I am being asked to go into a meeting and introduce my pronouns to everyone in an hour and a half!

[WhatTheFuckHappenedHere]

I am part of a work group tasked with running a big event that will take almost a year to plan. The first meeting is in an hour and a half over Zoom. The organiser, who I've never met, and goes by they/them pronouns according to the email signature, sent round an email reminder this morning with the meeting link, and including an agenda. The first thing on it is to introduce ourselves, our work area, an our gender pronouns. I don't really want to do this, but I need to work with this person and the group as a whole for the best part of a year! I'm feeling like I'll just have to go along with it lest I get accused of enacting literal and actual violence. Any advice?

@ArabellaScott

Oh, aye, fond of his column, I bet.

😂

I'd say my pronouns are fluid

I ran an online session and one lady had both sound and video off.
At the end she turned them on
She had been grooming a pony the whole time grin

Internet grooming is no laughing matter, I hope you called the police.

Thank heavens it was a pony and not a goat - I wouldn't want anything to do with someone who was grooming kids on the internet.

Goats on zoom! Whoda thunk it? Well apparently they have ...

www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/no-kidding-farmer-hiring-out-18183020

Oh, aye, fond of his column, I bet.

Well done, OP: excellent passive resistance - and I don't mean that snidely - it's often the most effective way to resist because it's harder to challenge when people can't be sure whether it's deliberate.

When I"m asked to state my pronouns - which will inevitably happen sooner or later - I'm planning to say, "I don't identify as needing to state my pronouns". Polite, not unprofessional but also gobbledegook while sounding vaguely woke, so difficult to challenge.

If you want to give your pronouns, great.

If not, then people will most likely assume them based on your appearance.

(she/her, by the way)

probably researching for his wife/sister/friend etc.

I suspect he was going to stick his male nose in and tell the women that discussing their female health concerns was exclusionary!

I'm genuinely wondering now whether she was literally grooming a pony or whether it's a euphemism I've never heard ...

disappearing
I can absolutely vouch for the lady that it was a very pretty welsh Cob
which I have met when working at her house

it was the fact that it was totally in character for her that made it all the funnier

just rather rural

@WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll

El Presidente

"My pronouns are Boutros/Boutros/Ghali"

🤣🤣🤣🤣

Interested to know where the phone was during the grooming. Are there special horse phone holders on the market?

@WhatTheFuckHappenedHere

Oh and the self care, this is more or less along the right lines. Yes we really were instructed with these things.

I mean really, everyone knows to have a wee and grab a brew before the meeting and in any breaks don't they?

I think they should have gone round the meeting and asked if everyone had a standing up wee or a sitting down wee!

@roarfeckingroarr

Read this to DP. His response: what total bollocks. Tell her to say her pronouns are "captain knobhead".

That cracked me up @roarfeckingroarr. My husband had someone mention pronouns for the first time in a meeting the other day. He said his eyes could not have rolled any more than they did.

Maybe we should all be stating where we stand on the Great Marmite Divide, just so we know.

Del
Pro marmite

Glad it passed without incident OP. It's just cringeworthy isn't it. Luckily for me, my organisation is very, very unwoke, so it'll hopefully be a while before i come up against this. But I do feel like it's just another level of self absorption from the people suggesting it. I find it bad enough saying who I am and what my role is, without all that other unnecessary stuff.

I'm so so glad this hasn't come up at my work yet as, being very honest, I'd just be irritated.

I refuse to engage with any of it and will not be told that I have to state what 'my pronouns are'. Seriously. Fuck right off.

Common sense really does need to prevail as it's all going a bit mad. I have no issue at all with people living however they wish, transitioning however they wish and therefore wanting to be referred to in a different way to how they had been previously.

But. And this is the big one for me. I personally feel that this shouldn't then impact on everyone else who would otherwise quite happily just carry on as they have done for all their lives being referred to as befits their biological gender.

The pronouns I wish to be addressed by are 'you' and 'yours'. Or if we happen to be in Yorkshire, 'Tha's' is acceptable. The way people refer to me in the third-person when I'm not present is up to them.

I came across a nice, polite pushback in my ruminations on this topic earlier: 'my pronouns are whatever yours are'. Watch the sheep-witted conformists scratch their heads while they try to work that one out ...

PS. Link to the horse phones, please, I want!

I have tried to understand what becoming nonbinary would change in how others treat a person.

Suppose I declared myself nonbinary tomorrow (as I like to think of myself as a human being with varied interests and hobbies which often fail to neatly fall into the Barbie doll and GI Joe categories). Would I suddenly get a raise so that my earnings would be somewhere between male and female average for my occupation? Would suddenly nobody be interested in sexually harassing me? Would I be safer walking out alone at night?

I honestly mean that I don't understand which actual changes someone expects to happen. Maybe this is why the pronouns are so central in what I have read?

I very much like 'whichever pronouns will get me a higher salary', and in the unlikely event of my very unwoke work place embracing this nonsense, that's what i'll go for

My standard response is that I am a post gender individualist and I find the use of pronouns oppressive. I therefore request people to use my name at all times, eg. Wizwoz went to the canteen by Wizwoz-self.

In between enjoying this thread, so many excellent suggestions, I made a very infuriating discovery at work (nhs).
The hospital recently introduced a sort of workplace messaging service, Facebook lite for individual organisations. I think it's called "workplace". It's very annoying, suddenly my email filled up with notifications and suggestions I join, endless inane chit chat.
Anyway I did join, mainly because I wanted to read a discussion about car parking as parking permits (now free thanks to coronavirus) are always a hot topic of contention. Coming back from a weeks holiday there were so many notifications on my email I couldn't find my actual emails that I needed to see. A colleague explained I could turn them off by going into the settings.
And guess what, there in my settings I find I have been assumed as having "neutral" pronouns!
I was so cross. Couldn't decide whether to change to female pronouns as thankfully the choices were limited to female, male or neutral but decided even making the change would dignify giving the option.

Tomorrow I will delete but then I fear the unsolicited notifications will resume.

“I don’t celebrate birthdays. It was my 8th birthday when we went for a family picnic in Yosemite park. We set up camp next to old faithful. A freak hot blast and my entire family was spontaneously combusted, apart from me because I was peeing behind a bush at the time. I’m too triggered to answer your questions about birthdays... I have problems peeing too...”

There is nothing wrong with 'they' and 'them if you're talking about a hypothetical person or somebody of unknown sex - and I would agree that these are genuinely neutral terms in this context; but in what way is it 'neutral' to default to 'them' for a person identifying as Miss, Mrs or Ms? Of the people who use these titles, 99.999% of them identify as 'she/her', so why ever would anybody think it neutral to assume that somebody is one of the 0.0001%?

It's not like the sky is going to fall in if the wrong sex-based pronoun (or one that the person in question rejects) is used:
"I'm meeting a friend for lunch today."
"Oh, nice - where are you meeting her?"
"Him, actually - we're going to the new cafe in the high street."
"Sounds great - hope you both have a nice time."
Not awkward in any way.

Pronouns are not a value judgement - just a socially-accepted way of referring to somebody - and neither standard one is better or worse. Your pronouns don't own you, define you or dictate what you can or can't do with your life, any more than the name of the road you happen to buy a house on.