These email pronouns at work

[TheOGCCL]

Reading round the trans topic one thing I think we can say is it’s incredibly contested.

Do people who use email pronouns at work realise this? Have they done their research and then consciously decided to come down on one side and want to publicly announce this? And why this particular topic, you wouldn’t put Black Lives Matter in your email signature.

Personally I don’t think work is a place for getting involved in this debate at all, I have no interest in what gender any of my colleagues are/were/want to be and it has no bearing on how I’d treat them, so why do so many think this is a good idea?

'They' is perfectly correct as a pronoun for a person of unknown sex.

@ErrolTheDragon and @ZeldaFighter just pondering … when using ‘they’ when they means one person, wouldn’t it be more linguistically correct and clear to write ‘they is’ etc?

'They are' is long established for referring to a person of unknown sex.
If using a pronoun makes your communication unclear - this applies to all pronouns including 'you', 'it' etc - then at that point you need to use the name(s) or noun instead.
As soon as a pronoun makes anything unclear or less fluent then its lost its function and shouldn't be used. This is one of the reasons for particularly rejecting 'neopronouns' which are more like grammatically more complicated nicknames. If you need to think about which pronoun to use or what it means, avoid it.

On 'they is'... do you feel the need to say 'you is' to an individual?

I’d do the same.

In answer to the OP: I instantly lose respect for him/her/it/them/whateverthefuck. My heart sinks especially if it’s someone in HR, particularly if rainbows have been added (looking at you, Serena. I know you’re a woman, no need to tell me).

Ah, I hadn’t considered this.

Ah, I hadn’t considered this.

Which is understandable, because we just use these pronouns without thinking about them - which is exactly as it should be.

They as a singular is for a person of unknown sex. But if you know the sex of that person, insisting on "they" is a demand to kowtow to an ideology. No different to demanding I use a particular word of phrase to refer to a God. Or not use a word to refer to God - which some religions do.

On the other hand I also have a male name and don't care in the slightest how people think of me. I think it often works to my advantage to be read as male, why would I purposely tell everyone different.

I have questions for the man who had a half hour conversation with me and THEN called me Mr in an email...

Yes, which is why Zelda using it was normal and appropriate. 'Pronouns' that others have to remember to apply to a specific individual are no longer functioning as pronouns.

That’s an English language problem,,isn’t it? Most Romance languages ( and I think Germanic from my dim memories ) have singular and plural forms of the second person in pronouns ( tu/ vous) , although of course, the simple use has been overlaid with courtesies. When you get to know a French person, they will usually ask you if they can ‘tutoyer’, that is call you ‘tu’ , because it signifiiez intimacy and friendship. Children , though, will be tu in the singular to adults.

plus of course, there is no neuter pronoun, even a chair or table takes a ‘while gendered’ pronoun.

I think this is not as irrelevant as it may seem, as it demonstrates that ‘gender’ is, at least grammatically, totally different to biological sex in some languages - and this difference is at the heart of my unease with the whole ‘state your pronouns’ fad. A French speaker doesn’t really think that a chair is female ( I am tempted to say, any more than many people really think that E. I is a she, or that a human being can not have a sex).

While = female. The poor autocorrect is generically confused.

A French speaker doesn’t really think that a chair is female ( I am tempted to say, any more than many people really think that E. I is a she, or that a human being can not have a sex).

Yes and no. There was some study which compared adjectives used to describe a generic bridge by native Spanish speakers (el ponte - m) and German speakers (die Brücke - f), and the choice of adjectives were strong, sturdy, vs elegant, that sort of thing. Can't remember the details, but I think it was referenced in Guy Deutscher.

People are frightened of losing their jobs if they don't