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.

Agreed as well as all the form filling asking for gender and clearly mean identity not biological sex. Options include non-binary etc.

Firstly, on those types of forms, there’s never an option to say I do not have a gender.

Secondly, if gender and biological sex are different things why are some organisations only asking for gender, such as the NHS or some work applications? If anyone can identify how they like and can be fluid, why are they even asking for this information because it can only create incredibly inaccurate data.

Gender data is subject to change without notice: sex stays the same, actual sexual orientation (lesbian/gay/bi) remains the same, but all the gender identities may alter at any moment, in some cases from day to day and certainly at the whim of the person declaring them. Do we expect someone who has said s/he is demigender to remember this and not say s/he is bigender next time (and not than cease to be a big endian * and convert to a little endian * the following week)?

Also, how could they fit all the genders on their form? Is their database set up for indeterminately large numbers of categories, each potentially with a single entry? If it is, what meaningful information is conveyed thereby? Because clearly it is unforgivable discrimination (possibly literal genocide) to limit people to a mere five or ten genders. And if it isn't, "none" should be an option.

*That's from Gulliver's Travels, nothing to do with computers.

For heavens sake, could you be more fragile? People who are scared to disagree say silent? These would be . . . people who are scared of pixels appearing on a screen, scared of words? There actually exist people who are scared to disagree? Oh yes, they just stay silent, poor sods, wilting in the corner, while we buggers wield words they cannot cope with. I'm pretty sure that these timid creatures have proliferated since 'pronouns' have been routinely brandished.

Timely reminder that looking at the voting, 91% think the OP is NBU.

Are all these people you are referencing too scared to vote also @Wordsmithery?

"My pronouns are: not / your / problem."

91% of voters who have been drawn to a transphobic thread, on a website with a notoriously obsessive, vicious cohort of transphobes.

😂😂😂

This might have flown in 2021. But not now.

If the people who think the OP is being unreasonable had noticed the thread – which is in AIBU, not hidden away in the fastnesses of the feminism ghetto – surely they'd have made use of the anonymous voting to make their disagreement with her known, even if they found her too contemptible or terrifying to address in writing?

I mean, I can (maybe) understand them being too scared even to venture into "Feminism: Sex and gender discussions", but this thread isn't in a scary part of the board full of dragons.

(The twerpies will now go and find all their friends in order to try to skew the vote, but we know that just over nine out of ten people who have voted so far have felt that the OP was NBU. It stands at 9% think she is being unreasonable, 91% think she isn't, and 840 have voted, just in case the pile-on is of more than half a dozen.... )

I remember a post from ages ago where a female police officer was young, fit , I think she did martial arts too, and had done all the police restraint training. Her male partner, who had none of the training and wasn't particularly large or fit overpowered her in a matter of seconds.

And yet there are still twerps who assert, in the face of all the evidence, that women are as able to defend themselves as men and as strong as men, and that to face the unpleasant reality that in general they are neither of these things is to insult all those women who are fit and do dangerous jobs.

Yes, I did once fight off a bloke who was planning to rape me (he stepped out of a gateway onto a dark pavement and told me his intention, offering me the choice of scream, try to run, or surrender gracefully and not get hurt). I saw him off by hitting him in the Adam's apple at full extended lunge with a rolled-up newspaper I was carrying in my hand, jumping on his ribcage to get past him after he fell over and made funny noises, and running like hell. This was clearly a totally unfair sneak attack by me because he was not expecting me to deviate from his script, and in any case had nothing to do with my strength and everything to do with being a county-level fencer with good reflexes and a bloody-minded attitude. It is not something I could do now, and I doubt that more than a few women in the country now could do it. You need both the skill and the mindset. In the same way, a women could fight off a man by releasing the tiger, if soft fruit were not good enough. (A Monty Python reference.) It proves precisely nothing about relative fighting ability if you lack a tiger or a rolled-up copy of the Evening Standard you had picked up on the Tube: if all women carried guns they could probably/possibly fight off men who were not carrying guns.

And yes again; fencing is a martial art.

We had a letter from the council the other week about bins. The individual from said council who’s in charge of bins had her pronouns under her signature.
How very helpful in the circumstances.
I mean, ffs, honestly.

Yes OF COURSE vast numbers of thinking mothers and women are ‘vicious transphobes’ 🙄 We couldn’t possibly be concerned about the irreparable damage this mad ideology does to children, or the erosion of women’s hard earned rights, safeties and dignities… oh no, of course the only explanation is that we all just get up in the morning in our evil lairs to obsess and be transphobic…

Get real.

And yet there are many folks with Adam’s apples who’ll tell you they’re Sheila, Tamara, Courtney. So, physical characteristics of any kind are obviously irrelevant. I just don’t need anyone’s pronouns announced, anymore than I need to know their blood type. A name will do just fine, Candace.

Anyone genuinely working for the safety of women and children is not focused on trans people.

The focus, Canadanian, is on defending women’s rights to single sex spaces and services.

Men, no matter how they identify, need to respect those rights and stay out.

Ounce the word women means women plus men who say they are women, the fox is quite literally in the hen house. How do we defend women and girls when the very definition of women or girl no longer exists?

But as you’re here, surely that means you’re one of the cohort of transphobes?…..

Exactly. That’s why women don’t give a fuck if men claiming to be sad if they can’t access female spaces feel sad. Not women’s problem. Glad you agree.

This is what I mean. Do you think these little gotchas that you spend your time on are helping a single woman or child?

I think for many of the ‘gender critical’ people I encounter on here, feeling like they’re the cleverest in the room or that they’ve ‘won’ is the whole point. I don’t believe that underneath it all is just care for other women’s safety.

Once again @Canadanianthe point is the defensive of women’s sex based rights.

Is that likely to get through to you any time soon?

Oh it is. I mean, as men commit 98% of sexual assaults and 100% of rapes, and TIM are men, standing up the genderborg and keeping men out of female spaces IS protecting women and girls. And actually, by reinforcing that sex is biological, the SC judgement even protected TIF and their rights, so therefore even protecting women and girls who don’t want to be women and girls. So yeah, GC women are doing an awesome job. Thankyou for noticing.

Oh I fully understand the narrative you tell yourselves, and each other and the world.

So if women defending women’s rights are transphobic, are you saying there is a conflict between women’s rights and trans rights?

Good. So why aren’t you supportive of that narrative? Why do you want to see women’s sex based rights dismantled?

You haven’t made a single woman safer. You’ve just made the world crueller and more unsafe for trans people.