New harassment policy

[GCQuestion]

NC for this as I am sure my employer would not like me posting this and I’m pretty sure some of my posts under my usual username are outing.

I have just received a copy of my firm’s new anti-harassment policy. Examples of harassment now include “consistently misgendering someone”.

We have been encouraged to put our pronouns on our email signatures but this has not been enforced so I have not had to make any statement one way or the other about the issue. I am, at least to some extent, gender critical but don’t care much about other people putting their pronouns if they want to.

Luckily, none of my colleagues have so far requested that I call them by anything other than the obvious pronouns and I need my job too much to make a point about this policy just on principle. I’m not decided what I would do if it became an actual issue as I’m comparatively relaxed about pronouns when compared to shared bathrooms, prisons, sports and the damage done to young people by gender reassignment treatment.

However, I am interested to know, is this legal? Can they say (and enforce) that misgendering someone is harassment?

Taken from ACAS - By law, harassment is when bullying or unwanted behaviour is related to any of the following (known as 'protected characteristics' under the Equality Act 2010):

age
disability
gender reassignment
race
religion or belief
sex
sexual orientation

For it to count as harassment, the unwanted behaviour must have either:

violated the person's dignity, whether it was intended or not
created an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for the person, whether it was intended or not

Ah ok, so you’d have to be using it to bully someone for it to be harassment?

Obviously I would expect going and standing by someone’s desk saying “you’re a man, you’re a man, you’re a man” would 100% be harassment!

Yes it can be harassment to repeatedly intentionally correctly sex someone (miss gender) to their face. The important word their is intentionally and they would have to prove it to be reasonably considered intentional. However they can't insist that you use their chosen pronouns as that would be compelled speach.
There's a simple solution just use the persons name so instead of calling say Joe he/she/they/it/any neo pronouns you always refer to Joe as Joe.
When it comes to referring to "Joe" when Joe isn't within earshot that's a bit different and could go either way and I wouldn't want to guess