This anonymous comment near the end was heartbreaking:
My line manager, a pleasant bloke with young children, has ‘pronouns he/him’ after his name on his email signature. Next to it, he has carefully made a hyperlink marked ‘Why do I do this?’, which links to a political blog about ‘allyship’. Whenever an email from him pops up, there also pops up the ‘pronouns he/him’. And every time his name and pronouns pop up on my screen, I get a lurch of dread in my stomach and fight back tears. My lovely, fragile young niece comes into my mind again, I feel helpless, and I can’t concentrate on my work. My teenaged, soon-to-be-adult niece, who has for years struggled with depression, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. We all helped and supported her as best as we could and hoped maturity and time would work its magic and foster her growing into the strong, healthy young woman we know she can be, just like a million awkward teenagers before her have grown up and worked it out. Instead, she got caught up in the gender identity movement and is trapped in an alternate universe.
Now she feels ‘special’ and ‘chosen’, rather than just an awkward ugly duckling who got teased by the cool kids. Now she is praised for her ‘bravery’ by the cool kids at her new 6th Form and they tell her the rest of the world is against her and only her ‘allies’ will defend her. […]
We try still to hold her as close as we can and tell her we love her just the way she is, and that she doesn’t need to pretend to be a boy for the world to accept her. We hope we can keep hold of her before she is old enough to buy cross-sex hormones or get on a surgery waiting list to have her breasts chopped off. She threatens both on her darkest days, full of weeping and panic attacks.
Does my line manager know about girls like my niece? Every day, I think, I must talk to him. But what can I say, when our workplace policies allow and encourage ‘pronouns’? He has also been praised as ‘brave’, for being ‘a good ally to vulnerable people’. Does he know how this violent political movement of gender identity, that he so casually promotes with his ‘pronouns’, damages vulnerable girls like my niece? If he doesn’t know, why doesn’t he bother to find out? If he does know, how can he be so callous?