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

Why do you assume that anyone who gets a pronoun wrong is 'weird', 'silly', 'ridiculous', 'has a problem' or is 'a douchebag'.

As mentioned upthread, my son has been misgendered repeatedly through his life for no apparent reasons other than having longish hair, wearing purple fairly regularly and perhaps having lovely dark eyelashes. To me he appears to be pretty clearly male but obviously other people struggle to discern this easily. They are just mistaken, there is nothing sinister, stupid or aggressive about their mistake.

I have never given pronouns when asked, I work in a field where I'd just lose my business if I got labelled a TERF. So instead I just make anyone asking intensely uncomfortable. Along the lines of...

What gives you the right to ask this information, is your intention to force people who might not be ready do declare their pronouns publicly to live a lie because you're nosey?

It's not what I want to say, but I don't have JKR's bank balance and have a mortgage to pay.

So it's my compromise, make them squirm in the hope it will stop them fucking asking. I really wish I was braver, and that it was safe for the average Woman to have a voice.

What gives you the right to ask this information, is your intention to force people who might not be ready do declare their pronouns publicly to live a lie because you're nosey?

How do people usually respond to you when you do this?

And what do you say if they say something quite reasonable in response, like:

"Oh! Not at all. I was asking because some people have preferred pronouns these days and it makes them feel included/comfortable when asked. I'm not intending to force anyone to 'live a lie'. I would think if someone is not ready to be 'out' as transgender, they already encounter situations where they privately feel misgendered, but choose not to 'out themselves' in those situations too. And asking them about pronouns now hopefully makes them feel safer in eventually coming out when they are ready."

I've not really come across as anyone who has answered back to be honest, maybe it's my resting bitch face.

The evangelicals are out tonight providing us with their scriptures to learn!

Maybe it's them being startled at the aggression and negative presumption in your question and deciding not to engage with someone who is clearly just looking to pick a fight?

She's ten. I'm guessing what she'd think.
I don't think it's unreasonable that a ten year old girl with a relatively standard girl's name, who has not asked otherwise, woukd think it weird if someone out of tje blue referred to her as 'he'

Claiming anything else is a bit of a reach don't you think?

Your daughter might think it's odd if she's very conventionally female in her name and appearance. I think the rest of the adjectives you used were a reach and reflective of your own negative mindset.

Having pronouns noted for your child might seem an unnecessary overreach for you/her. For others, myself included, it's actually helpful info for people to know, and my child isn't even transgender.

Anyone who deliberately calls a very obvious girl 'he' without any prompting is trying to be provocative or prove a point.

Given this is a taught hobby group then the fictional person doing this wound be a teacher.

It is clearly a red flag is a teacher unprompted decides to call a ten year old girl 'he' in front of a roomful of her peers. Stop being ridiculous and pretending this is anything other than unexpected behaviour in the eyes of an average ten year old, or the eyes of anyone else tbh.

I see what you're doing and it's not working.

I'm not sure what you "think I'm doing", could you clarify what my supposed agenda is?

Your hobby group teacher might well never call your daughter 'he', however they theoretically might call my son 'she' if they didn't have information to the contrary. Would you assume they were only doing so because they were weird, provocative or trying to prove some kind of point?

I don't know what your son looks like so I can't answer that question.

If your son gets mistaken for a girl because of the way he looks and it bothers him then absolutely one option for him is to declare preferred pronouns. That's for you and him to discuss.

I answered your question which was something like 'how would your daughter feel if she were called he' and so I told you my best guess about how she'd feel, given there has been no precedent and it would be very unlikely indeed that any teacher would call her He in genuine error.

You're trying to make out I'm a small minded bigot for guessing that my daughter might dismiss an adult teacher deliberately mis-sexing her, but I am not. I am being as bog standard mainstream as I possibly can in stating this.

It's a pointless argument you're trying to have with me all I'm disengaging. Goodnight

I agree.

This doesn't have to be met with immediate aggression?

Maybe they've had an embarrassing moment when an adult called a long haired boy "she" or a short haired girl "he"?
My mate has a name that could be male or female, and when he had long hair he was often mistaken for a girl - could this be a way that they are trying to avoid this? Could it be that they've borrowed some resources from another company and not looked over them thoroughly?

not everyone thinks as hard about gender as mumsnetters, and sometimes its actually more productive to just have a little chat rather than bowling in with a Cass Report in a ring binder......

The reason I am pro stating pronouns is - this helps children (with children it’s not so easy at a glance to tell) who aren’t clearly boy or girl.
so if you are a long haired boy mistaken for ‘she’ a parent had stated ‘he’ on the intake form and it stops the child having to explain themselves.

Yes it might be obvious for your own particular child, but this is not the case for all children.
Add into the mix a unisex name and you have an upset child being misgendered - easily avoided with a pronoun started on a form.

My reading of the op is that the form already asks about sex (although they call it gender) and that preferred pronouns are a separate question, so I'm not sure what these concerns about accidental mis-sexing are based on.

Since when was it agreed that being accidentally mis sexed was such a massively huge irrecoverable incident?

as opposed to you know life???

one of my sisters ex bf saw a photo of me sitting down from the back when I had really short hair - he said “who’s that bloke?”

oddly I didn’t fall to the floor wailing about literal violence & how I couldn’t cope. I just laughed and said “that’s me” he went red and apologised and then life went on as normal

I agree with the OP that this should not be a mandatory question on a registration form (especially one for children), however, being mis-sexed can absolutely be a humiliated experience, especially as a child.

I was once publicly mistaken for a boy in my early teens and it stuck with me for a very long time, as I was already self-conscious about my appearance compared to my peers (I never felt as pretty as them, and this comment validated that).

Regardless of whether or not it's humiliating, if there's already a question about the child's sex (as there appears to be) then the risk of mis-sexing has already been dealt with, which means the question about preferred pronouns is either unnecessary or about something else entirely.

@Floisme I was responding to a comment that being mis-sexed can't be a negative experience. It can. That's it.

Do we need to start a 'I do not have a gender' declaration that people can sign up to and auto-send to whichever orgs they wanted?

It's hard for individuals to send things like this, if we started doing this en masse, we'd at least build a picture of how many people object to this coercion

My thoughts too.

They could be using gender as a synonym for sex, but this practice is causing confusion in health data collection in heaps of countries. E.g. the AIHW admits on this page that they're probably confusing male/female/sex/gender data
https://www.aihw.gov.au/about-our-data/aihw-data-by-sex-and-gender

All kinds of places share data that gets used to make health policy. I think its still worth it to stipulate if you only want to have your sex recorded.

For those saying the daughter "has pronouns" I disagree.

The purpose of the data collection is to support those few who wish to try and mandate the use of unexpected or unusual pronouns despite the evidence of our eyes.

So in answer to the implied question, the daughter does not mandate pronouns. She is used to and comfortable to be referred to in a way that makes sense in light of her sex.

The issue with this is that not everyone will understand what you mean by this, which has been demonstrated on this thread. If you want to drive meaningful action, you need to assume that not everyone is a frequent visitor of the Feminism board on Mumsnet. You are in an echo chamber and some of you are failing to recognise that.

For example, if I told the key worker at my son's nursery that <insert son's name> does not have a gender> I can guarantee that this would completely flummox them and they will presume that they can no longer refer to him as a boy or use he/him pronouns when referring to him.