And if he’s finally figured out what exactly fits, that’s great. And if, at some point, he figures out that trans man isn’t exactly right either, that’s great too.
The queer movement and feminist movement looked at the two allowed gender roles and said, “Okay, but hear me out, what if…?” And people keep coming up with different ways to end that sentence, and that’s fantastic. I have no expectation that we’ve finally found all the endings; and if people keep the question mark there, great!
It should. I mean, why not?
My firm gives us the option to add preferred pronouns to our email sigs and to our firm facebook page.
I haven’t yet, and here’s why -
A fair number of people have added pronouns. Most of them are cis and straight (which seems to be the statistically likely outcome to me, but I’m just pulling that out of thin air), and some are not. Which I think is why the firm is giving us this option, and I think it’s a good idea.
However, there is a small number of people who are expressing, in a seriously passive-aggressive way, their opposition to the idea of declaring personal pronouns, and by extension the whole “gender ideology” (their term, not mine) thing, by aggressively declaring their “he/him/his” pronouns. Sometimes in all caps (the system doesn’t flag odd capitalization, or any words at all – apparently one can input “he/him/his as God intended” or crap like that), sometimes by adding “under protest” (which is especially stupid, since the firm doesn’t require a declaration of pronouns). The firm actually did make that particular employee (the “under protest” dude) stop doing that, but otherwise, they seem to be in a bit of a dither (as HR department always are) about what to do. I think they feel they’ve opened a can of worms and don’t quite know what do do about it. This particular firm also has offices in countries that are notoriously unfriendly to LGBTQ issues, and I don’t know how they’re handling that (now I’m curious – I wonder if the option is available in all offices?).
Anyway, I’m a bit hesitant, since I don’t want anyone to think I’m being aggressive about declaring my cis/straight pronouns. I’m not. And if (a few) other people would stop being jerks about it, I’d add my pronouns to my sig and my facebook page.
One reason this rubs me the wrong way is because it smacks of typical corporate HR buzzword psychology. If a company wants to be inclusive to everyone, then have a corporate environment such that trans people don’t feel embarrassed to list their pronouns. The workspace should be inherently accepting such that trans people freely state their pronouns, religious people freely wear religious items, people freely put pictures of their family on their desk regardless of their sexual identity, etc. Encouraging people to list their pronouns seems like the usual HR garbage that the managers track in the department meetings “Yeaaah, well, as we can see on slide 47, our pronoun compliance is only at 47.8%. We really need that to be at 100%, so I’m going to ask everyone to come on in Saturday so we can all update our profiles and email signatures. And if we can get those United Way cards turned in 100% too, that’d be great. And HR printed up a bunch of corporate logos in rainbow Pride colors that they want everyone to to put on their car before tomorrow.”
I personally don’t see that a bunch of cis people listing their obvious pronouns really makes the environment feel more inclusive. I compare it to religion. If I was an atheist in a company where everyone else listed Christian in their signature, that wouldn’t make me feel comfortable listing atheist. What would make me comfortable is if I saw there was a wide variety of religions listed as well as atheists. Then I know it’s cool to be non-Christian and non-religious. It’s the same with pronouns. If I’m in a company where it’s just cismen and ciswomen listing their normal cis pronouns, I’m not going to feel comfortable listing my non-standard pronouns since it makes me stand out as the non-conformist. What would make me comfortable is if I can interact with my coworkers in a comfortable way and I feel accepted. But seeing everyone list their obvious pronouns in their sig seems like a corporate mandate which is being forced upon the employees and doesn’t necessarily indicate that the employees are actually tolerant.
I’m a writer, and more and more frequently the markets I submit to either ask me to put my pronouns in my cover letter (sometimes this is optional) or they request a third-person bio, which amounts to the same thing. I don’t mind doing this.
My trans friends disagree with you, fwiw. They appreciate seeing cis people list pronouns. And a key difference from your religion example is that they, like the cis people, are mostly listing “he”, “she”, or perhaps “they” as their pronouns. It’s not like being the only person to list “atheist”.
What my trans friends REALLY hate is people who don’t list pronouns but would get pissy if you used the wrong one, because, “isn’t it obvious”. For many trans people their pronouns might not be obvious, and they would nonetheless like to be on equal footing with everyone else. Having cis people list their pronouns, having it be normal to check the listed pronouns, makes trans people less “other”.
It sounds like they likely are in a community with lots of other trans people where unknown pronouns would be common. In that case, it seems probable that they might have a John that uses something other than he. So it makes sense to list pronouns since they are not obvious. But in most businesses, that’s not the case. Just thinking over my career in a multi-national company, I can’t think of anyone who used a non-obvious pronoun. Everyone’s signature would be “John he/him”, “Jane she/her”, “Joe he/him”, “Sally she/her”… If 99.99% of the people list the obvious pronoun, people stop paying attention to that part of the sig anyway. It would be more useful if that unusual case of “Peter she/her” stood out by being listed because it’s not obvious instead of getting lost in the sea of cis-normal pronouns.
