Mandated to give my ten year old's pronouns - how to respond

[Gofastboatsmojito]

I've recently had to fill in a form for my daughter's hobby, she's joining a group to rehearse and perform which builds on the standard teaching class.

As part of this I had to fill in a form which asked for her gender and her preferred pronouns. She's 10 FFS, and her school luckily don't go in for teaching gender ideology, sticking to a more factual PSHE curriculum. So she hasn't got a gender or pronouns.

I've filled the form in because I don't want her to miss out on this further opportunity, and I have no reason to believe the group, which is council run, are gender ideologues. I think they're just trying to be modern / some secondary children also do this hobby so maybe there have been requests from older children's parents.

I'd like to email my contact, who I email relatively often, expressing why this question is problematic.

How does the below sound? I'd like to add something about Cass but I'm not sure what the best point to include woukd be at very grateful for your ideas.

Preferred pronouns is a mandatory field (with only 3 choices! She/her, He/him, They/them - not very inclusive) but ethnicity has about 5 different questions where you can choose an Asian ethnicity or n/a, a Black ethnicity or n/a, a White non-European ethnicity or n/a, White European, or just opt out entirely. Its a badly designed form tbh.

Thanks

I hope you don't mind a little bit of feedback. I'm not happy being asked for my child's gender or pronouns. She doesn't have a gender or pronouns, she has a sex (female).

Asking for pronouns is akin to asking for a religion without giving the option of 'none', so I respectfully suggest you consider adding 'no preferred pronouns' or similar to the list of options, or adding an 'opt out' as you do for ethnicity

Well if the transgender people who I apply this courtesy to turn out to be predators attempting to enter female spaces for nefarious purposes, I will apologise wholeheartedly.

Seems unlikely as they are mostly female-born and/or gay but you never know I guess.

I also am happy to extend you the courtesy of not referring to you as cis if you don’t like it. So there, the favoritism is now going both ways :-)

Such a non issue.

No-one "has" pronouns. It's grammar. Not a possession.

Or manface or no-sexface I guess as most transgender people I have encountered in real life are female-born lesbians, or male-born homosexuals.

Eh? I didn't say people owned them or carried them about with them.
Everyone has them in the sense of how we refer to them, unless we want to sound ridiculous and use their name repeatedly. 🫡🫡🫡

Oh brilliant so you can tell just by looking which TW are the likes of Karen white & Katie dowalski and which are harmless? And for the women raped and assaulted I don’t think “sorry” cuts it. Best we keep all men no matter how long their hair or how glittery their nail varnish out of our spaces

Most TW are definitely not gay hence their insistence that they are lesbians (ie straight men who like to fuck women)

how on Earth does it benefit women to play along with men who perform what they believe are female gender stereotypes

today the IOC said that it’s fine for men to be punching women because their passport says female and no doubt their pronouns are she/her. Playing along with this nonsense is the thin end of the flipping wedge and how we’ve got to where we are

'And what if that man is clearly making an effort to present gender markers associated with femininity, eg wearing a dress, makeup, long hair, nail polish etc. is this not a fairly obvious set of clues that this person wants to be treated as something other than their birth sex?'

Absolutely quantum

and? It’s not women’s job to be support humans

what if the women in the rape survivors group colonised by a TW really didn’t want a man there? Oh wait they didn’t but no one cared because you know women

why is it always on women to be kind and make room?

Okay I’m going to tap out as it’s clear people here want to think that transgender people are mostly male predators who are trying to oppress and harm women and that’s completely counter to my own first-hand experience.

There are shitty people of all kinds. I am not going to judge all males by the standards of the worst males I have ever heard of, I am not going to judge all females by the standards of the worst females I have ever heard of, and I am not going to judge all transgender people by the worst transgender people (or worst transgender imitators) I have ever heard of.

Some areas, like sports, prisons and working with children need careful safeguarding to ensure the protection of women and children. Showing courtesy towards my colleague’s female-born child’s preferred pronoun is an entirely different matter and scale and I’m not going to be shamed into conflating the two by hyperbolic slippery-slope arguments.

As far as 'manface' goes, I know 2 mid teen girls who are cosplaying manface , this only started when they hit puberty.
I hope that they grow out of it before they harm currently healthy bodies, affirmation is strong in this age group and they have no idea of the long term health issues they are signing up to. (Elaine Miller is very informative on this).

As the Cass report says, affirmation is not a neutral act. A mind that is rejecting the body it lives in needs psychological help as a first resort, not surgery.

I agree. I'm trying to make my arguments more factual than personal

Oh brilliant so you can tell just by looking which TW are the likes of Karen white & Katie dowalski and which are harmless?

I don’t think you can necessarily tell the Jeffrey Dahmers and Fred and Rose Wests of the world just by looking at them either.

Maybe Cheeky would like to comment on HMPS figures RE sexual offending?

First I’d want to look into what categories the sex offending covered (eg are prostitution services included), and I’d be interested to know the sex offense conviction rate for transgender women vs men. Ie do cis men simply get away with sex offenses more often than transgender women do.

Funnily enough I have had quite a few male students who wear make up and necklaces over the last few years but they are not the ones changing pronouns! Often the ones who are most militant about pronouns have not changed anything particular in their appearance and yes, it is difficult to remember who they are! I am also fluent in several languages. As I am sure you are aware, in many languages you have to use the correct male or female form when speaking directly to someone. Often I find that those who claim it is so easy to switch have only ever thought about what it is like to speak in English. It is ironic that you say it is easy when there are plenty of examples of people getting it wrong even when desperately trying to prove how easy it is!

Just to add I do actually try to use preferred pronouns but my point was that it is NOT easy and I don't think anyone should be penalised for not doing it.

If you teach students and have new classes coming and going regularly with multiple people with alternative pronouns, I can imagine it is a lot to keep up with, far more than most people ever have to.

In those circumstances I think I would just take the view that I would do my best and if I made mistakes (which occurs in all situations where you are remembering personal information about people, eg names - which tbh I sometimes have to be told more than once, and people quite often get my name wrong too) I would not be hard on myself at all about it, particularly if they were people I was going to deal with for a year and then probably never see again.

If someone was aggressive about me making a mistake in their pronouns, I would apologise for getting it wrong but privately think they were rather rude, the same as if I got someone's name wrong and they were aggressive about it.

The definition of have and has is possess, own, or hold.
"he had a new car and a boat"

There is no sense of "having" pronouns.

Would you be less upset if the question was “What pronouns would you like others to use for you?”

There aren't any ways of talking about people who are pretending to be the opposite sex that makes sense.

I think everyone else knows exactly what I meant. 🤣

LOL okay so it seems you're determined to be upset no matter what grammar is used, which makes your objection to it on the basis of the word 'have' seem a little disingenuous.

Been away from MN all day so apologies for the slow reply

If someone called my daughter He she would be amused and confused. She'd probably call them 'weird' (fave word at the moment for anything remotely unexpected) and wonder why they were being so silly when she's clearly female. I don't believe she'd mind, we've taught her pretty well that if someone says something clearly ridiculous like that (or eg calls her fat or stupid etc) then it's them that has the problem not her. I think she'd fit this in that category and assume they're being a douche bag for their own reasons.

This is a good point.

I suppose best case scenario I'm expecting them to reply saying something along the lines of 'thanks for your comment. We added this question in after requests from parents but I can see that omitting an opt-out means some parents haven't got a choice which works for them so I'll pass your suggestion onto the relevant team to consider for future iterations'