They know at work that I am a woman, so why this?

[EmiliaBassano]

I bought a new phone yesterday and rather than make a total pig's ear of doing the job myself, I asked my work IT department to help me set up the work email access as it didn't work last night when I tried it at home. They logged it as:

Emilia called to ask for help with getting access to their emails as well as getting MFA setup for their new phone.

Just why? I don't identify as anything other than what I am and I don't have pronouns on my emails, which I refuse to do. But I have worked here for 10 years.

AIBU to be irritated?

I'd advise caution with pursuing that line lest you end up looking more than a little foolish.

@Changingplace was quite correct in their (you see how it works?) post.

Yes you are bu. It's set message they send out regardless of the sex of the person so they just insert the name into the rest of the text.

Why should an IT person have to sift through automated responses to correctly gender the person who made a request?

And I'm surprised they've got time to help you set stuff up on your personal phone. And the thanks they get is you moaning they didn't call you 'she'?

When TRAs used to say “well we’ll starting calling you all ‘he’” the standard response was generally some version of “knock yourselves out. We’re not that fragile and don’t really give a toss”. Now we have this response to a fairly common use of “their”.

I can't help thinking that people are likely to say "their" if it's a woman's property, but "his" if it's a man's.

Why? It's just a stsndard message.

It's just the way things are now. Stop stressing. Hope you like the new phone.

"X called to ask for help with obtaining access to email accounts and setting up MFA for a new phone."

Reads better to me.

This use of 'their' is so completely a non-issue that I spent some time trying to think what 'MFA' in the OP stood for (Male-to-Female Assignation?), assuming that was the problem.

The colloquial singular use of 'their' is increasingly common for reasons independent of gender stuff. I can remember being struck by how often my son did this a couple of decades ago to refer to people in his class when he was speaking to me. It was pre-gender ideology and it seemed to occur most in contexts where he was talking about someone he didn't know well, when the anecdote didn't really relate very strongly to the person. It suggested a certain sort of impersonality or narrative distance from the person.

It is an interesting evolution of conversational language. I wouldn't use it in formal written contexts but I certainly wouldn't regard it as an error when used informally - or (as others have already suggested was the case here) as part of some automated text that has to serve for men and for women.

When I said misgendering by accident, I meant in a way that can cause confusion. Anyone who looked at me, heard my name or knew me would refer to me as “she”, even though I’ve never stated any pronoun preference.

If someone wrote at work, for example:

Fishes has shown above average strength. He can lift 50lb weights.

it would be confusing, because who is he - it’s obviously not Fishes.

The next person might lift the report and change the name and weights and also be talking about a woman, and then miss changing the “he” and again cause confusion.

If we all right “their”, there’s no chance of us missing a gendered pronoun. It’s not about offending people with misgendering, it’s about effective communication.

The same problem would arise if someone started calling me Dolphins instead of Fishes. Sometimes vague and correct is better than precise and at risk of being wrong.

I've never known such a fuss about absolutely nothing.

I think the salient question is have they always worded it like this, or is it new?
It would annoy me, and people saying it's 'perfectly correct' and 'neutral' are being disingenuous; the name is clearly female, she's been there 10 years and they would know if she wanted to be addressed as anything other than 'she' and 'her'.

Did they sort out the problem with your phone?

if so, just be glad it's sorted out, they've done their job and don't deserving you giving them shit for trying to be professional.

I see the boys have arrived, starting the weekend early with their dicks in their hands.

MFA= Multi Factor Authentication.

I can't help but wonder if a man would have noticed. Or cared ?

It must have been a shock to some TRAs when it emerged that English was perfectly capable of reflecting an ungendered world. Makes me wonder what they 😀 were studying instead of English. Shame it wasn't science.

Third person singular they is a longstanding option in English. It got sat on by the language police in the 18th Century according to the OED.

An early use cited in the image (link at top) is from 1375. It's þei if that shows as Thorn - E - I on your screen.

Bring back Thorn and Eth!

Someone always wheels out this kind of thing on these threads.
This is, as you say, an anachronistic form. It jars to a modern eye/ear precisely because we don't use it unless we don't know the sex of the person.

It makes far more sense to write the script without pronouns at all. It doesn't sound professional as it is, it's as if they really can't be bothered with detail.

Well I wheeled it in because it is longstanding, discussed in English lessons in other countries, attested in the OED (you read that didn't you?), used by me and those around me when in England and when using English in other countries... It is actually taught.

And then you timeslip in from the 18th Century. Someone always does that.

You can choose to use it or not. The world will still turn. Someone.

That OED article you screenshotted states that modern usage of singular they is pronoun of choice to replace he or she where the gender of the antecedent is unknown, irrelevant, or nonbinary or where gender needs to be concealed. None of these cases apply to the OP.

I'd suggest that it is not "disingenuous" to answer the OP's original question by pointing out the received message was not only grammatically correct, but socially fine.
I don't believe for a moment that message was in any way ideological nor intended to upset. And neither do I think any obfuscation is being attempted here by those espousing common sense.
Seriously. There's no need for outrage.

The real question is not whether the author of the message was right to make neutral reference to the person needing help (for the avoidance of doubt, they obviously were) but, rather, whether the OP and others are right to be offended by it. On that point, I don't think they are.

I shall go further, I think that being offended - or even just irritated - by the message "Emilia called to ask for help with getting access to their emails as well as getting MFA setup for their new phone." says rather more about the person being upset than it does about the sender of the message or society at large.

I'm all for fighting the good fight, but I really don't think there's a battle that needs winning in Emilia's message from the IT department.

>None of these cases apply to the OP.

Fair point apart perhaps from 'irrelevant'.

Was gender relevant? It might have been known.

How is their sex relevant to their phone set up?

The problem a lot of people struggle with regarding English (possibly English teachers more than others) is that no matter how much you stamp your feet and grind your teeth dictionaries can only be descriptive. Not prescriptive. Our mother tongue is very much bottom up, not top down.

That OED article you screenshotted states that modern usage of singular they is pronoun of choice to replace he or she where the gender of the antecedent is unknown, irrelevant, or nonbinary or where gender needs to be concealed. None of these cases apply to the OP.

They left out the key reason: when nobody gives a shit.

I disagree and I think people overblow this..we do use and hear it enough without thinking that I don't think people find it as jarring as they say. It's only obvious to me when it's use in a TRA way where it's written and repeated over in one paragraph for example. I think we use it more than we think not just when we don't know their sex but when it's really not that key to what we're saying.