Best responses for being asked for pronouns in person

[Seraphinite]

I’m going to a residential training course (not UK) and I suspect they will ask us for pronouns when we introduce ourselves on day one. (I’ve been to something with this organization before and have seen it)

What are some good responses I can give? Is saying ‘I prefer not to say’ best?

I don’t want to draw attention to it, be adversarial or open up discussion, I just don’t want to answer.

(For avoidance of doubt, I don’t buy in to gender ideology so that’s why I don’t want to answer. To me, stating my pronouns indicates I think it’s an ok question to ask in the first place )

Related to the above:

Something I've learned over the years is to be very careful about when and how you take up someone else's cause as your own.

Because you can fight for someone else, but you can't compromise for them.

So there is always a risk that if too many allies join a cause which is not their own, albeit from a genuine and laudable desire to help and make things better, they become a force for polarisation and extremism.

That doesn't mean allies should stay out of it - of course not! A demand for fairness and justice should always be supported by more than just the people directly involved.

What it means is that allies should be careful that in their desire to support and do the right thing, they don't shout so loud that their voices drown out the very people they are trying to empower, taking away those people's agency to define their own best outcome.

Pronouns aren't an ideology, for crying out loud, they're a part of speech. All it does is tell people how they should refer to you when talking about you in the third person, it's helpful for the same reason it's helpful to let people know what your name is, so they know what to call you when they talk to you or about you. If you'd rather people call you "um" or "thingy" or "them overthere" then by all means withhold that information, but it's your own life you're making awkward at the end of the day.

The English language has been developing for more than 1,400 years since the Anglo-Saxons introduced it. For 1,398 of those years we've managed to rely on our initiative to work out what to call people. We haven't needed any silly icebreakers to announce to the world that we are a man, or a woman - it is almost always obvious to the world.

I don't know about anyone else, but I'll have forgotten your name within seconds of you telling me so there's no chance of me remembering which made-up pronouns from the 1990s you use. Much easier to say what one sees.

@AlwaysLatte

Just give your preferred pronouns, they're not asking you to change them. Just to make sure they address you they way you like to be addressed.

Most people don't have 'preferred pronouns' , so why we should pretend we do?

Haven't read the whole thread, but the whole point of saying second person singular as suggested earlier is exactly that that IS the pronoun needed most in conversation. Yes, you can refer to someone in the 3rd p when they are there but much more likely to directly address them and in English the 2nd p is effectively neuter unlike 3rd p pronouns.

It’s impossible to remember them all
This is a pretty catastrophizing take, to be honest. In practice, most people's pronouns will match their presentation
Ha! So what you’re saying is, you’re relying on the majority of people to conform with the gender that matches their presentation, in order to reduce the mental load and make it easier to remember the pronouns of those who don’t conform? How discriminatory! Surely EVERYONE is entitled to have their own chosen pronouns hmm?

LuckyWookie

Pronouns should be sex based. And regardless of how people present, it’s pretty easy to tell what sex someone is in the vast, vast majority of cases. That’s just not what some people want to hear though. Tough.

DH's organisation has recently merged with another, and in order to provide introductions everyone has been asked (voluntarily) to provide preferred pronouns. In DH's part of the organisation, there is a very senior person who is transgender. That person has declined to provide preferred pronouns, stating that they will not be offended however people choose to address them. They are an older transgender person who has been living their life quietly for many years and not made any fuss about their gender. They are currently addressed in accordance with their presentation. As far as DH knows, there are 3 other transgender employees, out of 15000. Many of his staff have written to him expressing discomfort. His question is - if the one transgender person in his immediate area of work does not wish to provide pronouns, who are they doing this for? He concluded it is all very much virtue signalling rather than anything else.

I will say "I don't have a preference" if I am ever asked this. It hasn't happened yet.

I would not like to say "she/her" because although accurate it unnecessarily draws attention to my gender. Which is likely to be unhelpful to me as a woman.

I would prefer the use of "they" generally, especially at work, as non-gendered language is less likely to lead to discrimination against women. However I would not like anyone to think I was opting out of being a woman or that I was being demanding about other people's speech. So I would prefer to say "no preference".

@Sophoclesthefox

Then you’ve got Arabic, where all the verbs you use are conjugated according to the sex of the person that you’re talking to - so “how are you?” would be “kayf halak?” to a man and “kayf halik?” to a woman. What a minefield! I have no idea how Arab speakers are approaching preferred pronouns, would love to know.

