Can I be forced to use pronouns?

[nationallampoons]

Hi all.

I work in hospitality and my company have recently taken on some new recruits.

One is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns but is considering she/her pronouns. He was born male. He looks male. He had the same uniform as you would expect, neon hair, piercings, multiple badges on his uniform stating his pronouns, he's vegan, free Palestine, f Boris etc.. (I'm not against freeing Palestine or vegans) but you can imagine the type. Everyone's a "facist" etc.. it's draining at times.

Here is my problem, I don't want to use they/them pronouns. It feels unnatural when talking and I struggle with it anyway. I just don't want to do it, I don't care if that makes me rude. I'm just sick of it. I'm sick of being moaned at for misgendering. He just doesn't shut up about it.

Now he's saying he believes he may be a woman and is asking questions about "women hood" and all that bs, I've told him I'm not comfortable talking to him about it and I was called a boomer, a Karen and a gammon?? He is considering changing his pronouns in the new year.

Here is my question. Legally, can I be forced to use his preferred pronouns? Not arsed about losing my job, but I don't want to get into any criminal trouble

I just want to go to work, earn my living and go home. I don't have the time or energy or willingness to go along with this bullshit

Afterfire

Couldn’t care less whether (as mentioned upthread) Eddie Izzard wants to be called a woman. We all know he was born a man. And it doesn’t make me any less of a women or damage my own gender by saying yes ok, I’ll call you a woman.

Bolding is mine. Did you know you had slipped up? Did you know that women have had their posts deleted on MN for using he about Izzard? I won't be reporting you, because I am not a trans activist, and I don't believe in forcing people to show deference to Izzard. But other people do.

I don't believe for a second that using "she" for Izzard changes my sex, any more than it changes Izzard's. No-one does. That's not what anyone thinks.

Whilst I understand your position, alll I can hear is ‘me,me,me’. Ie you’re prepared to go along with it as you don’t think it has any direct effect or relevance to you. This is shortsighted. It affects many women and girls. Those who are denied fair sports as men sign up to the women’s category, those who are spied on in effectively mixed sex changing rooms, those women who are forced to endure male rapists in women’s prisons. Don’t be so insular and selfish. Succumbing to the lies of pronouns leads ineluctably to all of the above.

There are, however, many trans people, like my dds friends, that you would not have a clue they were ever the opposite gender / sex than how they introduce themselves. And that’s okay too.

Maybe pre-pubescent children or children who have stopped puberty. Not so many adult men.

extract from Capital FM

Halsey is taking a break from doing press after they felt uncomfortable with how their pronouns were dealt with in an interview.

Halsey has announced that they won't be doing press in the near future after they feel “deliberately disrespected” by a recent interview.

On Wednesday, the 26-year-old star, whose preferred pronouns are she/they, took to Twitter to share her discomfort with her last experience with the press.

The 'You Should Be Sad' singer recently welcomed her first child with partner Alev Aydin and had spoken about their secretive relationship in the recent interview.

However, Halsey expressed concern over their pronouns not being respected...

In a series of tweets on Wednesday, the star expressed their dismay at feeling misgendered by the interview.

She wrote: "First your writer made a focal point in my cover story my pronouns and you guys deliberately disrespected them by not using them in the article."

The singer continued: "Then your admin b*ardised a quote where I discuss the privilege of being the white child of a black parent + Intentionally used a portion that was the antithesis of the point I was trying to make."

The 'You Should Be Sad' singer announced in March that both pronouns 'she/they' feels "most authentic to me".

She updated her Instagram bio to reflect her preferred pronouns and put out a statement: "For those asking RE: my updated Instagram bio, I am happy with either pronouns.

"If you know me at all you know what it means to me to express this outwardly."

Except, Halsey was not happy with "either pronouns", which led to her expressing anger on twitter after one piece exclusively used she, her and hers to talk about her. Halsey actually requires both. The publication had to edit the copy to alternate, and other articles since have followed that model, as indeed this article above does.

