Pronouns at work/being gender critical at work etc

[Leafstamp]

If you are a woman and have your pronouns in your email signature at work, can I ask why?

If you haven't given it much thought, are you open to being persuaded that, albeit in a small way, this practice of declaring pronouns is contributing to a movement that harms women, children and LGB people?

Equally, if you are already clued up on this and consider yourself a sex realist/gender critical are you able to be open about this at work and challenge instances were gender identity ideology is being unduly promoted? Do you find that others agree with you?

I work in a small company where none of this goes on, so I am curious.

So I guess I was thinking of a couple of things:

1. ’Queer’ is still considered a homophobic slur by some people,
2. Queer is generally not well defined, or very broadly defined so as to not really have much in common with LGB people. When it is linked to gender identity, which Stonewall does for example, then you get the homophobic notion of men being lesbians.

Does that answer your question?

https://unherd.com/2022/03/the-liberal-case-against-pronouns/

Yes, one of those shitty things is making female victims of male violence refer to their abuser “she” or “her” in court or elsewhere.

When a woman has to swear an oath to not lie in court and is then ordered by the judge to lie in court you realise how barmy it is.

When police are looking for a criminal and describe him as a 6ft tall woman flashing her penis at children you realise how far the tentacles of gender ideology have reached and how much it harms women in particular.

I'm a woman, I've thought about it, I support trans rights and trans people and I want to contribute to the normalisation of preferred pronoun requests. It's a very small way to make the world safer for a very marginalised and oppressed group.

The movement which is harming women, children, and LGBT people is the horrifying wave of reactionary transphobia which is the thin end of the wedge of enforcing gender conformity, attacking bodily autonomy, and eroding children's rights to safety. Misogyny and homophobia lurk behind it, and it's revolting. We stand together or we fall apart.

I work in a multinational company. I often can't tell the persons gender by name and it makes it easier to see their pronouns. I don't want to misgendered and I want to know how my transgender colleagues would like yo be assewsed. I also show how to pronounce my (typical British) name in my signature and appreciate it when others do too.

A colleague has her pronouns on her email but she has an unusual gender neutral name so this makes sense.

I’m not sure why I need to know if I am addressing a man or woman in an email or vice verse? How does saying he/her/they protect anybody? Having been at tge shitty end of sexual harassment specifically due to my sex plus good old fashioned Misogyny and discrimination I find I am still often treated differently because of my sex. Marking out a transperson in this way is not helpful to them either, it doesn’t give them protections in my view. I don’t subscribe to it and it should never be forced onto anybody.

Why does anyone at work need to know what sex you are over email? I have a typically feminine name. Fine. If my name had been ‘Chris’ I genuinely wouldn’t care if they ‘misgendered’ me. I’d only be concerned if they called me in for a prostate examination or the like that’s not relevant to me.

There was an example that a women with a unisex name put her pronouns as she/her and immediately got treated worse, due to her declaring she was female. I’ll see if I can find it.

I couldn’t agree more. I’d rather lose my job than comply with this bollocks

What’s trans rights? Currently trans people have the same rights as everyone else, so what else should I be supporting?

What transphobia are you seeing? I dispute that they are the most marginalised and oppressed group. That would be women. The ones with vaginas.

I can only speak for myself, but when I see it on the bottom of my colleagues emails, if I’m really honest I do have thoughts going through my head which are generally:

• eye roll 🙄
• they are a nice person that means well and thinks they’re supporting a minority group
• if I don’t know them already I can normally tell instantly what kind of age group they sre
• they are someone who lacks critical thinking abilities

🙈

Shitty things like losing their sporting opportunities and victories to male athletes called Emily, Laurel or Lia, being sexually assaulted in women's prisons by male inmates called Karen, and being unable to access any single sex rape crisis support in vast swathes of the country.

Those sorts of shitty things?

Preferred pronouns are one of the steps on the pathway towards those shitty things.

If you pretend a man is a woman, you then lose the ability to credibly object to him being in women's spaces.

I don’t think it’s a massive deal (not the whole trans thing - I mean the pronouns on emails specifically). I just think it’s all a bit silly and people with cringe about it in future.

Totally agree it's just supporting the T. But of course they're the most important letter...

I work in finance/accounting field and have a name that could be a man’s or a woman’s (albeit spelt differently but not many people seem to get that). No way am I advertising the fact I’m female- there was an experiment done once where a male and female professional swapped email addresses and the responses they got were markedly different from when they were using their own (with the ‘woman’ being treated far less favourably).

Also I’m intrigued as to people saying they find it helpful to know if the person they are emailing is male or female - leaving aside the issue of whether someone’s ’preferred’ pronouns are going to match your expectation - why does it matter? Are you going to speak to them differently because of this? (the study above suggests yes). Would it throw you as much if you expected someone to be blonde but they were actually brunette? In a professional setting I really can’t see why it matters. If it’s because of referring to them with the wrong pronoun to somebody else, surely if it’s ambiguous due to the name you just use ‘they’ until you work it out.

The field I work in is very international. With some Asian and African names, and hybrid working, it's really very helpful to know their pronouns from the email signature! Regardless of your views, most of us are embarrassed when we end up sounding ignorant xenophobes.

Inclusive practises often aids more than one group.

That said, I don't add my own pronouns. It doesn't bother me that much if people see my name (slightly unusual) and (male dominated) profession and postnominals and assume I must be a man.

You don't address someone with third person pronouns. HTH.

@Leafstamp

I think so, do you feel that term Queer has been taken from LGB people by the trans community, then?

Is that the crux of it?

I'm no expert on any of this, it's a complex issue. I do know some gay and trans people, and thought the term Queer becoming more commonplace was an attempt by the community at large to 'reclaim' the word.
Owning it and using it themselves to cleanse it of stigma and negative connotations.

I have a family member has gone from gay to straight via their transitioning- do you take issue with that? Does that make their belonging to the LG or B communities any less valid?

Again, asking genuinely and without malice - tone can be hard to convey online so I don't want to give the wrong impression!

People think they are supporting the LGBTQ community, but really it's just the T isn't it?

Radical trans ideology (and ideas stemming from "Q = Queer") is actually really homophobic, so people have got it wrong if they think they are supporting LGB people when declaring pronouns.

@Leafstamp I don't think all lesbian and gay people agree with you. But I see the point you are making.

What is an even easier thing to do is to put your title in your email signature, which is what people did before pronoun usage became a ‘thing’.
Mr = male
Mrs/Miss/Ms = female.
Easy!

I don't find I need pronouns to tell someone's sex. They tell other people what the pronoun pronouncer wants to be called.

Can you not tell when you meet them?

@Polecat07

I don’t believe there is such thing as “the trans community” and if I did I don’t think it is them that has particularly “taken” the term.

Sexuality is based on sex, not gender, so I don’t agree that your relative has changed sexuality due to whatever it is that they refer to as “transitioning”.

People can’t change sex, so “transitioning” makes no sense to me.

I deliberately use only my first initials where possible, for that exact reason.

Given that being known as female harms women's chances at work, and pronoun declarations force closeted trans people to either lie or out themselves and force questioning people to make a declaration that they may not be ready to make, how can it be even remotely inclusive to encourage pronoun declarations?

I refused mine. Boss was Ok with it.

I find “my pronouns are they/them” bloody odd. I was taught it was rude to refer to a person as he/she in their presence so if feels totally futile