I live in an Arabic speaking country. Generally, unless they're properly fluent in English, Arabic speakers default to male pronouns a lot anyway when speaking English.

eg my lovely (sadly no longer with us ) housekeeper could make herself perfectly understood in English 90% of the time - she was elderly, working class, completely uneducated (had never been to school), couldn't read in Arabic much less English, & had picked up spoken, functional English over many years of working for expats.

She'd come out with sentences like this: 'Corvus, your friend Bikky, I feed him cat, him sick, I hope him not die.'

It would take several follow up questions to establish if we were talking about Rebecca or Victoria, & if it was the friend or the cat who was sick.

If any of them had had a pronoun preference (maybe the cat did? Who knows? It turned out to be pregnant, not sick, FWIW) then frankly, she'd have struggled to comply.

I'm loving all the posts about different languages. In German, the word for girl 'maedchen' is not feminine, but neuter, because the suffix 'chen', meaning little, turns any noun neuter. This means adding it to any name as a term of endearment, eg. 'Katherinchen' means that any adjectives need to have neuter endings, not gendered ones. I don't know how the gender folk deal with that one.

Anything dismissive, eg

"Pass"

"The usual"

"You choose"

"Whatever"

I'm enjoying the segue into language discussion. I am also an ESL speaker and can confirm that spoken Chinese (various dialects) do not have gendered pronouns, nor does Bahasa Malaysia/Bahasa Indonesia. I know plenty of people who therefore mixed up he/she when conversing in English.

At the end of the day, for me, this is about women in the workplace.

I do think there are concerns about outing people who don't want to be outed and people with English as another language. But my primary driver is female inequality.

In my workplace, it is heavily male dominated. In a board meeting, a senior white man declaring himself a man by asserting he/him is at best neutral but really an assertion of power. Me, as one of the more junior people in the room and one of the few women, having to declare she/her is basically subordinating myself.

Unless you think misogyny does not exist, then declaring one's sex in public is NOT a neutral act.

For me, I have fought to get where I am in the face of overt sexism. I really object to being coerced into announcing that I am a woman before being allowed to speak in my professional role. It's not relevant.

LuckyWookie Pronouns should be sex based
I agree completely. But if we’re going down this route where people can choose their own pronouns, then EVERYONE must have the choice, not just a select few. Unfortunately that makes it impossible to remember what everyone has chosen because there are simply too many. I don’t find it reasonable to say that the majority must use sex based pronouns in order that the minority may choose their pronouns.

"Just use my name: 'she' is the cat's mother"

or

"For women, that question is a microaggression"

[quote CharlieParley]An ESL speaker would already have learned he/him, she/her, they/them as a beginner to the language, there's not any requirement for them to learn new pronouns, just the same ones they already know. There's no reason at all it should be any harder for them than anyone else. It's not like trans people don't exist outside English speaking countries either, so I don't know why you'd assume the concept would be particularly hard for someone just because they're ESL.

This is an ill-informed statement, I'm afraid. I'm not only an ESL speaker myself, I also work with/encounter many ESL speakers. More than half of all languages do not have he or she pronouns. This includes the two languages with the most speakers in the world - Mandarin Chinese (which introduced he and she in written Mandarin a hundred years ago, but in spoken Mandarin both pronouns sound the same and so functionally are the same) and Hindi.

Very many other languages spoken in Asia also do not know gendered third person pronouns. As do various Indo-European, African, Oceanien and American ones.

ESL speakers from those countries frequently confuse he and she. L1 interference in such a fundamental of language is hard to overcome even for ESL speakers with considerable language skills.

My native language is gendered for animate and inanimate objects. I speak and write English at a native level and work as a writer and editor in both English and my native language. And yet, gender is such a fundamental feature of my mother tongue, I still find it strange that a table or a flower or an apple is neutral in English. And in spoken communication I still occasionally use gendered pronouns for inanimate objects in line with my mother tongue.

That's because language transfer in regard to such fundamentals requires constant and considerable and conscious effort to overcome. And sometimes we're too tired or stressed or hurried or emotional to do it.

And in my view, the requirement to mis-sex contrary to the learned rule that he refers to a person of the male sex and she to a person of the female sex makes the whole problem worse. This adds considerably to the stress of a non-native speaker.

You demand consideration for those who do wish to dictate pronouns to others, because it matters so much to them their mental health requires compliance. That's fair enough - as I tell my kids, you can ask for anything you want.

You just can't have everything.

In turn, I'll repeat what others have asked of you before - consideration for those of us who struggle with that requirement (for instance those who are ESL speakers or neuro-diverse) and experience adverse mental health effects because of it.

