Hi everyone. I've been catching up on the recent threads and I wanted to thank everyone for all the interesting discussions. Also, a big thanks to @nauticant for keeping these threads going and to @KnottyAuty and all those doing the NHS audits for kicking some serious ass! So impressive!!
The conversation about employers' pronoun policies going forward had me thinking back to a point I made when I posted before (been a long time lurker and only recently delurked to comment a few threads back). I think we all agree that being told to use wrong-sex pronouns is absolutely unreasonable, but I would argue that being told not to use correct-sex pronouns to avoid causing offense is also unreasonable. It's different from being asked not to use an offensive word like the "ne" word. We're not just being told to stop using a specific word or phrase, we're being told to stop doing something that is automatic, instinctual, and has been done by humans since the beginning of our evolution – that is, recognizing and referring to sex. I bet that when we were living in caves and grunting and gesturing, we had different grunts and gestures for referring to males and females. In fact, other primate species show differences in their vocalizations and gestures when dealing with individuals of the same or opposite sex (see link below).
Recognizing the sex of others is an evolutionarily developed, automatic and unconscious perceptual ability that is absolutely necessary for the survival of any sexually reproducing species. Trying to stop humans doing this is very different from stopping us using an arbitrary word that's offensive. Our brains were easily able to replace the "ne" word with something much more appropriate because it didn't cause cognitive dissidence. It didn't require us to attempt to override millions of years of evolution.
I like the Stroop effect as a comparator (the phenomenon mentioned in an earlier thread where you try to say the color of words that spell out different colors), but I would argue that the cognitive dissonance and level of discomfort we experience when trying to override our automatic perception of sex is even worse than that caused by the Stroop effect. Our perception of color and our pattern recognition ability that allows us to read words quickly are primal evolutionary traits, but they don't have much bearing on whether we are successful in reproducing, and are therefore under much less evolutionary pressure than sex recognition. People who are color blind or dyslexic have no problem passing on their genes, yet a mutation that made it very difficult for a person to recognize the sex of everyone around them would significantly hamper them in the dating and getting busy department, making that trait strongly deselected for.
What I'm getting at is that of all the ingrained, automatic, perceptual abilities in humans, I think sex recognizing might be one of the strongest and most consistent across all populations (and therefore one of the most painful to try to short circuit). Think about it, people can see colors differently, have different levels of spatial awareness and senses of direction, be better or worse at recognizing faces or picking out voices in a crowd, feel hot and cold differently, etc. People often say, "Oh I have the worst sense of direction," or, "I'm always hot," or, "I'm terrible at recognizing faces," etc., etc. But have you ever heard someone say, while chatting at the water cooler, that they struggle to know whether all the people around them on a daily basis are male or female? It's so crucial to our survival that I think it's probably one of the most stable examples of automatic pattern recognition in humans.
All this is to say that this demand placed on us in the workplace (and many other places) to not notice or refer to sex is different from anything we've encountered before. As mentioned previously, even the most die hard TRAs slip up and correctly sex people in court. Humans are never going to unlearn the ability to recognize sex, full stop. Even if someone could wave a magic wand tomorrow and delete all sexed pronouns from our memories, so that we all just used "they" for everyone, we as a species would probably very quickly naturally develop certain inflections or gestures or spelling variations that would differ slightly when we were referring to males vs. females (and this would probably happen first among women, for whom sex recognition is about self-preservation and safety in addition to reproduction, which is also why this movement is so fundamentally misogynistic).
Employers and governments can't just legislate or wish away an automatic, unconscious perceptual ability shared by all humans. I don't claim to have the answer, other than to suggest that teaching people that any reference to their biological sex is a mortal offense was a terrible terrible mistake. Trans people need to be able to cope with acknowledging their own sex because the rest of humanity cannot be forced to delete an ability that is impossible to delete.
Paper on chimpanzees
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23436383/
This is a fun Stroop effect test. Click on the interactive experiment link to take the test.
faculty.washington.edu/chudler/words.html