I must admit to laughing at attempts to portray MN as some isolated minority of the population who believe that the self selection of pronouns is bollocks.

No. It is not.

It is like those false claims that MN FWR was the extreme minority, the dinosaurs that are dying out, yet over the past 18 months poll after poll has consistently shown that the points raised and discussed on this board are held by the majority of the UK population.

The female musician Halsey has requested she/her and they/them, and demands that publications interviewing her alternate between using she/her and they/them in the copy.

That just seems the logical next stage, for people who want to feel special and can't think of any other way than pronouns to do that.

Once everybody realises that endless changing and alternating is unsustainable, we'll end up with they/them as standard for everybody - even though 99.9% of people don't identify that way; they can just put up and shut up, as they aren't the special ones.

You think people on this thread feel browbeaten?? Are you for real?

Was that question meant to be a joke? If anything, browbeaten is putting it mildly.

It starts off with browbeaten by people who insist that you use their special pronouns - even when they are not present - and that leads to validating that everybody referred to as she is female and thus entitled to access supposedly female-only spaces.

I am not saying that most transwomen are seeking to exploit this to assault (and worse) women, but how can women possibly know who the bad ones are among those facility-users with penises, far higher testosterone and much greater strength than they have?

The vast majority of men - actual male men who don't claim to be anything else - wouldn't pose a threat to women, were they told to use shared facilities for any reason; but again, women have no way of knowing who the bad ones are out of all of them who have the great potential to do them harm. One simple tried-and-tested solution to this is to make it clear that ALL men are not allowed to use female facilities - the many harmless ones AND the few dangerous ones, on account of their having male bodies. Virtually all transwomen also have male bodies, so the exclusion obviously extends to them too.

This is not discriminatory in any way, as there will also be equivalent male facilities for all those with male bodies, so nobody is at any disadvantage.

Following this theme, there is an incredibly irritating radio ad for a particular cat food, in which the voiceover actress refers to her singular cat as they and them. Her script directs her to comment that the cat's coat and health has improved since she started buying Expensive Cat Food Brand, but I cannot trust the judgement of a character who pays so little attention to her cat that she does not know her pet's sex!

I am now resolved never to try that brand, as I now inextricably associate it with the type of person who puts too low a priority on animal welfare to remember whether non-human animals are he or she. Such people tend to be exceedingly neglectful pet-owners, and I have some bitter anecdotes about that, believe me.

And where Ukraine is now is being constantly attacked by Russia.

Should Ukraine just accept that Russia has the right to attack and invade them, that that’s the direction things have moved in now so they just have to live with it? Should they accept Russia’s claim to sovereignty over part or all of their country, and stop fighting back? According to your logic, yes.

You don’t see the whole “preferred pronouns” thing, ie the imposition of Gender Identity Ideology on people who don’t subscribe to it, as an unjust attack or invasion because it’s been carefully presented as a social justice movement and it has the support of lots of liberal types and young people.

But it is an attack: an attack on women’s rights, LGB rights, child safeguarding, and the rights of anyone who doesn’t want to live in a quasi authoritarian culture.

It’s an invasion of spaces, services and sports originally meant for biologically female people (the disadvantaged sex class) by biologically male people (the dominant, privileged sex class).

It’s been sold to you as social progress. China’s cultural revolution was sold as social progress too: have you seen how that worked out?

You seem to think people only object to GII because they’re against the natural evolution of social ideas. But for many or most of us it’s because we can see this was no natural evolution at all but a top down propaganda and lobbying movement funded by immensely wealthy and influential (male) people. We can see it’s primarily for the benefit of already-privileged male people, and has achieved a standing as a minority civil rights movement and a form of social progress that it absolutely doesn’t deserve.

Far from standing in the way of progress, we are fighting back against a very real attack on our own human rights by those who already have more power. Like the Ukrainians are doing when they resist Putin’s Russia, even though Putin would have you believe his invasion is some kind of “liberation” of lands that justly belong to Russia, that his is a socially just war.