P.S. and FYI I have attached a map showing a distribution of languages without gender (the white dots). It's from here: wals.info/feature/44A#0/-44/130[/quote]
Really interesting and informative post, thanks.

The blatant anglophone/Western culture bias of gender ideology is ok Because Trans presumably?

Really enjoying the wider language discussion
I didn't really learn English grammar at my comp school but learned more from my 3/4 foreign languages there (my Russian is shite so doesn't really count but still interests me!)
LinkedIn popped up to cheerily ask me for my pronouns today. Resisted the urge to put fuck/off or compelled/speech but might revisit later

'That question is a micro-aggression' - perfection.

I can't speak for ESL speakers, but as a 'neurodiverse' person with a communication disability, enforced pronouning presents a huge barrier to workplace inclusion and I'm grateful this has been brought up. It is not easy to have got the job in the first place, shown up and been socially acceptable all day, including the routine disruption of mandatory training and some unfamiliar person doing eye-contact lasers at your face. Now we must engage in some sort of plate-spinning, tap-dancing version of the Stroop test on top of all the other sensory input we are dealing with as best we can, and when we inevitably fail, we're being unkind at best and discriminatory at worst.

Truly appreciate those who are pushing back and citing neurodiverse inclusion as a reason - you are better allies than you know.

@MostIneptThatEverStepped

Do any non English speaking countries do this?

@MostIneptThatEverStepped

the pronoun thing is big in Spanish-speaking countries. I am not sure if has reached the work-space yet though.

The important difference with Spanish (and other latin-based languages) is that nouns and adjectives are gendered, so you do have to pick the 'right' one when talking to the person directly.

Not only that, but since 'they' is also gendered (ie a female and a male they) you cannot get away from using (or not) inclusive language. So as @PaleGreenGhost put it - you are constantly stating whether you are a performative ally or a bigot.

This is also unfortunately conflated with the feminist stance of not using male nouns/pronouns when talking about both males and females.

@IamAporcupine thank you so much for answering my question.
I did wonder whether Spanish speaking countries would find it just too unwieldy and not bother. Obviously just wishful thinking!

Sigh. The pronoun fans never do stick around when we get into the weeds on which populations this is bad for and why. Off being kind elsewhere I dare say. I’d love an answer sometime about why all of these excluded populations don’t count. I’ve been told that I’ve weaponised them in the past, I guess I will have to make do with that!

Agree with your post, too Johnny

In my workplace, it is heavily male dominated. In a board meeting, a senior white man declaring himself a man by asserting he/him is at best neutral but really an assertion of power. Me, as one of the more junior people in the room and one of the few women, having to declare she/her is basically subordinating myself

It’s not a neutral act for women.

@TirisfalPumpkin

'That question is a micro-aggression' - perfection.

I can't speak for ESL speakers, but as a 'neurodiverse' person with a communication disability, enforced pronouning presents a huge barrier to workplace inclusion and I'm grateful this has been brought up. It is not easy to have got the job in the first place, shown up and been socially acceptable all day, including the routine disruption of mandatory training and some unfamiliar person doing eye-contact lasers at your face. Now we must engage in some sort of plate-spinning, tap-dancing version of the Stroop test on top of all the other sensory input we are dealing with as best we can, and when we inevitably fail, we're being unkind at best and discriminatory at worst.

Truly appreciate those who are pushing back and citing neurodiverse inclusion as a reason - you are better allies than you know.

Sadly, @TirisfalPumpkin, the young generation of (often self-diagnosed) autistics seem to tend towards the ultra woke end of the gender/trans spectrum, going by the vast majority of the FB groups I’m in. Black and white thinking combined with gender ideology produces some very inflexible thinking about anything deemed to challenge the trans rights narrative.

Because you can fight for someone else, but you can't compromise for them.

This is very wise.

Blibby, I think your post is very clear and persuasive.
Can I ask – genuinely; I am woefully underinformed/have underthought about this issue and am trying to get my head
round it –
How is Trans Orthodoxy as the "only" way to accept and support trans people 'simply wrong'? How does it require 'those of us who are not trans to lie about ourselves and who we are'?

Again, absolutely genuine questions not a bid to start a fight. I would really welcome a discussion/some explanation on this.

How does it require 'those of us who are not trans to lie about ourselves and who we are'?

Because it's an ideological belief most people don't share, and for a feminist who centres women's rights and is critical of gender as a social construct which oppresses women having to say they have a "gender" or "preferred pronouns" is compelling them to lie about something they think is toxic.