Ted Cruz smirks to the crowd at a Turning Point USA event in Phoenix, Arizona. Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Gage Skidmore

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz is continuing his war on the transgender community.

This time, Texas’ junior GOP senator has introduced legislation that would force federal employees to be referred to by their legal names and birth pronouns. Ironic, considering Cruz’s first name is Rafael and “Ted” doesn’t appear on his birth certificate.

Under the Safeguarding Honest Speech Act, which Cruz introduced Nov. 15, federal agencies and government contractors with policies that require employees to use someone’s preferred pronouns or a name other than their legal name would be barred from receiving federal funding.

Employers would also only be allowed to use pronouns compatible with the person’s sex or the employee’s legal name, the bill states.

“Forcing anyone to use pronouns that don’t accord with a person’s biological sex is an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment,” Cruz said in a statement. “The government has no business compelling anyone to use pronouns that contradict biological reality.”

The bill is unlikely to get far in the Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate.

But that doesn’t seem to be much of a concern to Cruz much, who’s expended plenty of energy and hot air recently trying to demean the LGBTQ+ community.

Earlier this year, Cruz called for an investigation into Bud Light to see if the beer’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch, somehow broke the law by partnering with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Last year, he faced online ridicule for declaring during a speech that his gender pronouns were “kiss my ass.”

Now, Cruz has a cameo role in poorly reviewed transphobic “comedy” film Lady Ballers. Produced by Ben Shapiro’s right-wing news blog Daily Wire, the movie attempts to wring cheap laughs from a story about a group of adult men who decide to identify as women to win women’s basketball competitions.

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This article appears in Nov 29 – Dec 12, 2023.

Michael Karlis is a multimedia journalist at the San Antonio Current, whose coverage in print and on social media focuses on local and state politics. He is a graduate of American University in Washington,...