Pronouns campaign being launched at work

Many times this.

If anyone can read this and not understand how being a female hasn't caused me to have a challenging emotional relationship with my sexed body then they're incredibly dense. I'd love to know what parts of this can men actually identify with? My experience of womanhood isn't about femininity. It's about being a woman and all the risks, pain and joy that brings with it.

I am wrestling with my gender, so it would be accurate, and also nobodies business.

Lies all round. It would be do much easier if we simply weren't put in these situations by the MRAs.

Exactly. I've not yet been asked/told to add the pronoun signature yet, but if I am, I'll respond with integrity and self-respect.

Nah, you don't owe a bigoted bully trying to coerce you into a quasi religious purity test- which is precisely what the pronoun police are - a single solitary sentence about your life, beliefs or anything else at all. You owe yourself protection from any nosy coercive bigot who's asking you ridiculous questions.

And only you decide if you will share anything personal about yourself with bigoted coercive bullies - or anybody else at all for that matter in a workplace particularly when THEY approach YOU with stupid requests, demands and coercive bigotry.

Don't be fucking ridiculous.

"I'm not comfortable talking about my gender identity" or "my gender identity is private" would also suffice, without being untrue.

It's interesting that so many people on this thread love this option, when usually regular contributors to this board insist that they refuse to lie/have their children lie by using a trans person's new name or chosen pronouns.

Apparently honesty is only important in one direction.

Exactly! People trip over themselves to do The Right Thing without actually thinking about it.

Nobody has pronounced my name (first and last) correctly for a good 25 years. Even people who can say my name correctly, mispronounce it when they talk about me because otherwise other people don't know they are talking about me. It's really not worth everyone's time me trying to teach people how to say it, half of the allocated time of a meeting would be gone before we all give up.

Exactly. All those snowflakes on Reddit etc complaining about being “misgendered”. As you say, they must have bigger problems than they realise. Or, conversely, not many problems at all if that’s the most important thing in their lives don’t you think?

I do find I am naturally removing sexed references from
my language at work - it’s not often I need to use pronouns for anyone in an email tbh, and I use ‘hi all’ or ‘hello team’ as collective references. ‘Sam has been contributing to this project and can update you at the meeting. I look forward to seeing Sam and everyone at the away day’ works fine.

I refused to do it. Nothing happened.

I like people having pronouns on their signatures. I work with lots of people from other countries with unfamiliar (to me) names. It helps me work out how to refer to them in emails.

When you say your name, you demonstrate how to pronounce it. You don't need to do it twice.

😂😂😂 hats off to Richard!

Hahaha this has just reminded me of an all company meeting (we're an SME) where the CEO - who is captured with a trans identified kid - was so concerned about doing "The Right Thing" he asked new starters to say their name, pronouns and how to pronounce their name. Everyone ignored pronouns and the first person was like "My name is Richard, pronounced... Richard" 😂😂😂

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/01/15/labour-council-tells-staff-pronouns-before-meetings/

It’s not this council by any chance?

thankfully we don’t have this at my (corporate) job. I don’t really get it though. We have one trans woman working with us who has added she/her voluntarily, but she’s already transitioned and has a very obvious “she” name, there’s no way anyone would “misgender” on an email and call her “he” or be confused (she’s not something gender neutral like Sam, Jordan, Charlie, Harper etc)
I also have an obvious “she” name so no one would refer to me as “he” either. Unless they were entirely stupid.
What’s the point? Someone I know called John has put “he/him” on his linked in profile. No fucking shit John!

You do realise how offensive it is to many trans people to be asked whether they'd like to be known as she, he or they? If they feel are presenting clearly as a 'man' or a 'woman' its extremely triggering to have their pronouns requested rather than assumed from their presentation.
Asking for pronouns is one of the few areas where GC people and the trans community often see eye to eye, albeit for different reasons.
Would you tell a trans person objecting not to be so fragile or mock their concern?

This is magnificent

You mean like: "Transwomen are women! Transmen are men! Non binary people are valid!" ?

How quaintly retro of your company, OP. Are they generally behind the times?

This kind of nonsense makes me so grateful I work for myself these days. But back in my corporate days I would either have smiled and nodded and made the right noises, if pressed, but somehow never got round to it (‘oh, just been so busy on <insert number one priority project that nobody would argue is less important than playing Genderwang>). Or I would have just done a version of ‘I don’t do that’, depending on the culture and what I could get away with.

Stonewall will be going bust any minute now, so if you just stall for a while it’ll likely just quietly die a natural death. Tiresome though.

If I were feeling brave I’d email the DEI person and to say that the Kings College polling recently indicated that 39% of the population think that trans rights have “gone too far” so it’s a surprising and possibly inflammatory time to roll out pronouns. GC people are actively looking to support people in bringing employment tribunals so they should be careful… Could they organise a quick anonymous survey for employees to provide feedback before the roll out? If they don’t do a consultation it seems like they’ll potentially open themselves up to a lot of risk with maybe 40% of staff while debate is so heated?

it flags all the risks and will hopefully illicit honest feedback that knocks it on the head…?

I agree.

Thankfully we don't have this where I work, though a number of people voluntarily place their pronouns in their email signature. Though the one person who has transgendered and now uses a different name does not.