Any academics? Is this normal now?

Kittens, don’t I know it. I was at uni with a guy doing an English PhD and he was the biggest mansplaining twat you could imagine, as well as being a predatory creep. Discovered that he is now an academic and uses they/them pronouns apparently. Regularly tweets about wanting ‘TERFs’ to die. Shuddering at the thought of young female undergrads having to be exposed to him. He was and no doubt still is, so toxic.

you'd say "X (surname, date in brackets) carried out research, which proved.." and you'd make sure everything was like that, either referring to the research, or the researcher by their surname. So from the assignment, you would never know the gender of any researcher referenced, as it would be initial and surname only. I thought that was quite standard for academic text, and nothing remotely to do with what gender anyone defines themselves as.

And what about the second time they are the subject of your sentence? Which is going to happen when you are writing 5,000 words about Jane Eyre?

And come to that what about characters OP? Is Jane Eyre a 'they'?

Hope you get an essay on Orlando

Herja good for you, stand your ground. I am against precarity in academia (ie where people only get hired for a year at a time) but the fact that this person is precarious means that she will have little clout in her department and that you can easily go above her head if she tries to make life difficult. Sounds harsh, I know, but people who say stuff like this to students, making out that referring to a woman’s sex is offensive, shouldn’t be teaching them anyway in my opinion.

English is one of the most thoroughly colonized subjects, unfortunately, so you're in for a lot more of this. That having been said, your tutor really is laying it on a bit thicker than usual.

The consequence of making extreme stupidity a protected characteristic in academia. It seems that the dumber you are, the more people will cheer you on, while any challenge is labelled as hate.

Yes, I would ask to see the tutor and bring in a huge pile of books and articles on women’s literature, replete with references to ‘she’. Maybe print some of them off and highlight the word she to show the tutor. Display faux-concern at how hateful these works must be and maybe ask if you could do the essay without using any sources at all and just double check with the tutor that you will definitely still pass if you do that. Maybe even find something by their revered leader Judith Butler where she uses the feminine pronoun (there will be lots) and seek a declaration that anything by Butler or anyone else who has referred to female writers as she will be removed from the syllabus forthwith.

You should ask your tutor what their (see what I did there?) view of the study of women's writing is? Are all the scholars who have published on women's writing guilty of making assumptions about the gender of the writers they have analysed? Should this entire field of literary analysis be scrapped?

Ah, I remember...they? They are not a very nice person at all. The idea of that kind of person having an influence on undergrads and potentially being able to harm the careers of additional grad students is indeed worrying.

Kittens Nicci is the person who screamed ‘she? I am pronouns they you fucking cunt’ in a video filmed at a WPUK meeting where she was one of the protestors. She is also the person who subjected feminist student Raquel Rosario Sanchez to horrific abuse and harassment, which the U of Bristol dealt with appallingly. Really really nasty piece of work. I am guessing that as a PhD student she has access to undergraduate students, which is worrying.

(Runs off to Google Nicci Shall)

Okay Herja then I would ignore that advice fully. If you get pulled up on it, start a formal complaint.

This wasn’t the notorious Mx Nicci Shall was it? Maybe tormenting feminist fellow phd students wasn’t enough and she wants to ensure that the whole university changes its entire policies so that she never has to read the triggering word ‘she’ ever again (sorry, Nicci, I meant they/them, I really am such a fucking cunt).

If they meant use they instead of ‘he/she’ then okay although it’s often a feminist statement to use ‘she’ and specify that you are using it to denote a person of either sex. But personally, I hate reading stuff where ‘he’ is used to refer to both sexes so I think the singular ‘they’ is fine when you are speaking hypothetically. It’s not grammatically incorrect as it is recognised as referring to the singular when used in that context (as I have used it in this post when referring to this tutor whose sex I don’t know)

Agreed. I'm not an academic but I write articles regularly for my company's website. The marketing department told me this year's ago.

Am a current Humanities student and can assure you it’s not standard at my place.

Simone de Beauvoir (not that your tutor would ever have you read her, I’m sure!)
No, they just endlessly quote ‘one is not born, but rather becomes a woman’ without even reading the next sentence let alone the rest of her work!

We were always taught not to use they, he, she, I, me .. where possible. So if you would say "She carried out research, which proved.." you'd say "X (surname, date in brackets) carried out research, which proved.." and you'd make sure everything was like that, either referring to the research, or the researcher by their surname. So from the assignment, you would never know the gender of any researcher referenced, as it would be initial and surname only. I thought that was quite standard for academic text, and nothing remotely to do with what gender anyone defines themselves as.

That's just plain daft Herja - your tutor is jumping the shark.

I'd argue that we've had to fight long and hard to get women's writing recognised and onto the curriculum (and women's contributions to science, music, art,... You name it) and I'm damned if I'm going to "invisibilise" their contributions.

It's also historical nonsense. How do you explain that Elliot had to publish under a male name, not because she were trans, but because she was forced to by a society which didn't take women's writing seriously, unless you can refer unambiguously to her sex.

(Of course this is actually the end game - to prop up an ideology built on offensive sex stereotypes, its adherents now need to retrospectively trans any woman in history who fought against those stereotypes).

University academic here. No, it isn't normal and in the specific instance you cite it's downright weird.

Is the person hoping to trans her colleagues after they die, and that's why the options need to remain open? I'm not sure whether to read her comments as terribly keen or as anxiety about getting it wrong and the inevitable TRA smiting as a result and thus overcompensating.

Any chance that's just an over-eager PhD student by the way?

"Women, enjoy your erasure", as one male trans activist said.

So yes that's fucking awful.

I'm not sure which specific subject you're studying, OP, but what if you're referring to a fellow scholar who's active now and whose "preferred pronouns" you could presumably ask, or you'd know from having communicated with them? Is this person insisting that you refer to even people like that as "they"?

Ironically, Jane Austen used "they" as a non-specific 3rd person singular pronoun for situations when a generic person who could be either sex was being talked about, as did Chaucer, Shakespeare, Thackeray.. .

The rules of English grammar are largely a Victorian invention, and a highly artificial attempt to force English into a mould provided by Latin, a mould into which it doesn't fit very well.

I personally have no problem with "they" in phrases like "if a person is over 12, they should play the sport appropriate to their birth sex" (though I'd probably opt for a plural construction) - I find he/she really clunky.

I do however think the use of"they" for named particular individuals is bloody daft. I think these people are confusing stereotypes and personality with fundamental shifts in their nature, which I don't think makes sense. Then again, people are at liberty to adopt all sorts of stupid metaphysical beliefs if it helps them through the day, and I suppose when confronted with stupid sexist stereotypes, wanting to set yourself up as some sort of special person sitting between the two categories the stereotypes get applied to has a certain naive appeal (even if the rather more obvious response is that the stereotypes are shit).