And we would like to see real social progress in terms of societal understanding that there is still a very long way to go before female people are truly valued as much as male people in this hopelessly misogynistic world we live in, and that that is the goal we need to be travelling towards if we really want to build a better, safer, more just world for everyone.

It's not polite its fucking exhausting. Its the Stroop test real life equivalent and it's disrespectful to demand that other people change their language to accommodate you.

And most trans people are clocked constantly. Women have developed good instincts to clock men or to know when something is off.

Your gender might not be that fragile but most of us don't believe gender even exists so none of us care about your (non) fragile gender.

What we care about is that men stop colonising and disrespecting womanhood and infiltrate our single sex spaces.

Haven't read the whole thread yet but if a colleague of mine tried this sort of shit with me, I'd go on the biggest wind up ever. Eg.

OP could buy a copy of the Daily Mail and take it into work every day.

Get a Vote Tory badge/flyer and stick them around the staff room.

Tell people that you are considering changing your name by deed poll to Karen and wish to be know by that name from now on.

Talk loudly about your house price and your pension and how great it is not to have a mortgage.

You could have a real laugh with this.

And yet, the OP has been given some excellent advice and this thread will have been informative for others.

If you as a poster cannot do anything but attempt to shame the OP, readers notice that too.

Things you describe as cliches, don’t become irrelevant because you choose to label them as such.

😄

😂😂😂

I really think you should put in a complaint about the way you are being spoken to op. It is vile and bordering on hate speech.

Last year my teen was in a group of 7 friends and 5 of those friends had declared trans identities.

This year, my teen has remained friends with only 1 of those, but has now a new friend that has a trans identity. So, out of my teen’s current group (4 friends) two have trans identities. Both of those friends were part of a different friend group of about 5 from what I can gather, and four out of those 5 had trans identities.

I have four close friends who are mothers of trans identified children and one work colleague. (I know quite a few others socially but they are acquaintances and the topic is not discussed )

And this is across different religions and different cultures. Plus of both sexes. And sexual orientations, but mostly they are same sex attracted.

I would like any poster to tell me that this is a naturally occurring phenomenon. What have activists said over the past few years ? Just like being left handed? No. It isn’t.

A wonderful nuanced post at from Catiette yesterday at 23:38 that so carefully unpicks the tragedy of all this for children. The world we're enabling where adults deliberately teach them a lie - a falsehood - along with the enforcement techniques to demonstrate the child's compliance with this open lie.

I think afterfire that there is inconsistency in your posts from
start to finish.

You started off with a very direct statement of “They do not want special treatment.”

Then you posted that you do understand that these individuals are seeking special treatment, it is just that you also believe they are progressive and you want to extend that extra respect them that they demand.

You acknowledge that ‘special’ treatment (not always a negative thing by the way) of someone else is the requirement of you to change your behaviour away from the accepted norm.

It is disruptive in this way.

”The key thing here is whether we are going to acknowledge that pronouns now include they / them as well as he / she. If we are going to do that as a society - which is what is happening now- then it’s not “special treatment” anymore than referring to someone as he / she. “

You seem to have chosen to accept that disruption through accepting language evolution. However, are you only listening to the loud, popular group of the population on this issue and then saying that is the ‘new way’ of things so you choose to go with it. While not acknowledging that the wider population are not actually changing their language.

Some will be masking their reluctance due to the risk of their livelihood, their family or their friends. Is this true ‘acceptance’? No. Of course not.

It does though add to this false perception that ‘everyone’ is doing it and therefore it is a societal change.

“It’s a complete movement and acceptance of use of language.”

No, it is not. Because that would imply that the ‘change’ is abiding. I have listened to quite a few of my friends who are just beginning to realise the implications of this forced language change (by the way, not through conversations with me because I haven’t had time to discuss it with them), now either drop the presence altogether or admit that they are only doing it to keep the peace.

