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?

But this makes no grammatical sense. Her work colleagues obviously know what sex she is so ‘they’ will never be relevant unless they are grouping her with others.

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)

Imagine how mind numbingly tiresome these people must be. So much spare time on their hands that they expect to police other peoples speech (even when they are not present). I think we should popularise people ‘getting a grip’.

That is nice in theory, but I cannot see that that is really going to work in reality.

Start with the receipt of the CV. Simply the act of adding those pronouns has started any reader thinking about that person's sex class.

Due to the language conventions of the English language, people are conscious of people's sex class. By making any sort of statement about that such as a different pronoun, turns attention to that exact thing. The poster's friend has just created a discordant language request that will mean that people who have that CV will have to take careful consideration every time they speak about her. And what are they focused on: her sex category. Because that is the thing she has brought attention to specifically.

Regardless of the intention, this is the impact.

I am all for trying to remove negative sexist attitudes and behaviour in the workplace and anywhere possible. I have been conscious of this sexism for all my life as I am sure most women and girls have.

But drawing attention to sexism through a language demand where someone has to then think about the sex class of that person is not something I see as being effective.

There are ways to ask a question to make the point that the questioner thinks it's a load of nonsense (as I and most people here do) and there are ways to ask a question to elicit information from the person being questioned. It's worthwhile to be able to ask the second way, even when you want to ask the first way, especially if you're genuinely interested in the answer!

I was thinking the OP might ask for some examples of how this person prefers to be referred to, because it's not very clear, rather than quizzing them on their motivation.

@Helleofabore said ...She may as well point a huge sign that says, 'I want you to think about what sex class I belong to' simply because she has been the one to make any statement at all such as adding pronouns to her CV.
This is one of the reasons I won't add pronouns to my email signature. Women still face sex discrimination and declaring my sex in this way would make it more salient in professional contexts, where it should be irrelevant.

I once mis-sexed a third party in an email, neither the recipient nor I was aware that the third party's name is in fact unisex and I happened to know someone of the opposite sex with the same name. The misunderstanding was resolved rapidly and without drama; it would not have been avoided by pronouns in email signatures (a practice followed by only one of the three people involved in this incident).

Bloody hell!

I'm told that's how it's done in publishing now with YA novels. I've read an extract from such a book where they cycle through the lead character's pronouns, and finding "Alex" referred to as he one minute and they the next made it incredibly hard to follow, as I thought the 'they' referred to his friends who were with him. It is ridiculous and doesn't work. I feel sorry for kids having to negotiate all this stuff.

Don't let's forget there is a small group who have made a point on social media that they expect you to ask their pronouns before talking to them at any point during the day. Because they change pronouns regularly in the day depending on what they are feeling like right then and there.

Because they are 'genderfluid'.

Their pronouns are me!/me!/me!
It's time they grew up.

I had a colleague who started out as she/they and then progressed to they/he and finally he/him. So for that person it was about signalling where they believed themself to be on their “gender identity journey”. Obviously this was extremely difficult for everyone to keep up with but she/they/he seemed to have think it was obvious from her/their/his hair length, existence or lack of jewellery and make-up and clothing choices where they were on any given day. Reader, it was not.

This colleague had a lot of young friends at work who were all very supportive of her/their/his journey but, whaddya know, kept getting the pronouns wrong. And to all those who say “you never use a third person pronoun to someone’s face” I will say this scenario played out several times in front of me:
Friend 1: Do you like Wotsits?
She/they/he (quietly): No I don’t.
Friend 1: eh?
Friend 2: She said no she doesn’t.
Deathly silence descends. Everyone looks at She/they/he who is glowering.
Friend 1: You mean they?
Friend 2: Sorry I mean they, no hang on, he, er, you?

I remained impassive on all these occasions as my job likely depended on it I am a professional. I no longer work there.

TRAs must have trouble in French, Italian and Spanish is all I can say! 'you' is the formal plural in English and we use it in the singular in place of the informal singular, i.e. the equivalent of 'tu' in French - it's 'thou'.
Using 'they' for everything would be utterly confusing, and sex is important (gender, otoh, is non-existent so doesn't need to be catered for).

Yes, all the pronoun nonsense doesn't really work in French.

Trans women can ask to be referred to as "elle" and trans men as "il", but it's not such a big change because possessive pronouns are gendered according to the thing being possessed rather than the person doing the possessing.

So for example, "He is sitting at his dining table" in English would become, "He is sitting at her dining table" in French because the table is feminine. This effectively cuts the possibility of using wrong sexed pronouns in French by half.

Word endings may change according to the gender of the person, but usually by adding on an extra "e" for a woman. The extra "e" is silent so it makes no difference in spoken French, and in written French there's no real way to tell whether someone has got it "wrong" - or right, depending on your point of view - deliberately, or by accident because mistakes are very common.

People who identify as non-binary are screwed because there is no such thing as gender neutral in French. They have invented a gender neutral pronoun, "iel", but I have never seen or heard it used in real life. It's quite difficult to say without it sounding like either "il" or "elle". And the only impact on the rest of your sentence is going to be in your word endings. Since the only options are "extra e" or "no extra e", in reality "iel" will default to the masculine and become virtually indistinguishable from "il".

