Little to no risk in sharing your pronouns
From last summer: Why I Put Pronouns on my Email Signature (and LinkedIn profile) and You Should Too.
Pronouns…on your signature?
looks around confusedly as if having just landed on an alien planet
What does that even mean? Signatures don’t have pronouns.
Never mind what it is; the point is it doesn’t cost you anything.
For a cisgender person (a person whose gender is in alignment with the sex they were assigned at birth- more on that another time!) there is little to no risk in sharing your pronouns. When you’ve never questioned what pronouns people use for you, or even thought about the idea of pronouns after you learned about them in 2nd grade, sharing your pronouns on digital profiles is easy and costs you nothing.
Emphasis in the original.
I beg to differ. It would cost me my self-respect, my unconscious feeling of having some clue about how to do basic things like walk through doors, buy food at the supermarket, wear clothes, not fall over. I would feel like a damn fool if I started signing things with My Name + me me me me. That’s a cost.
For a person who is transgender or nonbinary, sharing pronouns can be a bit riskier. If someone is transitioning at work and only a few people know about it, sharing pronouns may out them before they’re ready. For a nonbinary person, sharing they/them pronouns often only sparks a lengthier conversation (*coughthisarticlecough*) rather than simply inform people.
That’s why we ask cisgender people to lead the change by sharing pronouns.It normalizes the process, has little risk, and actually makes for a safer environment for everyone.
What process? Signatures don’t include pronouns, for anyone, not even trans people, so what process?
Finally he explains. (Or maybe it’s not “he”? Despite the name Max Masure and the photo of a man? Am I committing a social crime by assuming he’s a he?)
At Argo Collective, we always have our workshop attendees make a commitment before the close of each session. One of our clients committed to adding his pronouns on his LinkedIn profile. Two days after he added “He/Him” after his last name, a University reached out to him and said they noticed he and some of his colleagues added pronouns on LinkedIn. The University told him they had a transgender student who was looking for an internship placement and this company seemed like a safe environment for the student to begin their career.
Oh, that’s what it means: adding it in parentheses after your name, as some people do on Twitter.
No. It’s stupid and otiose and I’m not doing it.
Now at this point in my reading, I start to have a familiar thought: the intention here is to be kind, and it’s making me feel sick, and isn’t there something dubious about feeling sick at intentions to be kind?
So I pause to think about it.
There could be. Certainly a lot of the struggle against “political correctness” smacks of that. Carl Benjamin smirking at the camera and saying he guesses he would rape Jess Phillips if pressed enough but really there isn’t enough beer – that’s definitely about being pointedly hateful for the sake of being pointedly hateful.
But scorn for people who obsess over pronouns? I don’t think so. There’s such a thing as cruelty, there’s bullying, but there’s also misdirected kindness. I think pronoun follies are infantilizing rather than kind, however kind the intention may be. You can want to be kind to a toddler and give her chocolate until she throws up; a mistaken form of kindness.
One way the mistaken kindness of a lot of “allies” of trans people goes wrong is that it fosters narcissism. Trans ideology seems to attract narcissists as it is, and the ever-ratcheting-upward campaign to “center” them just makes it more attractive to narcissists. It’s inherently narcissistic to believe that one’s own inner feelings can contradict physical reality, and the more people coo over that belief and offer to do it favors even when signing emails, the more narcissistic the believer becomes. I think that’s probably the core reason this “movement” is so fucked up and so filled with idiotic claims and rules.
So, no. I think saying “Don’t be ridiculous about pronouns” is not cruel or bullying the way saying “I guess I’d rape her if pushed” is.
This is just fucking outrageous. One of the reasons I like using the title Dr since I got my PhD is that it degenders me (at least if I use my initials rather than my first name). I hate the fact there is no gender-neutral title equivalent of Mr or Ms (Mx is idiotic since nobody knows how to pronounce it, and don’t get me fucking started on Miss/Mrs). And why do I want to conceal my sex, when there’s really no way I can deny it in real life? Because the internet is a goddamn cesspool. Because I hate the assumptions that come with knowledge of my sex that a gendered title communicates. Because I can actually fucking show you the difference in responses I have gotten by email when using just my initials rather than my actual name.
Fuck the moron who wrote this garbage AND the horse they rode in on.
I absolutely agree. It’s no more bullying than pointing out that not everything is about them. How is listing your “preferred pronouns” not inherently implying that sex/gender is important to how you interact with somebody? I want to live in a world where nobody cares about whether I am male or female and instead looks at my qualifications and experience (in a professional context) or my interests and personal qualities (in the context of friendship).
That would be nice, wouldn’t it.
Ms. Benson,
This post is a load of hooey.
