If you do wind up doing so, I want to point out that there are options like She/them (or she/they) and he/them. These generally communicate that you identify as female or male but are okay with gender neutral pronouns as well. Heck, there’s even he/she/them.
Granted, these are most often used by trans people who want to point out that they are okay with gender neutral pronouns. There is an issue that sometimes people will use gender neutral pronouns only for trans people, and trans people often see this as refusing to acknowledge their gender. Plus there are people who identify as trans masculine or trans feminine (i.e. not 100% male or 100% female, respectively) or genderfluid/nongendered, who genuinely do not care what pronoun you use.
I’ve definitely considered using “he/them” myself.
I am an engineer who also happens to be a (cis)lady. I don’t have a gender neutral name but I have often pondered adding my pronouns (she/her) to my email signature because I still get misgendered. It’s still mostly in emails, especially from sales people, but it’s very annoying.
I can’t imagine what it would be like if it happened all the time and not just often in emails from sales people.
I had been wondering why someone would chose to use both a gendered and non-gendered pronoun, but this explains it in a simple way! Thank you.
I’ve been noticing it more often recently in company email signatures and have found it quite useful when you can’t tell from someone’s name if they are male or female.
I sorta thought about this, but at a certain point I’m up to “he/they/ve/zhe/ze, him/them/ver/zhim/zem” and it starts to look like mockery, which isn’t the intent. But it’s tough to express that I don’t really care, without rubbing in the fact that I’m in a privileged position to do so, and without subtly implying that others that do care are somehow wrong.
If you do wind up having to do it, I’d just stick with he/them (or he/they). That won’t stand out all that much or look privileged, as there will even be trans people who use that.
The fact that it’s he/them, not he/him/his/they/them/their shows that you don’t have to list every single acceptable pronoun. Two would be sufficient.
When you think about it, the intent is quite similar to the famous “I am Spartacus” scene, altered slightly to “I am specifying [pronouns]” which seems like a deeply decent gesture.
I am slightly confused about the etiquette implications of Napier’s statement below (emphasis mine):
So far, so good.
One big lesson for my cis-guy self in the last decade or so is the realization that I certainly can’t gender any particular individual conclusively by sight. And the first statement acknowledges that guessing about genders is suboptimal.
Here’s where I’m a little turned around: If I shouldn’t assume and I shouldn’t ask, than how shall I proceed respectfully?
I strongly suspect your point is that asking only when one perceives ambiguity draws attention to a perceived “otherness” as well. Is that a fair interpretation? In my mind, this would be like Immediately asking anyone with a perhaps-foreign accent where they’re from—which seems pretty abrasive to me.
Does it help if I introduce my preferred pronouns first and then ask about those of my interlocutor? Volunteering mine is meant to reduce the “otherness” factor, but I’m still asking and thereby drawing attention to my uncertainty.
To be clear, the contradiction I see above isn’t a big deal. I’m not implying anything profound—I’m just trying to learn to handle these interactions more gracefully.
The mega-law firm that employs me now has a field in everyone’s HR information entry page for “pronouns.” The firm’s internal facebook page will display those pronouns. And you’re not limited to he/him/his or she/her/hers – you can enter, and display on the facebook page, anything you want (although presumably someone would intervene if you made a joke entry).
This is true for all employees and partners, in all offices, anywhere in the world, including in some places that are, shall we say, less tolerant than the US or Western Europe.
What happens when people use the wrong pronouns in such a workplace? In a typical workplace, it’s not unusual to interact with dozens of coworkers and refer to them in emails, conversations, instant messages, etc. If someone writes “Give the data to Pat and he will format it”, but Pat prefers Ze instead of He, how would that mistake be handled? If you interact with someone frequently you’ll likely know their pronouns (similar to knowing someone’s nickname is different than their official name), but otherwise you’d have to look up each person in the directory before referring to them with a pronoun.
I don’t know. I’ve never seen it happen, and if it has happened, I haven’t heard about it.
I’m pretty sure (in fact, I’m 100% confident) that if someone intentionally and repeatedly referred to someone else by something other than that person’s preferred pronouns, there would be disciplinary action for sure. What that action would be I don’t know. An honest, good-faith mistake probably wouldn’t get much of a reaction, just a polite correction.
And, of course, I strongly suspect that the “disciplinary action” would be very different for, say, a partner with $20 million in billings annually than it would be for some person working in the office services department. Or the IT department, where I work.
