A bill moving through the Wyoming Legislature would prohibit the state government from requiring its employees to use co-workers' preferred pronouns. SF 77 passed the Senate and is now headed to the House, where it was not considered and died last year.

Known as “Compelled speech is not free speech,” it lays out that the state cannot refuse to hire someone or fire them if that employee refuses to use someone else's preferred pronouns. That refusal also cannot prevent the employee from receiving a “grant, loan, permit, contract, license or other benefit afforded by the state.”

Sen. Lynn Hutchings (R-Cheyenne) introduced the bill to the Senate Judiciary Committee this year and was also a sponsor of the bill last year. She said the bill was brought to her by a constituent who told her they had an issue with the state government compelling them to use preferred pronouns.

“When I first heard it, I thought, ‘Hmm, no one's going to really be interested in this’,” she said. “Then I found out when I started getting emails and phone calls, a lot of people are concerned about this issue.”

A similar bill was passed in Idaho in 2024. It specified that all government employees, including those working at public schools, are not required to use preferred pronouns “inconsistent with the person’s sex” or address someone using a name other than that person’s legal name.

Sen. Gary Crum (R-Laramie) asked Hutchings how the bill would play out if someone was repeatedly using “she” pronouns to refer to someone who uses “he” pronouns in a derogatory way.

“ If I called the good senator to my left here, I started just saying, ‘She's doing this, she's doing that,’ and it's really in a hazing point of view, how do we handle that type of situation?,” he asked.

Hutchings said she didn’t think she could answer that question.

“I don't think it's complying with what we want to do here in the law,” she said. “Except for the fact that if a good senator next to you was a ‘he,’ and he did not like you saying that to him, continually calling him a ‘she,’ I think he would have some remedy,” she said.

 Tate Mullen is the government relations director for the Wyoming Education Association. He said the committee should take into consideration the decision in the 2020 Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County. The court ruled that discrimination based on gender identity falls under discrimination based on sex, which is a protected class.

“If you misgender somebody, that's not a big deal, but if you do it in a harassing way, there are still those pieces, that employer-employee or employee to employee dynamic, that raise the question of a hostile work environment,” he said.

Mullen said the way this proposed bill could interact with federal Title VII claims, which deal with discrimination and hostile work environments, might put both employers and employees in a “precarious position.”

“They're stuck between that federal law and what might apply with this state law,” he said. “That's something that I think you need to maybe take a peek at.”

 Dr. Ben Moritz is the executive director of the Wyoming Community College Commission and said it has “no position, yay or nay,” on the bill. But he did raise concerns that the bill could have a “chilling effect” on academic conversations about pronouns.

Of the ten other people who provided general public comment, the vast majority spoke in favor of the proposed bill.

Patricia McCoy lives in Laramie County and said the bill would protect First Amendment freedom of speech rights.

“ Words matter, and in a free society, the government should never compel its citizens to speak words they don't believe in,” she said. “This isn't about being unkind or disrespectful. It's about protecting the constitutional right of every Wyoming citizen to speak according to their own conscience.”

Karl Allred is from Evanston and spoke in favor of the bill. He said his brother lost his job for refusing to write down his preferred pronouns at a training, but did not share where his brother lives or worked.

“ Our government shouldn't be harassing people, costing their jobs and things like that, just because they don't want to buy into this ideology, “ he said. “If you want to, that's great. Do it. But it should be voluntary. It shouldn't cost you your job.”

Wyoming Equality Executive Director Sara Burlingame was the only person who explicitly opposed the bill.

“ In the absence of state mandated genitalia and chromosome testing, all pronouns are preferred,” she said. “ I think we all share a sense that state-mandated chromosome and genitalia testing should be far outside of what this body would consider the role of government.”

Burlingame  responded to the earlier conversation about the bill’s relationship to hazing in the workplace.

“Nothing would stop someone from using it to haze. There isn't any line in this bill that would offer a solution to that and I do think that the continued bad faith effort to name someone a gender that they don't identify with, that is bullying and it is a form of cruelty,” she said.

The bill was amended on the Senate floor to get rid of any monetary compensation for enforcement, like compensatory damages or attorney’s fees. The bill was introduced to the House and then referred to the House Judiciary Committee on Feb. 10.