If trans people deserve the same as everyone , then they deserve to be protected under antidiscrimination and antihate speech laws the same as everyone else . I am sympathetic to the philosophical idea that the language in these laws is enshrining the possibility for the erosion of free speech . But that ' s been true since their development decades ago . The inclusion of trans people under this umbrella of protection doesn ' t introduce anything new , it just gives them the same rights as anyone else . Panicking that people might be able to take legal action against you for using the wrong pronouns is about the same as panicking that someone might take legal action against you for calling them black instead of AfricanAmerican or whatever else they might prefer . That extremely unlikely , practically indefensible possibility is the current state of our hate speech laws , and has been for years , yet we see a total of 0 instances of things like this actually happening .