Pronouns - sooner than expected - help

[IamAporcupine]

I work in academia, in a medical research setting, and was quite pleased with the absence of the pronouns nonsense.

We are setting up a new large research proyect (which I will be coordinating) and have a couple of organizational meetings coming up next week. There is quite a bit of information to collect from each participating centre so we decided to create a survey for them to fill in beforehand. A young male new employee was assigned this task.

He's just sent it to me to review. There, on the first page, after 'Name' and 'Email address' is 'Pronouns'. Fuck.

I was certainly not expecting having to deal with this at work so soon, and at this level. I have filled in surveys myself where I made clear I did not believe in GI, but those were either anonymised or I did not care who read them. This is different. This will likely be me coming out as GC. I have no idea what the rest of the team thinks.

Can anyone in a similar situation help me find the best way to deal with it?
Shall I simply send it back with a 'delete this' amongst all the other changes (if there are any, I haven't even checked yet) and wait?

I will be working with this guy for the next 3-4 years. He seemed nice enough. Young and unexperienced, but keen. And kind, as I will likely find out.

Is gender relevant to the study? If not I would consider this to be an inappropriate question to have.

No, gender is not relevant to the study - we are recruiting patients for genetic analysis. But in any case, the pronoun question is not even for the patients themselves, but for the referring clinicians...

I suspect young people just blindly jump on this bandwagon now without thinking.

I agree. It seems like a standard protocol - you ask: name/pronoun. Total nonsense.

Not if Sam's participation is simply the passing on of data. It would make no difference at all. OP, as she has said, would have no need to know or use Sam's preferred pronouns.

How do you envisage knowing them would make anything easier in this situation?

And I'd say Sam, and the name of Sam's organisation. Probably mostly the organisation.

Fairly simple and by far the most natural way to refer to Sam in this situation.

Wonder how we knew before "pronouns" ? 🤔

Thanks for trying, but we are all perfectly capable of telling whether the collaborators are male or female.

Absolutely, and I doubt I will be using any pronouns at all if I want to make sure everybody knows what they are supposed to be doing!

Yes 100% this. If you know that Sam is a woman you can disregard everything Sam says as hormonal nonsense, whereas if Sam is a ‘he’ then Sam’s knowledge and experience will be vital to the success of your project.

It sounds like this young man is just including pronouns because he’s relatively new to the workplace and just sees it as the done thing. (A bit like how in my first email signature I included a fax number despite faxes never being used in my particular office).

I’d just delete the pronouns column in the spreadsheet. Surely if any of the collaborators are that keen for you to know their pronouns you’ll find out if and when they email you and it’s in their email signature anyway.

This is the best approach. Legally if it is not absolutely needed then you must not store that information and therefore no point collecting

them seperately have an informal chat to him. Explain to him that you believe that many people are upset or “triggered” by the request for pronouns. This covers people who’d rather not say, people who won’t know what the hell it is, people who are GC (you can always say rightly or wrongly) and most importantly women - explain women are penalised during their careers due to the “authority”gap , as soon as a women announces she’s a women she’ll be taken less seriously in all aspects of life. It is negatively affecting women to make them state this (even if it may be obviously for, their name) as is using titles such as Mrs or Miss, Ms, Mr. State you think that collecting data on titles is outdated and discriminatory and then ask him for his views on that. Let him digest that. and then say that is why pronouns are best left off. That it makes a statement not about the person responding but the person asking for the data and that’s not appropriate.

If you don't need it, don't ask.
If your employee is surprised by this, then maybe explain its actually not as inclusive as he's been led to believe. But equally, if anyone states their pronouns it's a courtesy to use them.

Pronouns have been used since the dawn of time & everyone on here will have used them. Stop making every single thing part of a culture war.

He or she where appropriate & they/them as appropriate & what is wrong with having the manners to tell people how you prefer to be addressed.

Example: "I missed a call from the dentist, I'll need to call them back"
" did someone leave their phone in my car"

Mary wallstonecraft regularly used they to describe herself.

There are real attacks on the rights of women without focusing on a load of shite.

If you have a one-to-one conversation with someone when are pronouns used? When you talk directly to someone you don't refer to them in the third person. You say "how are you?", not "how are her?".

(Even in my response to you I'm not using your pronouns).

As soon as anyone implies pronouns are a personal choice not a convention based on sex they have told you they believe in gender

That thing that has led to women being paid less , being left out of society

Half of all sexism is an application of gender

So yes it does matter

There are real attacks on the rights of women without focusing on a load of shite.

For exactly that reason I refuse to play along and pretend we do not know who is male/female, and need to be told their 'pronouns'.

Note: if there is a transgender/sexual individual, I bet they will pick a name that makes pretty clear how they prefer to be addressed, and I will do so. Having said that, I will definetely avoid using 'they' as a singular pronoun as it will certainly be confusing in this particular setting.

Half of all sexism is an application of gender

Hey? Women have been discriminated against for centuries, when gender was a description of nouns when learning languages. No one ever thought to apply to people.

Gender is the word used to describe the common features such as being unintelligent that women are supposed to share in common

This gender as a concept is used to keep women down

And anyone who buys into pronouns is accepting that gender is real and so is accepting that women are inferior to men

Pronouns have been used since the dawn of time & everyone on here will have used them. Stop making every single thing part of a culture war

Pronouns have been used since the dawn of time to refer to sex. Just as man and woman (and their equivalents in other languages) have been used to refer to sex. The universality of words to refer to human sex shows you how crucial having such words is.

If you haven't understood that this is the basis of the arguments on this topic, then I am sure the women here will be happy to refer you to one of the starter threads on what this whole debate is about.

Since people starting putting their pronouns in email signatures we've seen the US Supreme Court afraid to say what a woman is, and decide to roll back Roe v Wade.

Please OP come back and tell us what you have done, and what response you had.

we didn't - took me 3 years until I met an actual Sam in person and realised he's a man. Props to the admin who put "Mrs Kim XYZ" into her email signature.

Did he tell you his pronouns when you met him in person?

If it didn't matter to Sam why did it matter to you? Would you treat Sam any different? Make assumptions about Sam ?

The university I work at has a new CRM to which a pronoun field has appeared. They have given an 'i do not want to provide this information' option which is heartening, but we were told the data as to which pronoun the students start out with on the database before they opt out was made based on their sex. Well duh 🙄

This. Strike it out. No explanation needed. Maybe a 'don't be silly'.

Yes, this is better. Factual and straightforward.