Brighton and Hove Council introduce pronoun badges

[RedToothBrush]

www.brightonandhovenews.org/2018/03/09/council-staff-given-thousands-of-pronoun-badges-so-public-dont-assume-their-gender/
Council staff given thousands of pronoun badges so public don’t assume their gender

If you don't wear a badge of course, you don't support the cause. This is thought policing on an epic scale.

I look forward to this policy being rolled out in Stoke, Hull, Blackpool, Hartlepool etc...

This is being roundly mocked on twitter. My favourite response -'How about a badge that says fuck off.'

I am so fucking glad I don't work there

Great use for council tax. I am sure local residents will be delighted...

Some badges are left blank so you can write in your own pronouns..... I can't foresee any problems with that!

Insisting that people wear badges to identify their assigned political classification. What a great idea! I wonder if anyone else has previously though badges to mark political classifications was a good idea?

I don't get it. I assume they're meaning the third-person pronouns, but if you're talking to someone face to face, surely you call them 'You'?

I mean, 'thou' or 'Your Highness' are also possibilities, I suppose.

What a waste of council money.

I've just discovered that the brightonandhove hashtag comes up with some very unsavoury results on twitter can someone link to said twitter outrage please?!

Yes! My pronouns are 'the most excellent' and 'the godlike genius'.

Sack whoever came up with this bullshit and wasted money on it rather than on road maintenance and the continuing struggling in the elimination of pot holes.

Who uses pronouns when speaking to someone anyway? Don’t understand the point of this.

What annoyed me about this most I think - and there were many, many, things - was the way it privileged the feelings of the council worker over their clients. Don't get me wrong, we should absolutely respect them, and I'm sure lots of them are on low pay (although I'm going to massively generalise and guess it's not going to be the street sweepers who've been calling for a badge). But lots of them will be dealing with vulnerable people in crisis, for example in regard to housing, and their thoughts amount to "I don't give a shit if there's a cock up with your housing benefit and you're facing eviction, respect my pronouns"

Rant over.

For a lot of people, these badges will serve as a useful label for those who have an, umm, 'unusual' approach to evidence-gathering. If they're going to deny biological reality then how can you expect rigorous logic in other matters?

--I also think this about religion but that's another matter-

read the link and then had to google International Transgender Day of Visibility
I still fail to understand why I am now living in a seemingly parallel universe which is wildly at odds with the one which I thought I inhabited.

Eh? Yeah, I can't ever see the need to use a third person pronoun when talking to/about a council worker.

At best you might say "I was here last week and your colleague told me.." but are you really going to remember what you read on a badge last week anyway? I probably wouldn't even remember somebody's name and would struggle to describe their appearance.

I think the people who will embrace these badges enthusiastically may well be very memorable to members of the public.

Nauticant

My preferred pronoun is Your Imperial Highness.

And if you don't call me that you are invalidating my existence and committing actual violence, you imperialphobes.

I find the insistence that all of us have a "preferred pronoun" incredibly tedious. I don't even have a preferred name.

Its not about pronouns its about power.

Well, indeed! And it's about enforcing the entire fiction of internal gender identity being the most important thing. If you are a gender-crit staff member, you are fucked coming and going - if you wear one, it's a nonsense, and if you don't, you might as well have "please ostracise me and pass me over for promotion" printed on a little motivational poster to go above your desk.

What you do is assign yourself into the special group to whom normal rules of behaviour don't apply. The non-group people then have applied to them a million and one arbitrary rules. These rules are largely invisible and it's not possible to avoid infringing them. The special group then actively polices the rules against anyone they don't like the look of.

Mine would be"shithead" just so someone would have to say "see shithead over there? That's the person you need to speak to, go and see shithead"

Fuck me, I've seen it all now!

This is making me think how about spend the money on teaching people to not be offended?

I mean the must be a tiny fraction of a percent of the population who this is going to be an issue for. Again it's just fucking virtue signalling. "Oh look, we should be proud of our council. We were the first to give out pronoun badges."