I’m aware of a few transgendered people at the firm, one of whom I worked with regularly (she left the firm a little while back). I’m not aware of anyone giving them a hard time or refusing to use their preferred pronouns. Not saying it couldn’t have happened, just that I’m not aware of it.
That’s a good idea. I just checked our internal employee lookup and we don’t have such a field. And it would be helpful not just in the case of trans people. Even for cisgender people, the gender’s not obvious for some names.
Interesting. On the one site I post on where giving pronouns is common (though not required or ubiquitous), that’s effectively what I did, and I’m cis. On that site you get room enough to fit more than a few characters, and I said something like ‘female or gender-neutral’.
If somebody knows my gender and wants to use it, that’s fine. If somebody uses gender-neutral either because they don’t know my gender, or they prefer to use gender-neutral for everybody, or just doesn’t think gender’s relevant to what they’re saying, that’s also fine. What annoys me, as slalexan says, is when people assume I’m male or otherwise use male as the default. And I do get that often from people who can’t see me; the name I generally go by is gendered to anyone familiar with it, but is unfamiliar to most people in this area, and my occupation (farming) is often thought of as male though it’s most often engaged in by entire families.
It turns out that you almost never have to use a pronoun to refer to a person you are talking to, or otherwise corresponding with. So the solution is to use their name to their face, and if you need to know their pronouns in other situations, ask one of their friends, or someone else who will know.
I have a lot of trans, non-binary, etc. friends and acquaintances. This suggestion comes from practical experience. Also, while people will be more comfortable with you if you get their gender and pronouns right, no one freaks out if you make an honest error, so long as you correct yourself and move on. The key thing is for you not to make a big deal over it. Don’t apologize abjectly or bring it up a second time.
“Pat was in the office, and she said…”
“It’s he”
“Sorry, he said…”
is how the conversation should go. (Then get it right the next time. Or avoid pronouns. Pronouns can be hard.)
Naw, I think it’s pretty safe to use “she” for Nancy and “he” for “John”. You only need to look up Pat and Bai.
I often check a person’s prior emails to see what nickname (if any) I should use for them. Having a centralized directory where I could check pronouns would be handy in some situations, and harmless in all the others.
There had been a lot of chatter before that about stuff like Facebook’s 50-plus gender category options introduced in 2014, but IIRC Peterson was the first high-profile authority figure publicly making a declaration to the effect that “I’m not going to acknowledge the gender self-identification of these people I have authority over”. That raised a lot of hackles, and also raised the stakes for the issue of being able to specify one’s pronouns, in popular perception.
That, ISTM, is when institutional policies of specifying and acknowledging individuals’ chosen pronouns began to be really widespread.
I’m not sure how much of this would translate to the workplace, as some comments and behaviors that are fine in casual environments can lead to HR disciplinary actions in the workplace. Certainly a coworker that you interact with regularly can have the expectation you will use the correct pronouns, but there are a lot of occasional interactions with co-workers where it’s not reasonable to expect everyone to know the pronouns of every other person. Even just remembering someone’s name can be difficult if you don’t see them all the time.
I haven’t worked in a workplace which has has this field in the company directory. I was wondering for those companies which have those fields, what are the expectations about how often the correct pronouns are used? Is it every time no matter the relationship between the co-workers? Just as a courtesy? When is disciplinary action appropriate for getting the pronoun wrong?
We have a lot of people in my office with Chinese names, and I often don’t know how to read gender from their names. I routinely ask people who work with them more often what pronouns I should use for them. So I think the “ask someone else” advice is pretty reasonable in the workplace.
I have never worked in a place with a database of employees that included pronouns, so I don’t know how the expectations would differ. But… I’d think it would still be pretty draconian to have formal disciplinary action every time someone got the pronoun wrong. I’ve gotten people’s NAMES wrong in business settings, and it’s embarrassing, but I’ve never worried I was going to be hauled in front of HR for it.
Heck, I would not mind it put on Doper’s profiles (so it’s up to us to look it up, I think we should be expected to expend some effort); I know I get confused with who is what all the time.
True – for the overwhelming majority of sensible people in a typical workforce, it will be something momentarily awkward, and then we all move on once we get back on the same page and beat.
So it’s possible in Discourse then? I wonder whether it requires an admin to add the field?
– I suppose anybody could add theirs someplace in their profile, but it might be good to have a field for it, preferably one that would show up by clicking on the avatar (as location will, if people fill it out) without having to go to a separate page.