“Misusing a coworker’s pronouns is sexual harassment”

By California Family Council

SACRAMENTO, CA —  Christian radio host Dennis McCourt sat down at his computer earlier this year to complete a training California law required. He got a few slides in, read a question asking him to affirm that misusing a coworker’s pronouns is sexual harassment, and stopped.

“There’s absolutely no way I’m going to do this,” McCourt said in an interview. “You could put a gun to my head. I won’t do it.”

McCourt works for an out-of-state Christian software company with two employees in California. That was enough to pull his employer into one of the most far-reaching workplace training mandates in the country, a law that requires employees to affirm concepts about gender identity that some religious workers say conflict with their faith. Whether the law exempts religious employers at all is a question no court, regulator, or state agency has definitively answered.

A Law That Grew

California has required sexual harassment training since 2005, but two later bills changed its scope substantially. In 2017, then-state Sen. Ricardo Lara authored SB 396, requiring employers with 50 or more employees to add training on harassment based on gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation. The following year, then-state Sen. Holly Mitchell authored SB 1343, which dropped the threshold to five employees and extended the one-hour training requirement to all employees, not just supervisors. Both are now part of Government Code section 12950.1, and the next compliance deadline for covered employers is Jan. 1, 2027.

The law’s reach surprises many employers. A company must train its California workers if it has five or more employees anywhere in the country, even if only one works in California and the company is headquartered elsewhere, which is how McCourt’s employer became subject to it.

An Unanswered Exemption Question

California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act generally excludes nonprofit religious organizations from the definition of “employer”, shielding churches and qualifying religious groups from many discrimination and harassment claims. But the training mandate in section 12950.1 defines “employer” on its own terms, covering any business with five or more workers, without mentioning religion or nonprofit status.

The Church Law Center of California, a firm that represents churches and religious nonprofits statewide, tells its clients they are not exempt from the training requirement. Separately, the employment law firm Weintraub Tobin has noted that other FEHA provisions requiring “all” employers to comply only “impliedly” carry forward the religious exemption found elsewhere in the code, leaving open whether that exemption applies to the training mandate specifically.

California Family Council, a Fresno-based Christian advocacy organization that tracks religious liberty issues in state law, says it has found no published court decision, no attorney general opinion, and nothing on the Civil Rights Department’s website that resolves the question. The department’s guidance repeats that the requirement applies to “all employers with five or more employees” without addressing religious organizations directly.

Even if courts eventually find that the law does reach religious employers, a further question remains untested: whether the First Amendment requires an exemption when a religious organization’s staff are asked to affirm gender identity content as a condition of compliance. Employment attorneys say that question has not yet been litigated in this context.

What the Training Covers (see training slides here…)

The Civil Rights Department’s free supervisor training, posted at calcivilrights.ca.gov/shpt, goes beyond conduct rules into concepts about gender. One slide defines “gender identity” as a person’s internal sense of being male, female, a combination of the two, neither, or nonbinary and states that gender identity can differ from the sex a person was “assigned at birth”.

The training also walks supervisors through a scenario in which a transgender employee reports that a coworker keeps using their prior name and pronouns and has objected to their use of the women’s restroom. The training’s slides state that continuing to use a person’s prior name after a gender transition, known as “dead-naming”, “is considered harassment”, that intentionally using the wrong pronoun “is considered harassment”, and that objecting to a coworker’s restroom use based on their stated gender identity “is harassment”.

Under that framing, an employee who voices disagreement with a coworker’s restroom use, without any complaint, rudeness, or other conduct involved, has engaged in harassment as the state defines it.

Supervisors also required to watch the following video about gender and sexual orientation ideology. Notice how everything in this video is stated as facts with no acknowledgement that some employers and employees might have differing viewpoints that should also be respected. Watch here. 

The training separately warns supervisors that they can be held personally, not just professionally, liable: one slide states that employees who believe they were harassed “can sue the person who harassed them for money damages,” in addition to any action taken against the employer.

California’s own list of protected characteristics places “religion, creed” and “gender identity, gender expression” side by side as equally protected classes. Critics of the training, including McCourt and California Family Council, argue that the material puts those protections in direct tension by casting a sincerely held religious view about sex and gender as itself a form of discrimination.

One Employee’s Refusal

McCourt’s employer required him to affirm the training’s gender identity statements before he could move to the next slide. The platform allowed a comment field, and McCourt used it on every page to record his objection rather than let a silent click stand in for agreement.

“It’s not simply passively listening to the theory,” McCourt said. “It’s having to affirm it to get to the next page, to comply with the state’s requirement and my employer’s requirement.”

McCourt’s objection is rooted in a traditional Christian reading of Genesis, which he and many other Christians understand as teaching that God created human beings male and female. For McCourt, being asked to affirm a different framework in writing is not a minor technicality but a direct conflict with that belief.

He has told his employer he cannot comply and is seeking either a religious accommodation or an alternative curriculum, and is reaching out to Christian legal organizations for help. Federal and state law both generally require employers to accommodate a sincerely held religious belief unless doing so would impose a genuine undue hardship on the business, a standard that predates this training mandate. Whether that standard applies here, and how, is the question now taking shape.

McCourt is also asking pastors in his network to speak out on the mandate.

“I have a genuine concern regarding my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ being discipled by the state of California regarding their sexual ethic,” he said. “The fact that thousands of pastors in CA are not even aware that their church members are being forced into this indoctrination is very disturbing.”

Greg Burt, vice president of California Family Council, argues the training crosses a line. “California isn’t just regulating workplaces anymore. It’s dictating what its citizens must believe,” Burt said. “No state agency has the authority to force a Christian to affirm, in writing, a view of gender he doesn’t hold. That isn’t harassment prevention. That’s compelled speech.”

McCourt points to a passage in Acts 5:29, in which the apostles tell religious authorities they “must obey God rather than men,” when they were told they should not longer speak about Jesus and his teachings. This is the biblical text he and other Christians draw on when they say conscience should take precedence over a legal requirement they believe conflicts with their faith.

A Broader Pattern

California Family Council says this case fits a pattern it has documented in other settings, including gender-identity training for public school teachers through the state’s PRISM program, pronoun policies at the University of California, and training mandates for healthcare workers. In each case, the organization argues, Californians have faced pressure to affirm a contested view of sex and gender or risk professional consequences.

What Happens Next

California Family Council is compiling a list of pastors, employers and employees willing to go on record about the training requirement ahead of the Jan. 1, 2027 compliance deadline. The organization says it is continuing to consult attorneys on the exemption question and plans to press the Civil Rights Department and state lawmakers for clarity on whether religious organizations are covered.

About California Family Council

California Family Council works to advance God’s design for life, family, and liberty through California’s Church, Capitol, and Culture. By advocating for policies that reinforce the sanctity of life, the strength of traditional marriages, and the essential freedoms of religion, CFC is dedicated to preserving California’s moral and social foundation.