Pronouns she/they - what does that mean?

[MagpiePi]

A woman at work has she/they has her email pronouns. It doesn't even work grammatically as 'she' and 'they' are both 3rd person pronouns.
Not sure what she is trying to express, other than being tiresomely right-on, or have I missed something?

It means she wants to hop onto the bandwagon without really changing anything.

I would actually prefer it if English didn’t have gendered pronouns, and the singular “they” seems like the most probable route to this. If disambiguation is necessary we can just say “they singular” or “they plural” like we do with “you”. Other languages without gendered pronouns like Turkish or Finnish do just fine.

But right now it feels like using “they” is indicating support for a specific political agenda. So that will have to be for another generation to implement if they see fit.

Does it mean she's happy for people to refer to her as either she or they? All very unnecessary, just call her she as normal.

It means she is a pathetic handmaiden and is as thick as mince.

I can’t speak for everyone, but most of the time it means they’re okay with either she/her or they/them! Just go with whichever you prefer/are more comfortable with.

(N.B. I have met some people who expect you to switch pronouns regularly, like alternating between she/her/they/them, but I don’t think that’s how the majority of people mean it and if anyone tries to enforce that they’ll soon find out it doesn’t really work)

There was some narcissistic singer who insisted that people had to refer to her as “she” and “they” in set proportions, or she’d throw a tantrum.

Cross posted!

I think that’s very clear. It means you can use she or they and this person won’t mind either way.

I don’t agree with it. But it seems straightforward.

When my students pick she/they either they're genuinely not bothered how you refer to them or else they want to referred to as a mixture so not all the time one or the other.... However, that's just silly as who is counting?

Sorry to say but I think the pronouns are here to stay. Like beards. Hoped it was a fad...but it's been at least a decade and now we're on to the unironic moustache.

If anyone ever demanded I put pronouns on my email at work I’d definitely do this! Make it as complicated as possible and then complain ENDLESSLY to HR about people getting it wrong.

Oh and I’d change it every week or so too.

I really don’t understand why we didn’t all jump on board and do this! If we’d just thrown up dust and caused massive confusion maybe we could have brought the world of work to its knees until it saw sense.

I wouldn't worry about it...you would never refer to somebody in the third person in front of the ( very rude I think) and so when you do use it to describe/ refrence them to someone else, pick the one that is the best descriptor as it will only confuse the person you're talking to otherwise

I think it probably means that this person wants to communicate that while anyone who looks will see a female body, they don't have what might be understood as a "feminine" gender identity. Asking for "she/they" rather than "they/them" might mean "I actually prefer people to use they/them pronouns about me because I consider myself genderless but [due to female socialisation] I don't want to force that on anyone so I don't mind at all if people who don't go in for keeping track of everyone's pronouns just carry on using she/her"
Or it might mean more like "I am really not that bothered what pronouns people use anout me personally. I am obviously female to look at and don't want to change that but I don't have a feminine gender identity. I want to signal myself as a trans ally by putting pronouns in my signature but I don't want anyone to consider me to be cis because I am more complicated than that"

It's probably just supposed to be signalling that she's oh-so-cool that she's above sex/gender and not bothered what she's called. Although for that she really should have gone for the full trifecta, as an ex-friend of mine did.

Alternatively she's 'on a journey' to trying to browbeat other people into referring to her as something she's not. There's a male journalist who works for a cycling website who has done something similar. He to they to she.

I asked a close friend who uses she/they pronouns what she meant by it and for her, it wasn’t about rejecting her womanhood. She acknowledges that she is a woman and is happy with that, patriarchal pressures notwithstanding, but it’s a political stance to reject the idea that you would need to know the sex of a person in most everyday contexts. She also values sex-segregated spaces esp in prisons, sports, hospitals etc but I suppose it’s similar to rejecting the honorific choice of Miss/Mrs and opting for Ms - in the same way she doesn’t agree that a women’s marital status needs to be announced, she also thinks it disadvantages women to have sex announced when not necessary.

I’ve probably done a really poor job of explaining it, but it did change my perspective and I can see that for some people, it isn’t purely performative as I had originally thought

I'm GC and don't consider myself to have a gender identity. If a genderist believes that a "she" means having a feminine gender identity then calling me she would be incorrect for them, so it would be more accurate for such a person to call me "they".

If someone believes that "she" means a female regardless of gender identity or lack of, then it would be accurate for them to call me "she".

So I can understand being GC and giving this option.

It means she's a woman who thinks she's not like the other women.

The good thing is that she's offered you a choice of pronouns so you can completely ignore the "they" and continue to refer to her as "she" without being reported to HR.

It could be she doesn’t give a fuck and is just messing with the system

It might just indicate that she knows she's going to be referred to as "they" from time to time, by people who don't know anything about her beyond her role at work, e.g. that she's the staff member in charge of ordering paperclips. 🤷🏼 So it might just be a way of saying she doesn't care.

That's an interesting take, I hadn't thought of it like that.

I don't think it's like using Ms though - which is clearly a female title equivalent to the male Mr. If the person you're referring to looks female and has a female name, people are going to identify her as female regardless of pronouns. The use of "they" is unlikely to the the only way her sex is announced (or announces itself).

I can't see any difference between your friend and any normal woman. Why do you need to announce that you want people to use the normal, grammatically correct pronouns for you?
Why is being referred to as a woman in everyday contexts a bad thing?

Surely if you think people don't need to know your sex in everyday contexts, you wouldn't bother with pronouns at all?

I'm sure we all get referred to as 'they' but the thing is, we never know as we won't be there to hear it so why would anyone be worried about?

Because the grammatically correct pronouns perpetuate sexism ?

when I worked with people in different countries who didn’t recognise my name as female , they all use male default pronouns - all work was done by email and how they interacted with me was notably different and more respectful than when people knew my sex. I had a few laughs whenever we met and they jaws hit the ground

and we know that just knowing the sex of the person affects how people interact and interpret what you do - remember all those cvs sent out where the only difference was the name ( male or female ) and the males got far more interviews than the females?

making it easy to practise sexism just embeds it

I am all for neutral pronouns and names

It just means she is being ridiculous and best ignored...

Seeing as nobody here actually knows what it represents, I would assume it is entirely performative and signalling allyship to the trans cause. She did actually have blue hair and used to write company news bulletins about trans people being the most marginalised group in society. However, she is married, wears a ring and took her husbands surname.

ETA: I think it the fact that it doesn't make sense grammatically that irritates me as much as anything.

The thing is if she doesn’t care whether people refer to her as “she” or “they” there’s no reason to say anything is there. The only possible reason is that she’s just hopping on the woke bandwagon and/or just wants attention. I’ve never had to state “my” pronouns because funnily enough everyone has always referred to me as “she” because I’m clearly female. Which 99.999% of women are. Even masculine looking women are clearly female. It’s just virtue signalling nonsense.