What’s In A Name? It Depends.

For years, I have heard yammering from white male attorneys about how they are now disenfranchised. Please. Spare me. How about some examples from my almost 50 years in practice that dispute that ludicrous claim? 

A white male state bar president who proclaimed that women cannot be good trial lawyers, that they were only fit for the so-called “pink practices” of family law and probate.

The commissioner who saw me at counsel table with my client, an African-American male, assumed that I was the social worker and he was the attorney. (This coming from a white female.) 

The white male lawyers who automatically assumed that I was the secretary or paralegal and who would ask me for coffee and to take notes in bankruptcy creditor meetings where I was representing one of the largest unsecured creditors. 

How about that white males still are the majority of equity partners in Biglaw? How about that women and minorities may be “partners” in name only? Should I continue? Had enough?  

But now women and minorities (aka anyone who doesn’t fit within the white male profile) face yet more hurdles, as if they needed any more.

In a stunning  gob-smacking way, federal agencies, trying to comply with the administration’s hatred for the term “woke,” and any term that the federal government in its wisdom thinks “woke” encompasses, have once again taken a sledge hammer rather than a scalpel to follow that edict. In a list published recently by the New York Times, the number of words that conceivably fall into the “woke” category is mind-blowing (and yes, MJ is legal in California.) This is not just word exorcism; it’s much more than that. And it’s scary.

As an attorney who has spent much of her long career in the employment area, I can’t imagine that some of the now forbidden terms will last long, depending on the willingness of courts to strike them down. Fingers crossed. 

Here are just a few of the absurd examples: “women,” that word eliminates more than 50% of the nation’s population. I can’t imagine the deletion of that word will be acceptable to the federal female workforce. How about some more words that only describe women since men don’t have the ability: breastfeed + people, female, females, breastfeed + person, person + uterus, pregnant people, pregnant person, pregnant persons? Included in the verboten list are terms such as disability, disabilities, underprivileged; the list goes on.

Women and minorities now comprise an ever-increasing amount of the California judiciary 2025 Judicial Demographics Report: California Bench Continues to Grow More Diverse. The chief justice is a Latina. Other women on this court and lower courts have varying backgrounds. California is now a minority-majority state.

How about Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court Ketanji Brown Jackson? What words will she now use to describe herself? How will the federal government describe her? Even Amy Coney Barrett, a white woman, may have issues. (Discretion being the better part of valor, I won’t hazard a guess as to whether she still has a uterus and whether she breastfed her children. She also has several children of color.) 

The federal government seems to say it is OK to discriminate (whoops, a forbidden word) against those with disabilities (another forbidden word). Just about everyone in this country has a disability of one sort or another. What happens to the Americans with Disabilities Act? What happens to the Civil Rights Act of 1964? What happens to all the laws enacted to help citizens in this country in various ways? 

Basically, what the federal government is now saying in no uncertain terms is that it’s OK to discriminate (there’s that word again) against those people who may have no rights and who have looked to the federal government for help. Sorry, not sorry. Is Women’s History Month a thing of the past now? What about Black History Month? Pride Month? What will happen to all the books that have been written and published that use any or all of the prohibited words?

We are already dealing with banned books. When do the book burnings start? If you have never read or haven’t recently read Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” now is the time.

And if you think it can’t happen here, think again.

Jill Switzer has been an active member of the State Bar of California for over 40 years. She remembers practicing law in a kinder, gentler time. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see dinosaurs, millennials, and those in-between interact — it’s not always civil. You can reach her by email at oldladylawyer@gmail.com.

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