(LifeSiteNews) — The vast University of California (UC) system is being sued by a conservative watchdog group over a policy aimed at punishing students and staff for ‘misgendering’ those who identify as something other than their biological sex.

A legal complaint was filed Thursday by Defending Education (DE), a national grassroots organization working to restore schools at all levels from activists imposing harmful agendas.

The lawsuit asserts that UC is flouting free speech rights under the guise of combatting “sexual harassment.” 

“UC has enacted a speech code that punishes students for engaging in protected speech and discourages them from expressing views outside of the university-approved mainstream.”

At the center of the controversy is UC’s massive 43-page Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment Policy (SVSH), a systemwide policy adopted in December, 2025 that is billed as necessary to maintain a “community free from harassment, exploitation, or intimidation.” 

The policy applies to all UC employees, undergraduate, graduate, and professional students, and third parties. 

Moreover, students and employees in UC System schools must complete mandatory training — the “Sexual Harassment, Anti-Discrimination, Prevention and Education” (SHAPE) training — to ensure they understand the SVSH Policy. 

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The SHAPE training explains that “Intentionally calling someone their name used before transition, as opposed to their lived name, is called dead-naming, and may be a form of sexual harassment.” 

The consequences of engaging in “prohibited conduct” are harsh, including discipline “up to and including dismissal” from the UC System. According to the legal complaint, “UC threatens punishments including ‘revocation’ of an awarded academic degree, ‘[s]uspension,” “[e]xclusion’ from areas of the campus or UC functions, ‘exclusion from participation in designated privileges and activities for a specified period of time,’ disciplinary probation’ that can likewise ‘restrict the student’s privileges or eligibility for activities,’ ‘removal from university housing, and ‘written notice or reprimand to the student that a violation … has occurred and that continued or repeated violations … may be cause for further disciplinary action.” 

Speech codes like those in UC’s SVSH policy impose vague, overly broad, content and often viewpoint-based restrictions on speech which the Supreme Court has routinely confirmed are unconstitutional.

The watchdog group explains:

UC’s Anti-Discrimination Policy similarly prohibits “harassment” through a “hostile environment” based on a person’s membership in a “Protected Category.” Protected categories include “gender, gender identity, gender expression, gender transition, [and] sexual orientation.” But the UC system’s definition of harassment includes “acts of verbal, nonverbal, or physical aggression, intimidation, or hostility based on gender, gender identity, gender expression, sex- or gender-stereotyping, or sexual orientation.”  Among those acts of “verbal intimidation or hostility” in the UC system is the failure to use an individual’s “preferred pronouns.”    

“The protection of First Amendment freedoms is nowhere more vital than in American institutions of higher education,” asserted DE in a statement. “In fact, the college classroom has been referred to by the U.S. Supreme Court as the ‘marketplace of ideas.’  But marketplaces of ideas wither without open discourse and debate matters of gender identity and the fixed nature of biological sex.”

The lawsuit notes that, according to a recent survey of almost 70,000 American college students, roughly half of those surveyed report feeling uncomfortable expressing their views on controversial political topics in class or in conversations with other students. 

In a 2026 free speech ranking of American colleges, UCLA, UCSD, and UCI all received an “F” grade for their speech climates.

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