In the '12 election, the Maine “Yes on 1” campaign hired many students and others around the state to get the vote out for their particular issue.
Each morning, they held a casual meeting (outdoors, everyone just lie in the grass) to share results and strategies, have a litte “rah-rah” event to send everyone off.
Seems fine. I’m from California. But one thing they did quite astonished me: at the opening of each daily meeting, they went around the group (of ~30) and asked everyone to explain which pronoun should be used in reference to… them… him or her… or, her and him, and were they serious? If everyone said their name, I couldn’t have remembered, let alone their personal (sometimes quite novel) pronoun.
So, that’s just background for my inquiry. I’d like to know thoughts on
– how this would be considered (remember, it’s done daily) in other employment settings
– whether this is even legal. It seemed, to me, to be gender discrimination.
– what you would have done, faced with this. Would you just go along and give your regular pronoun .
IMPORTANT POINT (arguably)-- Yes on 1 was the gay marriage amendment. Just to give an idea as to how anyone might think of such a thing in the first place. “We want to be inclusive,” kind of argument.
However, I think it won’t matter, the more I think it through.
I take it you’re worried about the business using this information to determine who’s transsexual, so as to discriminate against them? Because it couldn’t really work that way unless the business had some other sexual indicator to compare to. If someone comes in dressed in a gender-neutral manner and asks to be addressed as “she”, is that a transsexual biological male, or a cisgender biological female?
How is asking someone which gender pronoun they’d like applied to them gender discrimination?
I imagine that in the group you’re describing – people willing to volunteer their time to canvas for gay rights – there’s probably a high percentage of people with atypical gender identities. You may have people who present as a gender that isn’t immediately obvious from their appearance or their name. So just asking up front what word they prefer is simple courtesy. The “ask every day” bit is probably a function of the fluid nature of canvassing work. You can’t be sure that you won’t have someone new each day who doesn’t know what people have previously said.
In such a situation I’d say, “You can call me ‘him’.” and move on.
It would seem odd for people organizing volunteers to fight for gay rights to turn around and discriminate against those volunteers for being what they are.
It’s not about whether they actually go on to discriminate based on pronoun, it’s just the fact that you’re asked publically to identify your membership in a protected class. Could you ask the group if they were married or single? No.
But if you had a bunch of people discussing race and you had a new guy show up and you wanted him to go talk to that group over there you probably wouldn’t say ‘go talk to those black guys’ or ‘go talk to those two mixed race girls’ as a way of pointing out who you wanted him to speak to. However, we do typically use gender as an easy way of differentiating people. In this group (as with in most groups) you might say ‘go talk to that girl’ or ‘go see those men over there’. But as others said, in this specific type of group, gender (or the gender they want to be referred to as) might not be obvious. Asking may just be common courtesy. It also stops the ‘he referred to me as a him, but I’m a her’ thing from happening. I mean, you can’t have it both ways. Either people can be asked and give an answer or they can’t be mad when they’re referred to by a pronoun that they don’t like. FTR, I don’t know these people, maybe they’re perfectly happy to have their gender guessed at and then correct the speaker if the guessed wrong.
BTW, can I ask where you heard about this? Was it from someone that wasn’t happy about being asked? Was it from someone that just thought it was odd? Was it from someone that was just mentioning it? Was it from someone that liked the idea? Are you reading into it?
Does the group have no problem with it and it’s just you that’s finding a problem with it where there (currently) isn’t one?
I will give you, that in a “normal” setting, say, a public school, a teacher going around and asking each student “are you a him or a her” would not only be strange but probably cause a public outrage, especially if it was in a nice rich white neighborhood. At least if we’re talking about Jr High age kids and the teacher used the OP’s reasoning. (Some girls don’t look like girls and some boys don’t like like boys etc. Parents would consider this insulting and flip their lids).
They’re not asking you to say what your gender (biological or social) IS. They’re asking which word you want people to USE.
Say you’re a masculine-looking straight cis woman. Or a trans woman halfway through reassignment. Or someone who is entirely asexual. Your preference in gender pronouns may not be easy to deduce from your appearance. The actual facts of your situation are nobody’s business but your own. But people are going to need to use some pronoun to refer to you, so rather than having them make possibly insulting assumptions, it’s easier to just have everyone say what they prefer.
ETA: I’m a real slow typer today. This is in response to posts 1 through 4. …
In a generic employment setting I agree it’s potentially troubling, with more later on the “potentially” part.
For the actual environment, temporary political canvassers working for a gay rights cause, it seems like a straightforward desire to be inclusive and un-offensive as well-explained by The Hamster King. Reading more into that particular situation is unjustified offense-mongering.
On to “potentially” …
The essential difference in a generic employment situation between asking about gender identification versus asking about race is that English has gendered pronouns, no widely agreed gender-neutral singular pronoun, and no racially marked pronouns.
So the question of which personal pronoun to use WILL come up, implicitly if not explicitly, for each and every employee. Whereas the general racial identity of each and every employee may be at least a bit obvious on their face, there’s no need or even legitimate want to delve into specifics.
For a group that’s expected to be overwhelmingly gender-conventional, there’s not much point in asking. If the person’s name is Jane & Jane is wearing female clothes, “she” can be safely assumed as the right answer. If Jane feels otherwise, Jane can choose to raise the issue at a time and place of Jane’s choosing. (Getting the genderness of that sentence correct took three tries.)
But if the employees are expected to have a meaningful number of gender-unconventional folks, it only seems polite to ask. And the kind of place which has those folks is going to be OK with that.
Obviously bigoted folks could use that question as a simple litmus test to weed out them thar sinful queers. That’s a risk you run being a statistical outlier in a partly bigoted world. Besides, if you are unconventional, it’s probably best for you to identify the bigots early as well.
BTW, is this something recent, because when I google Maine Yes on 1, I just get stuff on Bear Hunting, which I suppose could be related, but it’s probably not. The SS marriage stuff that relates to Yes On 1 goes back to 2009.
I’m getting more than a whiff of “get off my lawn” from the question, I gotta say.
I don’t think it is illegal for your employer to ask your gender, or your race or religion or sexual orientation or if you’re trans. IANAL, but my understanding is they are allowed to ask anything they like, but they aren’t allowed to factor information on gender, race, or religion, or sexual orientation or gender identity in some states, into employment decisions, so they are well-advised not to ask unless they need to know for some reason. “What pronoun do you use” (which isn’t the same as asking gender but correlates rather closely even among LGBT activists) is such a reason.
Or genderqueer / genderfluid, in which case you may prefer one of many gender-neutral pronouns (they, ze, xe, etc.).
What I would have done… not batted an eye. I end up at a number of community events where pronoun preference can’t be assumed, so I’m used to it and think it’s a better solution than guessing.
Yes. There are other gender-neutral / non-binary pronouns out there, I don’t know all of them (or even half of them), but you can Google them. I’ll just go with whatever the person asks for.
Next time I’m in an argument where I have to defend why Finnish system of just have one pronoun is better than having one for each sex I’m just going to link this thread.
The funny thing is that even though we already have that sort of perfect word that’s fine for everybody, in spoken Finnish people often still end up calling others the Finnish equivalent of “it”.
Ah, but this isn’t even about sex (biological), it’s about gender (social). Add that many Americans feel the need to label themselves completely while considering “I am me” an incomplete label and it can be quite fascinating in a trainwreck kind of way. We’ve had threads where someone was asking what should they label themselves gender/sexual orientation/social presentation-wise…