amendment rights meant they could deliberately misgender residents, but that ruling has been reversed.
"All individuals deserve to live free from harmful, disrespectful rhetoric that attacks their sense of self, especially when receiving care necessary for their continued well-being," California's Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement after the decision. "State law prohibits discrimination and harassment in the workplace. I am glad that the California Supreme Court agrees with us on the importance of these protections and has affirmed their constitutionality."
The decision is based on the LGBT Long-Term Care Residents' Bill of Rights, originally authored by state Sen. Scott Wiener (D) and signed into law in 2017. The bill included various provisions for LGBTQ+ people, including making it so that trans residents had to be housed in rooms that aligned with their gender identity and what has become known as the "pronoun provision."
That provision, alongside other proscriptions against discrimination, aimed to prevent employees "willfully and repeatedly failing to use a resident's preferred name or pronouns after being clearly informed of the preferred name or pronouns."
In the California Supreme Court's decision to uphold the original pronoun provision, the court stated that it should "be analyzed, and upheld, as a regulation of discriminatory conduct that incidentally affects speech. It should not be subject to First Amendment scrutiny as an abridgment of the freedom of speech."