That is not an abiding change. That is coercive and once that coercive force is removed, the language will revert.

You mentioned ‘tolerance’ a few times upthread, afterfire. Have you read the polls, there are several of them from different initial viewpoints, that have discovered that the group of the population between the ages of 13 and 28 yrs old are the least tolerant group in the UK population? They are the group who absolutely are intolerant of other people’s opinions if it doesn’t fit narrowly into their own political alignment.

Is this the group that you want shaping language and policy for all others?

That is why people are pushing back on your posts.

Your Maybe. But that’s where we are now.” is very reminiscent of where some other posters have already been. Your posts come across as only superficially understanding the issues. Or do you really believe that even after recognising the breadth of these issues that pronouns are both a sign of progress and not something to be concerned about.

And for all your talk of ‘tolerance’ your later posts descended repeatedly into the predictable prejudiced views about this board.

All while declaring it is possible to have an ‘intelligent’ discussion…

”I do understand the point but I don’t agree. I don’t feel threatened as a woman because someone chooses to use they / them. I am still and always will be “she”. Mumsnet has such a weird stance on all this stuff and it just isn’t reflected (thankfully) in real life.”

Maybe because Mumsnet brings together the many impacts of the ideological aspects of gender identity. Maybe because this is a collective analysis from people who see a picture that you obviously don’t see.

We are often told by some posters that they will always be a ‘she’. But what does ‘she’ mean when it no longer describes a female human of any age? Posters are saying that they are a ‘she’ just the same as someone like India Willoughby is a she. Is that true? Why

Or to extrapolate this further, are you, afterfire,
a she like one of growing male porn stars making money from views for masturbating in the female toilets with their estrogen grown breasts (maybe enhanced with silicon) and a fully working penis while a mum is next door toileting her children. One of the clips I saw contained the family speaking in English by the way.
Others in different languages. So this is happening in a wide variety of countries.

And you cannot use the trope ‘there are bad females as well’. Because it is a flawed comparison. A female who commits horrific crimes is still a female through their biology which is a material and unchangeable fact.
You (a general ‘you’) do share that aspect and probably many socialisation aspects around that body.

What do you share with Dana Rivers, afterfire?
Please tell us. Because I don’t feel I share a thing with that male, who seems to use womanhood for their fetish. How do you feel about that?

@Helleofabore the question of whether or not what you describe is a naturally occurring phenomenon definitely needs researching. It also needs accurate data collection to understand why this is occurring and to identify the appropriate responses from schools and society etc.

A while ago I read an article from a respected Doctor in the field of gender dysphoria in children. They had for decades seen very young children e.g. 5 years old with dysphoria but they had had never seen what they described as rapid onset gender dysphoria in teenagers. The big question is whether or not there is an element of social contagion, possibly supported by social media.

Data collection and analysis is key to understanding why this has only very recently started to occur. This is why, despite expert evidence given at the committee stage, it is very disappointing the Scottish Government vetoed an amendment to collect data? Why would you not want to collect data on children and teenagers having medical treatment and it’s long term impact? Why would you not want to track adults to see the impact of medical treatment, how many start the transition process and the decide to detransition etc.?

The Interim Cass Review also pointed out the poor record keeping along with the fact that there are different routes into children/teenagers identifying as trans/non-binary and the varying outcomes, with most not identifying as trans/non-binary as adults. The Cass Review also made it clear affirmation was not a neutral act.

I see two very separate concerns about gender identity beliefs and the widening of the trans umbrella. The first is making sure children/teenagers are safe and medicalised treatment is only possible once they become adults. The second is primarily men with AGP who do not have gender dysphoria.

This is why many on this thread are not prepared to use preferred pro-nouns as it is not a neutral act and implies support for gender ideology and encourages boundaries to being push in terms of medicalising children/teenagers and ending up with male rapists who do not take hormones or have surgery being placed in female prisons.

My previous responses were manly from an HR/employer perspective where I would expect preferred pro-nouns to be respected as it is a reasonable request.

