Almost 900 pronouns might be stripped subsequent month from the “law of the land” in Contra Costa County.
The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday unanimously authorised a plan to modernize the county’s ordinance code — a set of legal guidelines that governs areas comparable to well being and public security, administration and land use — by eliminating gendered pronouns.
“I think this brings us up to date well into the 21st century — this was long overdue,” Supervisor John Gioia stated Tuesday. “Words mean something, and so it is important to make this change to be, as others said, inclusive.”
With an purpose to higher replicate the neighborhood’s range and make clear authorized definitions inside the county’s insurance policies, the board voted to take away such pronouns and substitute them with gender-neutral pronouns or references to particular titles, positions and roles.
The simplest edits will substitute “he” with both “they” or a non-gendered description — comparable to “department head” or “listening to officer” — that focuses on the function the code is referencing.
The change takes impact Jan. 2.
Tim Ewell, Chief Assistant County Administrator, stated a three-person crew began growing a plan in Might to search out and repair gendered pronouns within the county’s 1,300-page ordinance code. There have been 841 complete “hits.”
Even guidelines about nondiscrimination said that no particular person needs to be promoted or discriminated towards due to “his” race, colour, origin, intercourse, age or handicap, amongst different issues.
“So obviously, this doesn’t work,” Ewell advised county leaders Tuesday. “If you think about it, that’s (a gendered pronoun) about every page and a half, which means it’s pretty well embedded into the county code. It’s the local law of the land.”
Ewell stated the county’s Fairness Committee is slated to handle lingering discrepancies in department-level insurance policies and procedures all through 2025.
Contra Costa County isn’t the primary native authorities to modernize the utilization of pronouns of their legal guidelines.
Berkeley revised its Municipal Code to incorporate gender-neutral pronouns in 2019 shortly after the California Legislature in 2018 adopted a decision that encourages state businesses and the Legislature to make use of gender-neutral pronouns when drafting insurance policies, laws and different steerage.
Within the fall of 2021, Santa Clara County — the primary county within the nation to ascertain an Workplace of LGBTQ Affairs — adopted a coverage requiring gender-inclusive language in all new county ordinances, resolutions and proclamations of the Board of Supervisors to the extent permitted by legislation.
Voters in each Oakland and San Jose authorised poll measures in Nov. 2022 that up to date their respective metropolis charters to make use of gender-neutral language.
And 50 years in the past, the California Structure was amended to exchange masculine gender phrases, comparable to man, with gender-neutral phrases, comparable to particular person — a proposition that handed by fewer than 45,000 votes.
Supervisor Diane Burgis applauded the edits authorised in Tuesday’s ordinance, which she hopes will show considerate and inclusive to future generations of residents.
“What we’re doing is not trying to exclude or put into context something that we don’t mean,” Burgis stated Tuesday. “Some people will make a bigger deal about this, but I think it’s consistent with what we’ve been doing, as far as trying to be inclusive and not exclusive.”
Contra Costa County’s ordinance code was first codified 64 years in the past and re-codified in 1973. Apart from incremental adjustments as wanted, some areas of the code have remained with out evaluation for a number of a long time. That features the county’s information for the right way to interpret the literal grammar and definitions of the particular phrases inside the code.
In 1991, earlier board members agreed to make clear that inside Contra Costa County’s legal guidelines, “the feminine gender includes the masculine and neutral genders, and the masculine gender includes the feminine and neutral genders.”
From a authorized perspective, that basically meant that any reference to “his,” hers” or “theirs” within the ordinance code was categorised the identical and technically interchangeable.
“But we also know that words matter,” Ewell stated Tuesday. “That’s why we’re coming back today and recommending to go through the county ordinance code to remove those gendered pronouns altogether.”
Gioia stated the edited, non-gendered ordinance code is anchored in fairness, emphasizing that the earlier authorized wording change concerning pronouns in 1991 wasn’t sufficient.
