@ManiPediNow
I'm sorry, perhaps I'm behind the times (I live abroad). What on earth is all this about? Why would anyone put pronouns on an email signature?
Like a pp, I don’t want to wake you up from your blissful ignorance, but if you really want to know... it’s all about the current movement which some call “trans rights”.
Some people think trans people are the most marginalised, vulnerable minority in the world ever, and that it’s inclusive and fair to bend over backwards to do whatever trans people (mostly biologically male) would like others to do.
Others think that this is a male supremacist movement masquerading as a civil rights one.
The vast majority of “transgender women” (that’s biologically male people who wish to be perceived by others as women) do not have any kind of surgery and some don’t bother with synthetic hormones either. So they tend to look very visibly male. Some even keep their beards along with their penis. Very few actually pass as women.
As a result it isn’t always clear if someone thinks of themself as a man or a woman and so the preferred pronouns are a way of telling the world what you want to be seen as.
Some people claim they’re neither men nor women but something called “non binary” and these people often like to be referred to as “they” instead of he or she, so this is another option for preferred pronouns.
I don’t know where you’re living because this is happening all over the western world, so I guess it must be somewhere else. We are seeing as a result of this ideological movement the end of women’s single sex spaces: hospital wards, women’s refuges, rape crisis centres, swimming pool changing rooms, prisons - all can be accessed by male people who “identify as women”, regardless of the fact these people for the most part will be clearly, visibly, audibly male; regardless of the impact that has on the women and girls for whom these spaces and services were originally intended.
Don’t get me started on sport.
Female physiotherapists who do home visits turn up at a client‘s home expecting to treat a woman but find their client is male. To question this, to even mention that there is a different level of risk for a woman alone with a male person rather than with a female person, is “transphobic” - which is pretty much a sacking offence, especially in public sector orgs like the NHS.
In a nutshell: the mantra of the trans rights movement is:
Trans Women Are Women.*
We are now supposed to believe that if a male person claims to have a “female gender identity” then that person is literally a woman and there is no material difference between that person and someone who is biologically female.
If we don’t believe this then we are dreadful bigots on a par with Nazis and deserve to be vilified, doxxed, punched, raped, sacked, ostracised, generally put in the bin.
For some reason, this movement centring male people has done extraordinarily well in the male dominated world we live in, has achieved much, much more legislative and cultural change in a short time than any other civil rights movement there’s ever been. But trans people are still the most victimised, marginalised and vulnerable people who ever existed, much more so than boring old female people who are after all close to being treated like full human beings these days.
If you discount the endemic sexual assault and harassment that is, of course, and the DV, and the murders, and then there’s the pay gap, oh and the portrayal of women in culture, and the way men still control so much of the narrative, and the fact that everything from seat belts to drugs are manufactured and tested on men, not women; and the reproductive rights (or lack of) and the maternity discrimination, and - oh well, there’s FGM and “honour killings“ and rape as a weapon of war, and 90% of the world's wealth being in men’s hands.
Not that that’s a comprehensive list of the ways women are still disadvantaged and dehumanised, but still, it’s not so bad, is it! We’ve never had it so good, after all.
Bet you wish you’d never asked now.
*the full mantra is:
Trans Women Are Women
Trans Men Are Men
Non Binary Identities Are Valid.
Give you three guesses how far this whole thing would have got if the main/leading protagonists had been female people who identify as men though.
Hint: females who identify as men are specifically excluded from inheriting under UK primogeniture laws, even if they get a GRC and a new birth certificate that (falsely) says they were male at birth.