EXCLUSIVE — Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) are leading a bill that would block federal agencies from requiring employees and contractors to use the “preferred pronouns” of their employees.

The bill, titled the Safeguarding Honest Speech Act, comes after the Department of Health and Human Services issued its “Gender Identity and Non-Discrimination Guidance,” which says that “all employees should be addressed [by] the names and pronouns they use to describe themselves.”

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Ogles and Cruz’s bill would block funds from being used to implement such rules that require employees or contractors to use “another person’s preferred pronouns if they are incompatible with such a person’s sex” or “a name other than a person’s legal name when referring to such a person.”

“Can you imagine getting reprimanded or fired from your job for not using an individual’s ‘preferred pronouns’?” Ogles said in a statement. “Unfortunately, that is exactly what the Biden regime has imposed in its latest guidance from the Department of Health and Human Services. The radical Left is actively coercing the speech of individuals — all in service of a delusional woke agenda.”

“Preferred pronouns” are a set of pronouns that someone uses to reflect that person's own gender identity.

According to the Pew Research Center, 5.1% of adults over 30 and 1.6% of all adults identify as transgender or nonbinary, meaning someone who identifies with more than one gender, no gender, or has a fluctuating gender identity. Thus likely using different pronouns than their sex at birth.

But, over the years, Republicans, both nationally and at the state level, have introduced legislation to try and prohibit or limit the usage of “preferred pronouns” on public documents and in the workplace or to make it more difficult for people to transition from one gender to another, calling it “radical gender ideology.”

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“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. “As the Supreme Court held, ‘If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.’ The government has no business compelling anyone to use pronouns that contradict biological reality.”

The bill's co-sponsors include Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Eli Crane (R-AZ), Doug LaMalfa (R-CA), Andy Harris (R-MD), and Mary Miller (R-IL).