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

I think the proposed draft is fine. If the hobby group starts playing silly buggers, then escalate as suggested.
It may be that they downloaded a form from the internet and just haven't thought about it.

Everyone has pronouns- they just replace your name (I, me, my etc). So you just need to put in she/ her and female. It’s really not a big deal. Everyone also has a gender and for most people it’s the same as their sex but a lot of forms use the terms sex and gender interchangeably which could be the case here

Yeah, sure. But it's still not right to say that the daughter doesn't have pronouns. She does, and they're sex based, like her gender. Using a male pronoun wouldn't be accurate because she is female. That's why her pronouns are she / her.

@Underthinker what do you mean? I've quoted the OP, and the question is directed at her. I'm sure she'll read it without being tagged since it's her thread.

The gender and pronouns fields are mandatory. Have the courtesy to read the OP's posts properly.

Honestly this is so tiresome.

I work in a pretty liberal industry and out of the many hundreds/probably thousands of people I know personally or refer to on a regular basis, no more than a handful of them have preferred pronouns, and it's not terribly hard to remember who they are. I am no genius and I can manage to stay on top of it.

Even if I get it wrong, most of the time the person I'm referring to is not present so they don't take issue directly. I've gotten a preferred pronoun wrong in front of someone once and they were more apologetic than I was.

I would bet that unless you're a secondary school teacher you don't know more than five people whose pronouns you might conceivably misconstrue, and certainly not five people who would actually make a big deal out of a mistake.

Could you say these surveys questions aren’t up to the task of monitoring protected characteristics because they don’t follow standard (ONS is gold standard) categories.

And collecting your own unique descriptor categories is risky because you might actually confuse or conflate or introduce new problems obscuring the data as has happened here.

Urgently the ethnicity monitoring questions are too blunt- not everyone falls within those groups and some peoples heritage falls within several of them. Not asking questions about race and ethnicity correctly is racist.

The sex question (to which in children, legally, the answer is always f or m) has been confused with a gender question- gender is social stereotypes associated with biological sex. Sex based stereotypes/gender are cultural idea such as boys must like football and have short hair or girls must like pink and not like football and must have long hair. These ideas are outdated and hold back both girls and boys so you shouldn’t inadvertently promote those.

Even more confusingly because I know you want to support all kids, not limit any of them, ‘gender’ here has been used as shorthand to ask about gender identity, which is a political belief. Gender identity is a set of private beliefs which should be no more required of anyone to state than are say, mandatorily asking about religious beliefs or how you would vote in an election if you were an adult.
I note with concern that that the gender qu is not asked as an optional question, which is poor practice.

Asking of children in a mandatory way about gender identity is very confusing because the majority of children don’t have any view on the adult concerns of gender identity politics. Many kids taking part in this activity are still in primary school. This is not a topic my daughter or her friends can appropriately be asked about given many young people would rather not have their views shared with peers or authority figures either way if this even is something they have thought about. You don’t need to know their thoughts on this.

I would also recommend that you have a section under the box seeking the name of the child the asking ‘is there another name (or pronoun) by which your child would like to be addressed?’ And that will tell you all you know about gender identity for the practical purposes of running an activity without intruding on, or introducing in any leading way, sensitive questions of gender identity in children.

By contrast the biological sex of child question (f/m) should always be mandatory if you wish to inform yourselves as an anti-sexist organisation.

It would be far more relevant if you wish to be inclusive, to use standard category definitions to ask about children’s access needs and SEN or any disability or medical condition, which may become barriers to the child participating in the group or not. The fact this isn’t asked/ isn’t asked in the correct way does risks coming across as ableist.

As a small group running a temporary activity and not a school; you are not equipped with the staff training or powers to safely deal with information or disclosures that you might otherwise collect in this current group of survey questions.

Thanks for having my child at this activity and if you wish to discuss any of this further please feel free to contact me.

Nobody has pronouns. Pronouns are a part of speech. They indicate the sex of the person you are talking about.

You do know that even hobby groups have to comply with GDRP regulations? So, yes, a form enrolling a child with a hobby group is a legal document. Should the OP care if none of the adults have DBS checks because it is 'just' a hobby group?

Very often with online forms you are unable to leave the gender identity questions blank.

Deleted - misunderstood you.
Great points.

Or these days, preferred gender identity, which is obviously what you don't want people to be allowed to have.

95+ percent of people are simply going to choose the pronouns that match their child’s birth sex and the very small number of people for whom this is actually an issue for their child are going to feel relieved and included.

It’s possible to believe in both biology and inclusiveness. This is the least important territory when it comes to being gender critical.