I also think it would be a little easier to avoid using wrong sex pronouns for someone in French than in English. Although I don't know any trans people in France so it's never come up in reality.

Say you work with a trans woman called Susan and you need to tell someone where Susan is but you don't want to refer to Susan as a woman or get into trouble for referring to Susan as a man, you can say, "Susan is in his office" without anyone batting an eyelid, because office is masculine and so this is correct French.

The word "personne" is also feminine, so if talking about trans women in general, if you can avoid talking specifically about trans women and talk about trans people, you can say "une personne trans" and everything defaults to feminine.

It's a language which is pretty resistant to gender woo in the first place and pretty easy to use in a way which doesn't make any statement about someone's gender.

Are any of these people in long term gainful employment?

Wear a flipping badge then if it's that important to you. (Maybe with some sort of flap or slider to select the pronoun. This probably exists.)

Though don't expect people to necessarily get it right even then.

This has to be the absolute height of self-obsessed nonsense.

I think it means
"I'm a 'cis' woman, so I am a she/her. However, as a 'cis' woman, I'm super privileged and probably going to be the absolutely least vulnerable/important person in any room. So if other more important/vulnerable people want to call me they, because it makes them more comfortable not to use sex based pronouns, then their view is obviously what matters most."

Laugh emoji, where art thou!

It does, some people wear different coloured bracelets so their unfortunate friends and colleagues know in which “gender” they should be addressed in at that time.

That may well be true unless there are no other ways of discerning sex from the CV.

But one could also say that saying you are a "she" will be read as you are a "cis" woman, who has a feminine gender identity. That may not be the intent, but it will be the impact.

There is no solution really. People will draw their attention to you being female whatever you do and possibly even make further assumptions due to how you state it.

@Ereshkigalangcleg ...some people wear different coloured bracelets so their unfortunate friends and colleagues know in which “gender” they should be addressed in at that time
This is a testament to our atomised society.

I was going to ask if this was a wind up, but I realised that I have no difficulty believing that such bubbles exist - that there are small corners of UK society where this manipulative weirdness actually happens and is considered normal -
and so instead I found myself thinking bleakly of all the other bubbles where disturbing, damaging practices proceed unremarked , unhindered and largely unseen.

At some point it becomes difficult for outsiders to challenge what's happening in these bubbles and for insiders to opt out.

A language tends to work as a organic whole, so taking one element (e.g. whether pronouns are gendered or not) in isolation and arguing that if one language doesn't do it, another language doesn't need to do it either, is a dubious undertaking without a thorough knowledge of both languages concerned.

An example: if you want to explain a situation involving Jane, Susan, cake and giving, in English, you do it with word order and a preposition: "Jane gave the cake to Susan".
You can't reverse Jane and cake without changing the meaning - "the cake gave Jane to Susan"(!).
Even moving "to Susan" feels a bit off - "to Susan Jane gave the cake" because although the meaning is still clear, word order is so strong in English that we are sensitive to word-order oddities. (It might sound ok if we were narrating how Jane gave various different things to different people, with the emphasis on who got what; in isolation it sounds awkwardly phrased.)

In Latin it would be a different matter, because Latin nouns have case endings. Jane (the subject doing the verb) would be in the nominative, the cake (object of the action) would be accusative, and Susan (recipient) would have a dative case ending. So wherever you put them in the sentence, their grammatical function travels with them and meaning isn't lost, and word order can be used purely for emphasis.
Along comes Innovatus Optimisticus and says "Hey, guys, some languages don't have case endings, we don't need this shit!"
Sure, they don't, but if they ditch them, it's not "just" a matter of ditching case endings. It has implications for how Latin handles word order and emphasis, and possibly other things too that I haven't thought of (it's a long time since I did any Latin).
Similarly with pronouns and gender, I suspect.

Word order is awesome, the way we use it without even thinking about it, and everyone will know immediately if it's wrong: I have a brown small old bushy-tailed dog.

“But one could also say that saying you are a "she" will be read as you are a "cis" woman, who has a feminine gender identity. That may not be the intent, but it will be the impact.”

Or you don’t include any pronouns at all. I don’t put any on my CV. Do you? They can read my name and make any assumption they want.

“There is no solution really. People will draw their attention to you being female whatever you do and possibly even make further assumptions due to how you state it.”

Exactly.

Yes, and also the sense for effective rhythm and sound; one can see it in your sentence about the dog.

Or you don’t include any pronouns at all. I don’t put any on my CV. Do you? They can read my name and make any assumption they want.

I wasn't talking just about CVs but any time in life where it is indicated that you are ok being called she or her.

If she/they is really about not wanting to be seen as female because of nor wanting to have to conform the societal expectations and stereotypes of being female, why not use she/him/they. ie use whatever pronoun you want with me, just treat me as a person and not what expect me to be from a gendered pronoun

Ok.

But do you see the outcome of just you mentioning that she is doing this as a political stance? That is what I’m referring to.

It sparked a discussion about your friend being female and language usage. And it didn’t resolve the sexism at all. I am not convinced the reason works as your friend explained.

On the other hand it is an example of how these language demands work. Ie it did centre a person demanding language changes to suit them in a discussion about that language. Of course, this is what many people have pointed out is the outcome, intended or not. That any demand to change language ends up with attention being directed at that request and towards that person.

Even a request has this disruptive effect.