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.

like a training session, we’re encouraged to describe in very basic terms how we look

So a Black person is encouraged to describe their skin colour and, in doing so, draw attention to their race? That's legally risky. What if someone has a facial disfigurement or is visibly fat? Would I get reprimanded for saying "and I have 34H breasts?" If so, why is that different from describing any other part of me?

My physical appearance is the least important thing about me. Asking me to describe it is like asking me to describe myself as though I were an object or a newborn baby. It's reducing me to the status of an object to be looked at and reinforcing the patriarchal idea that women's most important attribute is their physical appearance.

There is every such thing as sexism. That's the point!

Ok found the post from earlier:

1 - coerced corporate drones with no agency to refuse something that is actually harmful to them as women.
or
2 - they are actual willing idiot handmaids.

or
3 - they are thick and don’t even know why they’re doing it.

I don’t find this very constructive. I’m interested in other points of view. I don’t think this sort of name-calling furthers anyone’s cause.

Do you never write reports / messages or have discussions with others along the lines of “spoke to Sam in Legal about the Jones case and she informed me that it’s still ongoing”? It’s very clunky using names rather than pronouns in every case and some people seem very uptight about just using “they”…

Which begs the question, why does it matter if the Dr or Prof is a he or she

I work with a multinational workforce and I frequently have no idea what sex someone is. When I search for them in an open plan office, I look at the name labels on the desks.

Read the thread.

Our Service Desk, to the last (wo)man, has taken to using "the user" in place of sexed pronouns 100% of the time.

“Spoke to Sam in Legal about the Jones case and the user informed me the case was still ongoing” doesn’t really work

So you can refer with the appropriate prononun when referring to them in the third person.

"I can recommend Dr Hayes. He (or She) is the best professional to treat this condition. His (or Hers) patients are always satisfied with...blah blah blah"

"Spoke to Sam in Legal about the Jones case: it is still ongoing".

Why does everyone forget the humble colon?

Well it might be different in that I work for a very small company that would love a ‘sam in legal’ that i’d never met before (they could take on a lot of my work), but yes, if i had never met Sam before I would say ‘them’ if talking about them to others. If I was writing a report/minutes I’d put ‘SB informed the board that the Jones case is still ongoing’. Honestly at work pronouns aren’t an issue for me. Im not uptight about using ‘they’ and can’t really understand how others would be in a work context.

Doesn’t convey quite the same message.

Plus colons are against our company style guide 🤷‍♀️

It’s not compulsory and if you don’t want to, you don’t have to. Not everyone does. Encouraged is probably the wrong word. We started doing it to make meetings more inclusive to visually-impaired people.

I have no idea what would happen if someone said their breast size as no-one’s done it yet.

You introduce yourself so you describe yourself as you like. It’s not written for you. The men do it too. Some people say their skin colour and hair colour from memory. Maybe I wear glasses. I am not visually impaired so I sort of gloss over that bit.

Here’s some more about it: https://vocaleyes.co.uk/services/resources/digital-accessibility-and-inclusion/self-description-for-inclusive-meetings/

I really hate 'they'. It so bloody confusing in a conversation.
'They' is plural.

I definitely would not use 'they' at work even if asked - I draw the line!
Just plum for a sex, any will do if you must be awkward!

Nah, drop it. It does not work. You may get away with it in around 5% of the cases. But as soon as you start writing more elaborate sentences you are going to need the pronouns.

"Sam had to escalate to her supervisor the incident initially reported by one of her colleagues. She thought it was serious enough to involve her line manager"

Now try me to humble-colonise or the-user that. It is not feasible.

This bit, I agree with: "Name yourself, and repeat your name every time you speak".

The bit where we are expected to lampshade all the things that will make people treat us as lesser, like race, sex, age, and disability, has me screaming inwardly. Meeting a blind person is one of the few times where I don't get presumed to be incompetent on the basis of age and sex before I've even opened my mouth, so I have to say "I'm female, in my forties"? Fuck that noise.

You do realise that women on gaming servers have to disguise their voices to avoid sexual harassment, right? The same people who harass women on gaming servers also have jobs and they don't leave their attitudes at home.

" Spoke to SK. SK had to escalate incident to supervisor. Incident was initially reported by SK colleague. SK felt incident sufficiently serious to need line manager involvement. "

Theres always a way to write without using pronouns.

I use the English grammar that I have used since I was at school! They ,them etc is poor grammar..sorry!

Sam had to escalate to her supervisor the incident initially reported by one of her colleagues. She thought it was serious enough to involve her line manager

"One of Sam's colleagues reported an incident. Based on its severity, Sam escalated it to line management."

I'm a Wikipedia editor. We write entire biographies without pronouns sometimes.

In all honesty I wouldn’t report anything in this way at work unless perhaps in informal conversation with people I knew well enough not to need an email signature to know what pronouns they’re not going to be offended by. In a professional context and anything that might be subject to a FOI request I’d be wording it more like ‘the incident regarding x was reported by SB as it was considered to be a breach of [insert policy]. It really doesn’t need an email signature from Sam to help me do this. I’d have to double check but i’ve written numerous board minutes and I don’t think she, him, her or his have ever been written in them.

Someone once asked me what my pronouns were, when I was 8 months pregnant.

My answer was "take a wild guess"

It is interesting how discombobulated some people are when they've assumed from Alex's emails they are female, and then he turns out to be male (or vice versa). Why is that a situation we should worry so much about preventing?
If I was exchanging emails with a funny and upbeat colleague, and when I met her got a shock to find she was a wheelchair user, I wouldn't conclude, Oh everyone should put their wheelchair-user-status in their email signatures. I'd conclude I was being silly to assume all wheelchair users must be solemn or miserable.

Yes, I somehow formed an impression that someone I regularly received emails from was a fairly elderly man (in my head he was balding and wore brown cardigans). Moved workplace and it took me ages to connect the person who I had emailed regularly with the rather sharply dressed twenty something with plenty of his own hair who I had been chatting to when making a coffee

It wouldn't have changed the tone of my emails, because they are always polite and professional, but it did teach me a lesson about the pictures we hold in our head

Agreed, unless I know them well and the emails are informal then my writing style is like yours