Pronouns

[idontlikealdi]

I know this has been done to death on the feminism boards, but it's always been something I've read about and not encountered.

I the last few weeks I have had a slew of people on LinkedIn / clients / colleagues add pronouns to their sign off.

I work in a global capacity, no one not in the UK is doing this. I don't care what you identify as as long as you complete the job. Of the very few people who don't identify as they present, just tell me once and we're sorted.

I'm getting RAGE. It's fucking ridiculous. I'm thinking of adding giraffe / goat / duck to mine.

YABU - everyone should do it
YANBU - it's virtue signalling wokeness, at best.

For those stating that women can have male facial builds-
Yes. That’s true. Believe me, I’ve been asked if I’m a man or a woman so many times that it’s unreal. I have a masculine name too.

But it doesn’t change the fact that I am, in fact, female. That’s a fact written in my genetic code. I don’t care if people call me “he” by accident because my sex is immutable, and pronouns in emails irritate me to no end because being female isn’t a list of attributes people have, you can’t just become female because you like cleaning and cooking. That’s a gender role and it is a method of oppression.

To wear a method of oppression and to say it makes you a woman? That’s offensive.

Announcing pronouns is pandering to a regressive ideology.

I recruit at a relatively high level, and automatically disregard anyone who has their pronouns in their signature or CV.

It's a good bellwether, actually. I don't want staff who believe in gender nonsense.

Other people doing it doesn't bother me at all, other than it seems when people put pronouns in brackets in online meetings, my pronunciation guide for my name that I put in brackets in online meetings because that's important to me gets ignored a lot more even when I repeatedly correct people.

While it's not forced on social media, the idea it isn't forced in some areas isn't entirely true. I've had forms and conference registration that have made pronouns a required field. Each time I've listed that I prefer not to say for pronouns on those types of forms, I've ended up with issues up to not being sent information that others had. I also hate forms requiring titles though have seen 'None' or 'Prefer not to say' in the drop down a few times which was a relief and seems a good way to handle 'computer says we have to have this'.

I'd far rather see how other people gender me than have to give an identity - in fact, my gender dysphoria gets worse when I'm asked to do that, something about having to label an identity to others makes part of my brain freaks out. That some people don't seem to get this has made things harder and yes, makes it lonely when people assume that I'm just being an asshole for managing my own mental health.

I understood gender to be a protected characteristic, but now you are saying it doesn't exist. Bizarre.

While some workplaces have added it to their own policies as a protected characteristics and some places use gender to mean sex when they shouldn't, legally it's sex and gender reassignment that's are protected characteristics, not gender.

How can you tell someone's sex by looking at them?

Really really easily in about 99.999% of cases. With a slightly longer glance in the remaining 0.001%.

I mean, seriously... if you got someone to view a line-up of, say, 1000 randomly selected adults, for how many of the 1000 would they get the sex wrong?