They / them at work

[pootlefump]

I've just written a long post and it's disappeared so in brief - how do you deal with staff who are they/them at work? I will really struggle to call a very obvious biological male 'they'. I also can't loose my job and do want to be respectful but also can't change my view on this nonsense !

Maybe s/he will eventually become obsolete, in the same way as 'thou/thee' has done

Clearly never been to Yorkshire.

It does depend on what circles you mix in and I wish there were some properly high quality data on this. I mix with people who do not want to entrench gender stereotypes and are not very old fashioned so in my circles no one believes people can change sex or that forcing people to pretend so with cross sex pronouns is being honest.

For me it's more than momentary discomfort. It's supporting an act of a male oppressing a female (directly if a male wants to be she and i directly if voice versa). It's requiring me to act completely at odds with what my moral compass tells me. It's supporting males obliterating female sports and enabling them to assault women in what were previously protected spaces. Not because all TW are abusers. Because they are as likely to abuse as any other male.

That 99% of people subscribe to those views.

I'm not certain what views you mean. Of course there are people in the world who affect the pronouns "they/them". But what actual meaning does it have and what do you think the people in your circles think about it?

What a nonsense argument.

Your argument relies on an equivalence in these two positions. For that to be true pronouns would have had to always have been arbitrary and a matter of personal preference.

They have not. For all of our history she/ her has referred to one’s sex.

Gender ideology has decided to change this definition that has lasted for all of our history, and to redefine what pronouns mean. And then they ignore the very real impact this has on other people.

You can’t demand other people adhere to you fundamentally changing the meaning of everyday words, especially when that change affects them.

And furthermore, it is not ‘my view’ I am a woman. It is a word in English that refers to sex and always has. My sex is female, my age makes me an adult and it is those two characteristics and nothing else that make me a woman.

I’ve got one of those male-diminutive apostolic names so have been referred to with the opposite sex pronoun many times, usually because someone has skim-read a document and missed a vowel or because the feminine and masculine versions vary from country to country. My (German) female version of the name looks like a male name in some central and Eastern European countries.

Luckily, being referred to with the wrong pronoun for my sex isn’t literal violence so I am unscathed by the experience. Some of the people who used wrong pronoun might’ve felt momentarily embarrassed but no need, it’s no big deal.

Sometimes I accidentally call my kid our cat’s name. I mis species my own DD. Fortunately she is also unharmed.

I think that is quite an ableist stance.

not difficult for you perhaps

very difficult for the visually or hearing impaired, neurodivergent, people with memory loss, cognitive impairment, aphasia, English as a second/ third language…..

i don’t want to encourage a linguistic convention that prioritises a few, let’s be honest, relatively privileged people and deprioritises a whole load more people who are disadvantaged before they start.

I find the generalisations that everyone using they/them pronouns are difficult, over-sensitive, egotistical or boring to be very derogatory and discriminatory. There are lots of gender critical people on these boards who are gender non conforming and who absolutely recognise that had they grown up in this era they might have been swept up in it. And there are heaps of our wonderful bright young people, our young lesbians, our autistic children, our looked after children who are just doing the best they can in the culture that surrounds them and who are not boring, not egotistical, not stupid, not demanding and who are just doing what most of us do, seeking an identity and a place in our group. I think generalizing about them, avoiding them, excluding them, trying not to have to manage them, on the basis of their beliefs is pretty low behaviour.

Part of finding your place in the world is doing stuff your parents generation don’t agree with. Acquiescing to the whims of adolescents and young adults who are going through the process of asserting difference robs them of that experience (and fuck knows they don’t have many ways to rebel against Gen X parents who have done almost everything themselves)

I was a green haired, DM booted, rebel without a cause. I would’ve definitely declared myself genderfluid or cakegender or some such if Tumblr had existed in 1992.
I WAS a totally unreasonable, petty little authoritarian who demanded my mother provide me with vegetarian meals and rinse out our empties and carry them to the village bottle bank way before anyone had ever heard of a curbside recycling. My poor, beleaguered mother once made me a perfect replica of Siobhan Fahey’s skirt between me clapping eyes on it on Thursday night’s TOTP and the start of Friday night’s Indie Disco just to stop me sulking.

It’s entirely possible to both empathise with today’s teens and young adults and also not want to mix with Mx in the workplace.

Affirming concepts such as nonbinary contributes to a culture of unnecessary medical interventions including the amputation of healthy organs. At least my poor mother only had worry about me piercing my own ears with safety pin.

