AIBU to find pronoun introductions patronising?

[superlint]

I was in a meeting this morning and a woman introduced herself saying ‘Hi, my name is Maureen and my pronouns are she/her'

I genuinely haven’t heard anyone say this for years. As she was clearly a biological female and had a female name it sounded both patronising and virtue signalling. We all knew she was a woman within a second of seeing her.

I have never not immediately been able to tell someone’s sex and quite frankly in a meeting you use people's names not pronouns so it’s totally unnecessary.

AIBU to think pronoun announcements sound ridiculous.

Hats even funnier when they do that. Most of the NB people I know are sad middle aged men who believe a stupid haircut and a bit of eyeliner mean they’re special and not a normal middle aged married bloke.

It’s really quite ridiculous. You mostly use peoples pronouns when they’re not there and it’s a bit presumptive to dictate what you should call them when they’re absent. My pronouns are I, me and myself. 😂

I think you’ll find you’re outnumbered here!

Where I work we were encouraged to add our pronouns to our emails . Many of us didn’t. Why do we need to know if someone identifies as a male / female at work? When writing assessments I can’t say he / she for “fluid “ identifiers , I have to say “they” . This sounds like plurals not the individual person. I suspect it’s just a fleeting phase which will be forgotten and looked upon with some ridicule in the future ?

😂😂😂😂

Men are physically much stronger than women and men are the ones who commit rape.

I was very surprised that the PP purported to be unaware of these two facts; is he/she/it/fi/fo/fum from the planet Zog? Or perhaps one of those spiders whose female eats the male after coition?

Intolerant and judgemental - oh the irony! 🙄

Yes they are the ones who commit sexual assault by en large, but to say that men are physically stronger than women is incredibly offensive to all the women who work dangerous jobs to keep the likes of you and me safe from harm.

Are you actually joking?

Women are not as capable of defending themselves physically. That’s why we have male and female sports because male physiology is so much more powerful. Plus men commit most of the violent and sexual crime.

If women were ‘just as capable of defending themselves’ you wouldn’t have situations like the Chibok girls or the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan at the moment against girls and women at the hands of the Taliban.

Wake up.

I think that time is now judging by the voting on this thread.

Strength comparisons

The core data is unambiguous.
For upper-body muscles,
adult female strength is 50–60% of adult male strength (Nuzzo 2023).
For lower-body muscles, it is 60–70%.

In population-level grip strength data from the NHANES national health survey (n=13,918+), fewer than 0.1% of women exceed the median male grip strength. Even elite female athletes in grip-intensive sports (judo, handball) reach only the 25th percentile of untrained men (Leyk et al. 2007).

The difference is structural and hormonal: men have 15–20× higher circulating testosterone than women, producing ~40% more fat-free mass and significantly larger type II muscle fibres.

Olympic weightlifting world records show a 36.8% male advantage; across all strength and speed disciplines, the gap is stable and has not narrowed since 1983.

I wish you would give over and stop talking a load of old foetid dingoes' kidneys.

A very few women are stronger than some, not all, men. Most women are weaker than even weak men, although they can keep on working or walking for longer than most men. They are likely to have equivalent lower body strength to men, but as little as half the upper body strength. In a fight, all but very few women will be defeated by all by a very few men.

My daughter was in the army. Guess what? She was and is not as strong as most men of her weight even though she was working in a dangerous job to keep the likes of you safe from harm. (She yomped better, though, even while carrying more than her own weight in a bergen.)

Now, if you'd had the sense to assert that a woman trained in a martial art is likely to be able to defeat a man with no such training, you'd be talking less rubbish; then all you have to do is make martial arts training compulsory for all women, and forbid it to men, and we'd be better-able to defend ourselves. Unless we were pregnant, recently post-partum, or elderly, perhaps; we're not exempt from sexual assault just for those conditions, as the elderly grandmother raped in a churchyard on her way home from midnight mass would probably tell you rather forbiddingly: I imagine she, like me, would think you an ass.

superlint
Olympic weightlifting world records show a 36.8% male advantage; across all strength and speed disciplines, the gap is stable and has not narrowed since 1983.

Does that include men claiming to be female? Quite a few such cheats have been around in the past twenty years or so, and I'd expect that to have changed the stats a bit if their results are recorded as being those of women.

Oh, I didn't realise you didn't know this - you may be reading threads in Chat, Litterbox, Pedant's Corner, whatever and come across one whose title indicates you wouldn't be interested in it. This does happen, I know, but here's a nifty little trick. Don't read it. Simples.

Well, perhaps it affects people differently because we are all different?

I think you've quoted the wrong poster because I am interested in thus thread 🙂

Yes, quick put the thread on the quarantined zone lest people discover that over 90% of the respondents think that sharing preferred pronouns is coercive crap.

Pronouns in English are by sex. Look at how any young child learns to speak; they use pronouns by the observed sex of the person/animal they are talking about.

You can’t force a change in English usage by coercion and forced adoption of gender identity theory.

We are mammals; sex is important to us, sexed pronouns are useful to us so that is why they evolved that way.

Perhaps people echo because they agree and it is what most people think?
You are free to express your views. Or not if you don’t want to. It’s only a mumsnet thread.

This is obviously nonsense, but frankly you'd already lost me at "by en large".

Edit: the second part is nonsense. I agree that men commit most sexual offences.

nutmeg7
We are mammals; sex is important to us, sexed pronouns are useful to us so that is why they evolved that way.

To be fair, I have a feeling that in Armenian, Basque and Finnish they didn't. Or mostly didn't. And there are some others where it's pretty unimportant, such as a few of the Chinese ones, and some Turkic, and Swahili sticks in my mind but I may be wrong about that one.

The point being I don’t own the pronouns another person uses about me to talk to others. That’s why they are “third person” pronouns.

They exist for quick communication to avoid repeating someone’s name. In normal English as the language has developed, they are sex based.

I would not join in. I dislike that I was asked my pronouns when having a CT scan on an old wound recently. The NHS is in my experience terrible for this.

I think you are right but the one thing they don’t do in those languages is use the opposite word to name something incorrectly within that language.

Happy to refer to someone sad
Alive to refer to someone dead
Man to refer to a woman

Language is important

We can however explain that a man can have feminine traits and a woman could have masculine traits but in either case the nouns man and woman cannot be used for the opposite in any circumstance. And therefore the pronouns cannot be changed because they are sex based.

The word "man" is a singular noun referring to one adult human male, while "masculine" is an adjective describing qualities typical of men, such as strength or traits associated with men.

You're right. My apologies.