Ask a Manager GC Boss Question

[Magenta82]

Has anyone seen the question on the Ask A Manager blog about the gender critical boss?

I know the blog leans Liberal American and the comments are heavily modded but the mischaracterisation of GC beliefs and the Forrster case are wild.

www.askamanager.org/2023/03/boss-wants-us-to-disagree-over-lgbtq-inclusion-professional-styles-for-men-with-long-hair-and-more.html

Yes, I read this earlier today and looked for a thread on it so thank you for starting one. I knew Ask a Manager was very liberal but I was shocked too. A lot of misinformation about the law in the UK in the comments and I noticed the ‘manager’ said she couldn’t comment on UK law.

There was a comment saying something along the lines of "I would have thought gender critical meant being against socially imposed gender stereotypes" and so many replies jumped on saying its definitely not that it's just transphobia.

Horrific comments, and a real reality check as to what is going on in the US.

The way posters talk about ‘race’ and ‘gender’ as intense, innate identities that people not only have a right to feel strongly about but should feel strongly about. It seems to me that this has supplanted national identity - Americans have always been quite intense in their nationalism, so maybe this is a variation of an existing strain in their culture?

To me it feels like another religion, just a new and trendy one. Since the start the US have been more into religion than the UK.

Now a lot of people don't believe in a god they believe in gender, or other identity politics based madness.

I am highly sceptical the boss is actually banning pronouns. Resisting attempts to make them mandatory, maybe.

I wondered that.
It seemed more likely that someone had said they didn't feel comfortable having to share pronouns because they didn't believe in gender.

I’m also inclined to think that the OP in that thread is either misrepresenting something or misunderstood. There have been so many misrepresentations of GC concerns. But it is impossible to know.

Well, that was depressing. So much bigotry in the replies. I could almost feel the excitement and fervour of the posters through my screen. They love it, don't they? The mean woman really gets their juices going

It's probably a bit of a weird reference but it made me think of the men in this scene from Fritz Lang's Metropolis

There was another thread the other week about a guy who lost a job offer because of his social media posts. To be fair I can understand why the company wouldn't want him but the blog commentators were extatic and showed no empathy that a real human being had lost a job.

I just feel like if people are going to believe that they are the good guys then they shouldn't be so nasty about other people or happy when bad things happen to people they disagree with.

Its like they see people they oppose as caricatures to be defeated rather than people they could try to empathise with and have a discussion to try to change their mind.

The comments are a bit mad but the question itself seemed fairly reasonable- lgbt+ staff group, pronouns on email sigs if wanted (technically encouraged but no issue if you didn't) and lanyards for all sorts of random stuff were standard at my last job so none of it seeks inappropriate or excessive. There were a few hard-core members who wanted to mandate pronouns but this was given fairly short shrift.

Unless the letter writer has misrepresented what's going on in the organisation (which could be a possibility i.e. people feel bullied into using the lanyards/declaring themselves as "allies" or are shunned) I can see why people are upset at suggestion of removing things that are fairly innocuous.

Reading AAM is very enlightening in relation to the huge differences between UK and USA employment law though. Also the way so many people in the US literally cannot conceive of things being different elsewhere.

She also uses the terms "grand-boss and great-grand boss" etc to denote layers of management hierarchy which make me cringe.

I used to read Ask A Manager an awful lot but stopped immediately when there was a post agreeing with JKR being transphobic (I can’t remember the context of the post).

I always found it useful for navigating the "soft skills" aspects of management, I found it when I needed to tell an employee he smelt.

It was always entertaining and sometimes useful, but recently it's been overly moralistic and misrepresented GC views a few times.

Yes AAM has been captured for quite some time which is a shame. I still dip in and out, and skip over any questions underpinned by trans ideology.

As always, it is quite breathtaking that the blog, like many other outlets, are staunchly in favour of women's rights and clearly detail all the harms that misogyny can cause, but cannot make the link to trans ideology.