I don't agree.

A man who "prefers she" is telling people to pretend he's a woman.

I was taught, and in turn, taught my toddlers that in English (and other languages), people use 'he' for males and 'she' for females. If you ask me to use 'she' for a male, you are asking me to pretend that that he is a female. It's not like using a title, or a different name, it's a language fundamental that grammatical gender is chosen based on sex.

If you want to change that, then we'd have to start from the beginning, perhaps like the Finns, and never teach our babies that 'she' means female - that we've decided this grammar rule is going to change, and now we all get to choose the gender other people use when referring to us like we do our name.

Continuing to teach children that 'she' means girl and 'he' means boy when they first learn a language, but then changing that and saying actually, anyone can choose and it means nothing is setting them up for confusion and making them vulnerable both because of that confusion, and because it means they'll assume sex based on gender - which for women and children means opening themselves to predatory men.

Funny how people have absolutely no problem remembering that their friend has gone from Miss Smith to Mrs Jones but shrivel up in a corner when she asks them to call her Joseph instead of Joanne.

Also wondering how on earth people refusing to see that language is gendered would cope in a language that she's male and female words for inanimate objects, like Italian and Spanish do. "Strawberry" doesn't have a sex but is a female word in Italian. You would use a female pronoun as an object in a sentence instead of the neutral "it" to say "here's a strawberry, do you want it?" . Does this non sex based normal use of language destroy them?

there have always been 5000 children (mainly girls) per year referred for gender dysphoria?

catch yourself on

and until very recently, being referred to the Tavistock for gender dysphoria meant a very high likelihood of sterilisation and double mastectomy.

no, we as a society haven't always butchered girls who expressed dissatisfaction with gender stereotypes (although we have often punished them in other ways).

people who don't understand that preferred pronouns is a gateway to this kind of treatment for girls make me embarrassed for them as apparently they have no fucking nuance or care for the risk gender ideology poses to girls

To have pronouns is shorthand for "The pronouns that people use to refer to me are X/Y"

Also wondering how on earth people refusing to see that language is gendered would cope in a language that she's male and female words for inanimate objects, like Italian and Spanish do. "Strawberry" doesn't have a sex but is a female word in Italian.
I think it's fine as long as all strawberries have the same gender and we don't have to ask them on an individual basis in order to avoid offending our food.

You confidently state 'everyone has a gender' - er, no they don't. I have a sex- female- but I don't have a mysterious sense of being a woman, I just am a woman. I respect that others may feel they have a gender, but I don't.

And gender ideology (which this form is an example of) really is quite a big deal with all of its repercussions, such as leading to males in female spaces.

Yes it is tiresome. I have over 200 students and several who have changed pronouns - some of whom are quite militant about it. I can't always remember who has asked for different pronouns. Should I just avoid talking to them?

If they think they have a gender identity, they can crack on and enjoy it.
It is outrageous to tell me that I have one, when I don't. I am not a believer in GII.

It's also outrageous to attempt to co-opt words that are sex-based and insist that they reflect gender identity, or that they are a matter of personal choice for the person they refer to and other people must comply.
If people want words to refer to gender identity, they can think of some new ones. Pronouns already have a function and a meaning.

Gender identity ideology is founded on dishonesty.

😆😆

when you can describe for me the characteristics of the gender identity that all women, including Angela Merkel and Caitlyn Jenner share that makes them all women, I'll believe everyone has a gender identity

until then...nah

The institution the OP’s child is about to join has opted out of the original sexed based meaning, otherwise they would not be asking - the form would just ask for ‘sex’ ( meaning male or female), or not even that.

The question is a red flag.

(edited for typo)

Also wondering how on earth people refusing to see that language is gendered would cope in a language that she's male and female words for inanimate objects, like Italian and Spanish do. "Strawberry" doesn't have a sex but is a female word in Italian. You would use a female pronoun as an object in a sentence instead of the neutral "it" to say "here's a strawberry, do you want it?" . Does this non sex based normal use of language destroy them?
I have never known a strawberry to get arsey about being misgendered.

Nope, but you chose your line of work babes and teenagers have been annoyingly militant about shit that has far more nuance than they understand since forever. I was like that, you were probably like that. Deal with it.

Teenagers haven't always insisted on policing others' speech, "babes". And I don't have to tie myself in knots to go along with it.

Nobody has pronouns. Pronouns are a part of speech. They indicate the sex of the person you are talking about.

@Snowypeaks This is like saying names are just a part of speech indicating what to call the person you are talking about.

It's true, but it's also true that people have names. These things are not mutually exclusive.