Declining to put my preferred pronouns in my email signature

What? Sex based like my oppression as in the oppression of women for like, yknow, millennia. Not as in I’m oppressed because someone is asking my to include pronouns on my email signature. FFS.

I’ve heard some not-even-thinly-veiled contempt for ‘older’ feminists, also branding anyone not drinking the gender Kool Aid as ‘a TERF’ and therefore (in their eyes) a bigot - this is coming from young women. The poor dears can’t see how dangerous it is to nod and admire the emperor’s wonderful outfit; they think they are ‘being kind’.

Because maybe they don’t want to play that silly game using made up words..

Exactly. How arrogant to think you can police how people talk about you when you’re not even there, and can’t hear. 😑

Because I will not compel/order/dictate that anyone use "my" preferred pronouns. I would rather they made that decision for themselves, its nothing to do with me. Anyone looking at me will know my sex, anyway. I

I note that the 'be kind' generation are not known for empathising with older women

often, they can barely hide their utter contempt.

Honestly bewildered at @janeinthewild thinking their ‘rough example’ was going to in any way make any of it ‘a little but easier to relate to / understand’.

I am more in the dark than before I asked the question.

Well I might wish I looked like Julia Robert's or Mila Kunis or bella Hadid.
I'm never going to, so it would be wishful thinking, not reality.

And in fact I don't look at other women and wish i looked like them. Or men.

I'm holding out against declaring pronouns in my work emails. I receive emails from a wide slice of my workplace and have been noting their use in tandem with the seniority of those declaring their allegiance to the religion. It has been fascinating to observe how many managers are male he/hims and how many entry-level young people are they/them and actually females.

As an older woman who started work in the early 1980s, it's interesting to note that the better-paid and more secure contract roles appear to be men and the agency, non-contract and easily fired staff are young women (in spite of their new religious identifications). Plus ça change, eh?

I've been terminally online for two decades. I've deliberately never drawn attention to my sex in either online debate or corporate communications - it is evident that women are treated differently in both spheres. It is tedious to have to point this out to idealistic twenty-somethings as it will also draw attention to my age - I note that the 'be kind' generation are not known for empathising with older women. I have had no official approaches about my resistance to pronoun declarations, though I saw last month that the head of HR is now a he/him.

I barely post anywhere online now, due to the social media policy of my organisation and its notoriety as a Stonewall champion. Within the past few months, it has been explicitly stated that if you express any counter views to gender ideology you will be invited to an interview with the boss and then asked to leave. Therefore, I am saving my powder for that day.

Of course I have such a lot to say on this subject, but I can't. I'd quite like to be able to pay my rent.

I'll use a rough example for this. Imagine you see a photo of an attractive male and an attractive female. As a woman, I am more likely to think 'I wish I looked like that' when looking at the photo of the woman and not the man.

It's likely not exactly the same for being transgender, I would not know as I am not trans myself. But that is the best way I can describe the feeling of knowing what your gender is.

Of course that is only a small example and everyone's relationship with gender is not exactly the same but I hope that makes it a little bit easier to relate to/understand

No it doesn't.

Sexist stereotypes - how progressive.

The original poster did the right thing by stating her preference is not to declare her pronoun preference. This should settle the matter. After all, it is all about free choice, isn’t it?

I‘ve got a rather rare first name, and as a consequence I‘m quite often misgendered in email exchanges, when there has been no other contact. I ignore it as it is simply irrelevant. At work they’re now giving us the option of adding pronouns to our profiles - which I ignore. If my profile pic doesn’t give a clue, so be it.
Should the pronoun thing ever become compulsory, mine will be Dr. / Dr.‘s - thank you very much.
What meanings do pronouns that one can change arbitrarily have, anyway?

And I’ve been thinking ‘gender identity’ is such an important thing for people who don’t identify with their ‘sex’ but then they refuse to acknowledge their ‘gender identity’ and prefer to be known as the sex they are not. So where is the ‘gender identity’ gone? Lost and supplanted by a completely different concept that is sex?
Identity becomes unimportant and hides behind other concepts, so why be so proud of your identity if you don’t want people to know you have one that is different to the sex you were born into?

And then they disappear into the ether as quickly as they appeared, when they’re made fools of.

I just haven't. No one has yet said it's compulsory.

Not seen that in ages. Bloody brilliant.

So jane you think a woman has something to do with being female, and a man has something to do with being male?

When GC people make that assumption we are called transphobic.

Do you think you are conflating sex and gender here?

Where do all these drive-bys come from, bleating “Why do you CARE?” “What skin is it off your nose?” “Oh, MOCKWORTHY is it?”? Is there a klaxon on their social media “ALL HANDS TO MUMSNET, ALL HANDS TO MUMSNET, EMERGENCY, EMERGENCY!”?

Absolutely this.

So if you had to put “Jane, who believes that the earth is flat and the Royal family are lizards “ at the end of every email, you’d be fine with that ?

Different question, but I think this answer is perfect

It's a good idea to mock silly things, especially when they have potentially bad consequences if taken seriously.

People, likewise, @janeinthewild.

All this pronoun schtick is really, really silly. So, yes, a very good idea to mock it. (Although 'condone', perhaps is not an appropriate choice of words, as it connotes wrongdoing, which such mockery certainly isn't.)

[Perhaps the best idea would be something else? - L. Wittgenstein's Investigations §258, perhaps? Best idea of all? Hmm?]

Hear, hear Jetband. Just live your lives but leave me out of it.

Great example of gender announcement redundancy. Who’d have guessed Felix would be ‘the one in pink’ if it hadn’t been stated🤔
‘Gender-bending’ (as it was known in my youth) is nothing new; why does this generation want to make such a big fuss about it? It’s always been de rigueur in certain walks of life, from ‘30s Berlin to ‘80s Bowie to ‘00s Antony (now Anohi); the nightclubs of (well, my) youth; any creative tribe. At art school in the ‘80s half the students dressed as the opposite sex, Boy George or spares from a panto production; nobody blinked. There were usually a couple of people undergoing complete transition (ie hormones and surgery); we knew they were and addressed them accordingly. No big deal. And no one demanded ‘the straights’ (ie everyone else) get a badge announcing their (way more obvious) preference. Can’t we let those who want to cross gender boundaries do so without demanding everyone else unnecessarily accede to strict categorisation? It’s hypocritical and divisive.

Mockery = literal violence!

Another clear case of being genocided 🙄

So the whole pro-nouns thing is allegedly to make trans (inc enby, agender/sexual etc, etc, etc) feel included and welcome. How many trans people are people working with? If you’ve got an office of 50 people all being voluntarily required to use pronouns in email sigs to score DEI points, how many trans people are there in that office? Are there not a lot of offices where everyone’s wearing their 🌈 lanyards and stating pronouns with 0 trans members of staff?!

*I don’t ‘condone’ this mockery, I applaud it., 😁