@MrsJamin I haven’t looked deeply into the biology of it bc I’m not as interested as that, but I do remember reading something interesting: You know how we all start out female, which is why men have nipples? At about six weeks’ gestation, there’s a hormone surge which starts to change the foetus from a girl to a boy, if that’s the instrux in their DNA. The brain is the last part to change. This is why there are more gay men and trans women than lesbians and trans women - because boys have to go through a process to turn them male and sometimes there aren’t enough of the hormone, and you end up with the body of a man and the brain of a woman. It can also happen that the foetus ends up with a female body and male brain, but that’s less common. Trans and gay people truly are born that way.

We are absolutely marinated in hormones in the womb. That’s what’s responsible for finger length. Female-brained people have longer index fingers than ring fingers, and those with male brains have the other way round.

I know male/female brain is crude terminology, but I’m typing quickly on a small phone. I know there’s a range, and that individuals vary a lot.

@Belichtofalicht I don't know where to start with the dodgy "science" you're espousing there....

We don't all start out as female. What you are referring to is the fact that initially embryos are undifferentiated. However the sex of that embryo is either male or female, and development then differentiates accordingly.

To say there is a "male" brain is as useless as saying there is a male height. And that taller women are more male than shorter women. Brains are a mosaic of features some of which are slightly more common in females than males, or vice versa or neither.

I have just looked at my hands. My right index finger is longer than my right ring finger and my left index finger is shorter than my left ring finger. Am I only a half-woman?

We don’t all start out female, only blastocysts made from x sperms start out female.

All embryos look the same in the early stages, but that doesn’t mean they are actually the same.

Otherwise sex selecting in IVF treatments via microsorting sperm or implanting only male
or only female embryos wouldn’t be possible, you’d just whack in any old embryo and dose the mum up with exogenous hormones instead.

I just wouldn't buy into it. If I get pulled, then I will do a tinkly laugh and say 'Silly Old Me, what am l like!' 🤣

I've found using the name suffices. It seems awkward at first but it works out "x said x will do that task and x will feed back on at the next meeting that x attends".

I don’t have a problem with saying “they” as it kind of comes naturally - “I was talking to Sarah, and they said…etc etc”.

However, I won’t use made up words like zi and zer and I will never, ever call a man a woman and I’m prepared to be sacked for it.

Mine are the same. Maybe we are both nonbinary? Or bisexual?
Are our right hands better at sports than our left hands? 👉👈

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2019/06/24/does-the-length-of-your-ring-finger-predict-your-sexual-orientation-hmm/amp/

I'd try to refer to them with the pronouns they've asked for tbh, or just use their name. Mistakes will happen but hey ho.

It isn’t a simple matter of politeness though. It’s an attempt to change language and therefore thought itself. It signals a commitment to an ideological position that a man can become a woman. I know that sounds hysterical, but it really isn’t.

It's the Stroop Effect in the real world, and it's incredibly frustrating.

I look at my DC's They/Them friend. My perception is a young woman so I am conditioned to say She; my knowledge they prefer They means I stumble and try to 'correct' to their preference.

The result is I avoid the topic or don't invite them over as often because I can't be arsed with the mental acrobatics of an eveining at home.

In person, especially when walking or speaking, we can correctly identify the sex of a person almost every single time - it's something women and children have to be able to do for safety. Men aren't nearly as good at it.

Over-writing that evolutionary trait to pander to someone's belief their sex is less relevant their self-appointed gender identity is bound to be hard work.

"Be kind", my arse.

@Belichtofalicht
The sex of an embryo is decided at conception and male and female embryos develop along different, parallel pathways. I am not a qualified person, but I think what confuses the issue when it comes to sex development is that sometimes an agent (like a hormone or other chemical) which triggers the development of a male characteristic also suppresses the development of a female characteristic. Getting the chemical instruction in utero to grow a penis is also an instruction not to grow a vagina. If there is some problem with the transmission of the instructions (as in the DSD 46, XY ARD), the beginnings of a vagina may form - a small blind pocket which closes up at puberty. It does not develop beyond this because the embryo is male. Baby girls are born with more breast tissue than baby boys. So it may be that men have nipples because the instruction to stop developing breasts comes later in the growth of the embryo (this is me guessing). The important thing to remember is that it is the already established sex of the embryo which determines which sexual organs it will develop. Not the other way around.

😂

No, but you’re less likely to get breast cancer than a woman with a markedly longer index finger than ring finger on both hands. It’s often more marked on the right. Women with such finger lengths were exposed to more oestrogen in the womb.

Just skipping to the end to quote this and say I’m the other way round and left handed, so now interested if there’s a link to prominent hand? Anyway, I’m obviously only half a woman too. Back to read the rest now