Roy’s Wacky WOKE world

We are all familiar with the online human resource training courses required by employers –  workplace rights and responsibilities, workplace harassment prevention, etc. However, North Carolina’s Office of State Human Resources Center is force-feeding progressive ideology on its employees. 

An employee that spoke with Libs of TikTok on the condition of anonymity told us, “We have to do these little training sessions every month online. A lot of them are just kind of like don’t be a bad person you, know kind of avoid certain things, and then the majority of them are simply you are racist or bigoted. It is a constant implication that, no matter what you do, you have these biases somewhere deep down inside of you that you have to root out.”  

The same state employee sent us images of the required courses and at least 15 were directly related to realizing your unconscious bias, aka if you’re white, you’re bad.

The notion of unconscious bias is notoriously based in junk science and originates from Harvard’s “Implicit Association Test”.  However, a study from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Harvard, and the University of Virginia examined 499 studies over 20 years involving 80,859 participants that used the IAT and found the correlation between implicit bias and discriminatory behavior appears weaker than previously thought and that there is very little evidence to suggest that changes in implicit bias have anything to do with changes in a person’s behavior.

So why would North Carolina, or any other state for that matter, be using taxpayer dollars to convince their employees they are unconsciously biased? 

Scarier yet, NC state policy (Section 1, Page 21 8/17/2000) mandates Unlawful Workplace Harassment training provided by the Office of State Human Resources Center which includes language suggesting it is unlawful to use misgendered pronouns. 

One prompt reads:

“A transgender person might mention to her supervisor that she is taking hormones and intends to transition. The supervisor responds that the behavior is “unnatural” and refuses the gender pronoun requested by the employee.  “Is this potentially unlawful workplace harassment?”

If you answer, ‘No” you are met with a “incorrect” notification.

“The correct answer is “Yes.” Harassing an employee because of a gender transition, such as by incorrectly and persistently failing to use the name and gender pronouns that correspond to the gender identity with which the employee identifies, and which the employer has communicated to management and employees can be unlawful.”

Are they trying to imply that misgendering someone is considered harassment and may be met with legal ramifications? It appears that way to the employee we spoke with who is concerned about legal consequences.

“So, if I am not accepting of a person believing they are something they are not, and I don’t affirm it, that’s illegal.  That is the way they formatted the question, to make it seem as if legal action could be taken against you if you don’t use the right pronouns. Last time I checked we live in America and you can’t do that.  This isn’t Canada.”

Despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on June 15, 2020, which affirmed that even if Congress may not have expressly contemplated discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity when enacting the Civil Rights Act, Title VII’s ban on sex discrimination protects LGBTQ+ employees by its plain language, there are no laws regarding incorrect pronoun use.  In the 2020 SCOTUS case, the transgender worker was fired when she came out as a woman. It is not clear whether simply using the wrong pronouns could be so “severe” or “pervasive” that it creates a hostile work environment under federal law. The North Carolina [state government] is using the threat of legal consequences to enforce their woke pronoun policy which states:

“All employees have the right to be addressed by the name and pronoun corresponding to their gender identity, as indicated by the employee. A court-ordered name or gender change is not required. Accidental or inadvertent misuse of pronouns does not constitute harassment; however, persistent and intentional refusal to use an employee’s preferred name and pronoun may constitute harassment. If you are unsure what name or pronouns are preferred by the employee, politely ask them how they would like to be addressed. Pronouns include “he,” “she,” gender-neutral pronouns such as “they,” or other options.”[…]