You don’t have anyone named Pat or Ray or some non-English name that English-speakers can’t automatically gender?
I have worked with both male and female "Robin"s, with a woman named “Mel” and lots of east Asians whose names don’t (to me) have an obvious gender. They’ve all been ordinary cis people, but I’ve not known their gender until i saw them in person, or asked someone.
No, by the way, they don’t WORK with many other trans people. Often, they are the only one. One is the only person in his expensive company for whom “picking a bathroom” is fraught with stress. But they do socialize with other trans people. People pick their social groups using different criteria than they use to pick employers.
Do you know why they do this? Are they going to accept or reject your writing based on your own identity as the author?
Publishers are trying to appear more inclusive. There are a lot of publications right now exclusively for women and minority authors. So much so that there’s a (stupid, IMO) pushback from white male authors who feel like they’re being discriminated against.
And yes, some will reject your writing. Depends on the publisher.
Or, maybe they don’t want to accidentally misgender the authors.
My company have started to get into listing various aspects of identity in the company directory. Ethnicity, pronouns, religion etc. I’ve not listed anything even though everyone is encouraged to. I don’t see myself as having an ethnicity, nor a religion nor a preferred pronoun so I’m avoiding it as long as possible.
I have a name. Please use that. None of the additional info being asked for is of any interest to me and shouldn’t be to the company either. You are going to treat someone differently because of it (which is obnoxious and potentially illegal) or it is irrelevant (and so none of your business)
Sure. I work with people all over the world with names like “Dharmendra Quinn Jose Xi” where I don’t know their gender or what name they are commonly known as. But the thing is, either I’m talking to them directly, in which case I don’t need their pronouns, or I just refer to them by name or by generic “they” when talking about them (e.g. “Give the doc updates to Dharmendra. They know how to put them in the book”). Even if Dharmendra has his pronouns in his profile, I’m not going to take the time to look them up when talking about him if I don’t know them. I’ll just phrase whatever I’m saying to avoid using him/her if I don’t know. And I’m certainly not going to take the time to keep looking pronouns after dozens of times of looking up gender-specific names like John and Jane and seeing that they always use gender-normal pronouns.
What would be really useful is to know people’s nickname, since I do need that when talking to Dharmendra directly. If he goes by Donnie, it would be super helpful to have that in his profile so when he randomly opens a first-time chat to me with “Hi Filmore”, I can respond with “Hi Donnie” instead of a generic “Hi” since I don’t know which name he goes by.
I can see the use of having pronouns in the company directory along with other useful information like nickname, location, etc. Having it in their email sig seems more about virtue signaling since that doesn’t seem like a very useful place to put pronouns. But I don’t see this as a trans issue and trying to frame it as being trans inclusive seems offensive to me. Knowing pronouns is useful because not every name is obvious. But companies encouraging pronouns in sigs seems more about trying to encourage a positive image through a empty gesture.
I deliberately use a gender-neutral name online. One of the things I like about the internet is the anonymity. Nobody has to reveal their sex, race, age etc unless they want to - unlike real life where these are generally the first things you notice about new acquaintances. Adding pronouns to my profile would completely defeat that, and I hope it never becomes the norm in this kind of anonymous environment.
Adding them to a work email signature is different though, since for most people their name gives away their gender anyway. As long as they aren’t made compulsory or employees pressured to conform, I don’t see a big problem.
In my company, it’s common for people’s email sig to include their preferred nickname, too. Also, their credentials and sometimes a long disclaimer.
It’s a few more characters in an already long block of text. It costs next to nothing. It’s an extremely useful place to mention all that stuff.
And if it’s virtue signaling, well, great. It’s helpful to trans people to know which coworkers they can trust. I mean, the whole sig is about signaling. That’s why i include my credentials and my contact info, to tell you something important about me.
You could use they/them.
Wouldn’t that imply that I’m non-binary? But if I’m ever forced to add pronouns I guess that’s what I’ll do.
Haven’t you already said that you’re a woman on this board? When I’ve referred to you in threads, I’ve used she/her. Should I desist?
huh? only those with expressed pronouns are trustworthy?
Yeah, I mentioned it when it was relevant to the topic, so I guess a fair number of posters know. And honestly I don’t know what I’d prefer you to use. I wish English just had one pronoun for everyone like some other languages, so it wasn’t an issue.
People who choose to add the pronouns are likely more pro-trans on average. But that’s only true if HR aren’t ‘encouraging’ everyone to do it.
Just to be clear, I meant the corporation was virtue signaling by encouraging pronoun declarations. Like this example:
I’m sure HR is patting themselves on the back and sending out press releases about how trans inclusive they are, yet they don’t really do anything about these kinds of people in the company that make it feel trans exclusive. If they really cared about being gender inclusive, they would deal with these kinds of people harshly. I doubt that the trans people in these kinds of companies really feel comfortable declaring their pronouns regardless of what HR encourages people to put in their signatures.