Teenagers are another aspect of the discussion that afterfire keep mentioning.

Afterfire said ”I just don’t see the harm in going along with it”

Well I do. And my friends with trans identifying teens under extensive mental health support do.

It was because my friend’s started to talk to me about their tweens/teens gender issues that I started to get an inkling about this. Poster’s talk about respecting their teen’s friends. Have those posters, such as afterfire ever supported those teen’s parents through the very difficult decisions that need to be made?

I now have four sets of parents who are my close friends and one work colleague that I sit and listen to about the immense mental health issues of their children and the manifestation of those health issues into gender identity ideology.

Because it is ideological in the demands being made.

What each of those young people have in common, is fragile mental health. And three I know are getting regular support and the support is exploratory in nature and social transition has been a contentious issue. Explicitly not recommended at the start in two cases, yet the teen’s friends and other well meaning people did just that.

I have had two tell me that the school (same school) socially transitioned their child without permission. And both times were against their child’s mental health therapists recommendations and the parent’s choice for explorative treatment.

If you have teens with friends, do you only have a close enough relationship with the parents and have you actually listened to the pain that entire family is experiencing?

Yes, it is very common with teens. Particularly with female tweens and teens. Do you understand why though? And have you any knowledge about treatment? Do you understand why experts such as Dr Cass stated that social transition is not a neutral action.

You must do because you posted this :

”Do you not realise that people are perfectly capable of being aware of the information and research regarding the other point of view and yet still be capable of seeing a different view point?”

And

”Many people are here arguing about things they have no experience of”

So you must be aware of all the discussion from different aspects around the treatment plans for children and young people.

And that using pronouns can solidify an identity that a child or teen feels they cannot them change for many different reasons. No, it is not neutral at all.

So, I will disagree with you. And not because I am regressive or ignorant or hateful.

Your posts have reflected your prejudiced view of this board. That has been very clear. Have you ever really read the threads though with an open mind? Do you understand just how many people on this board have trans loved ones?

Or have you just decided that people who disagree with you are doing it from a position of hate and not being progressive?

@Helleofabore ooh keep going, I'm slowly trawling catching up and am most enjoying your efforts this morning.

Tis the first day of a new year and @Helleofabore is up and at them.

You go you wonderful woman of the cunty kind.

B x

I agree with you glittery.

And I agreed with your advice from a HR perspective. I have a limited time working in the industrial relations sector, but you were very clear.

I have articulated to a couple of people who I have had in-depth discussions about this with about the connection between the two groups. When you look at who set this in motion, we know it was mature males influencing the policies and why.

(I do encourage any reader to google Denton’s and trans and read the original source material if you can find it still)

Those male leveraged the needs of children and teens (the majority being female) to their own advantage. They prevented discussion and research with ‘no debate’. FFS I remember seeing ‘no debate’ when I became really aware of this issue in 2019. I was shocked how discussion was shut down and prevented.

All while our children were being harmed.

Because treatment plans were forced by those mature males to suit the male needs. Not females and certainly not females who were vulnerable and/or children and teens.

That is exactly why when posters come onto threads and use such blatant emotional manipulation, as ‘be kind’, ‘where is the harm’ and ‘it is progressive’ at the same time as showing intolerance in their own prejudiced views of those disagreeing with them, I find their inconsistencies rather revealing.

But you know boiled that my contribution pales beside some of the amazing contributions from very knowledgeable posters! I have loved reading them.

And they are much more concise…

(and bigly words for light entertainment too!)

Not to derail further with discussions on teenagers, however there are some excellent studies in the Break it down for me thread.

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3145470-Break-it-down-for-me?latest=0

And there are sites with more links (and some dissection but I encourage people to go to original sources before reading the analysis and form your own opinions):

The Cass Report : cass.independent-review.uk/publications/interim-report/

segm.org

genspect.org

www.bayswatersupport.org.uk

www.transgendertrend.com

These are just the start.