Yours truly,
Bruce Coppola (His Excellency/Highness)
At the risk of coming off as patronising, I think you may have overlooked that this is referring to an email signature, i.e. setting your emails to always have a line or several of text at the bottom. Business contact details are probably the most common.
Gawd, so relentlessly inane.
***************************
My pronouns are he/hymn/hiz, so that I look more ‘street’. Yo.
If I may say it – Amen.
I use my first initial, middle name when sending off plays to theatres, because studies have shown that plays by women are only 17% as likely to be read as plays by men (which have a low enough probability, since a theatre often receives several hundred unsolicited scripts a year and can’t possibly read them all). I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO DO THAT. If I started adding She/Her to my signature, all of a sudden the respect rate would drop into the gutter – that is not no risk.
And I am fortunate that my first name is ambiguous, and my middle name is connected 100% with males. It works for me. Some people have names that are so gendered initials are the ONLY way to hide.
On using initials rather than names: her publisher told J. K. Rowling that boys wouldn’t read books written by a woman, so she used her initials (the K wasn’t an actual initial). The Remington Steele effect?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._K._Rowling#Name
Said it before and will say it again — I am fine with people doing the pronoun thing because it tells me that this person is to be avoided like the plague.
I wonder if this would really have the effect that its proponents think.
If everyone listed their preferred pronouns in their signature, the practical consequence is that 99% of people will choose the usual, “expected” pronouns, and as a result, most people will simply pay no attention to that part. Sort of like how nobody ever bothers any more to read those stupid footers about “everything in this email is confidential” that corporations insist their employees use. And the 1% of people who actually WANT people to read that part of their email will be frustrated that nobody does.
I know that it can get tiring for people who are in the minority in some respect to have to constantly inform people of whatever it is. But the solution is not to make everyone provide a laundry list of statements about themselves. I can just imagine the day when the correct, woke, social expectation is that you respond to a party invitation not with a simple “Yes, I’m coming +1,” but with “Yes, I am coming. My pronouns are he, him, his. I have no special dietary needs. I have no disabilities that require any particular accommodation. I am neurotypical and can be assumed to understand most social cues. My guest’s preferred pronouns….”
If this had been instituted 50 years ago, the world would have been deprived of Johhny Cash’s “Boy Named Sue.”*
*Music & lyrics by Shel Silverstein
And that phrase: ‘assigned at birth.’
By whom? As if some agency or committee was perched in the delivery room. If gender is so completely arbitrary, how can you rage about gendered brains etc.?
Holms @ 4 – No, you’re right, I did overlook that. I’ve never had to have an email signature so I forgot that it’s a thing.
I think people should also list their race on their signatures, to help everyone become comfortable with different races. I think white people should lead the charge.
YNNB, you made me curious if Silverstein wrote the music or just the lyrics. On looking that up, I found he’d done a sequel song from the father’s point of view. It’s politically incorrect, to say the least, then plunged into deplorable territory at the end. Yikes. I was so traumatized I never got back to the original question.
Way back in the ’90’s, when I first started in IT and was posting in computer troubleshooting discussion groups, it took me less that 5 posts before I realized that my very gendered first name was getting me a lot of snarky responses that other folks posting weren’t getting. I switched to initials and, tada!, the snark factor dissipated.
These people who want to claim to be women either don’t understand what it’s like to be a woman, at all, or they are just fucking control freaks, maybe both. In fact if you look at it that way, the whole of transactivism seems to be about nothing else but controlling other people, mostly women people.
Oh, here’s a redacted example of a pronoun declaring sig. line, in case you haven’t seen one before:
Someone Blahblah, MPA | She/Her Pronouns
Executive Associate to Blah Blah | Office of the President
Some Liberal College
Somewhere, Some City, Some State
caz, that still leaves me with a problem. What sort of pronouns does a trans-otter use?
iknklast, those pronouns would probably sound like a Cockney comparing temperatures: ‘ot, ‘ottish, ‘ottest.
I’m guessing they’re going consist of playful, sing-song chittering sounds that can only be properly pronounced through a piscivorous dentition. Spelling them is going to be a tough one, as transliteration from Otter is, I suspect, complicated.
I’m cis and putting my pronouns in my bio has literally cost me nothing, emotionally or otherwise. Maybe a slight, meaningless feeling of doing one small good thing. That’s why it sounds really strange to hear someone say that would be in any way (or even inherently) disgusting to them.
But mainly I wanted to comment on “the process” you expressed oddly hyperbolic confusion about? Is it difficult to understand what the practice of cis people providing their pronouns does? To me it’s pretty simple: trans and nonbinary people (or butch lesbians and other gnc people) often encounter situations where others misgender them or are confused about what pronouns to use. If everyone is used to seeing an expression of pronoun preference as an ordinary, boring part of human interaction, this makes correcting pronouns in cases where people get it wrong, a more ordinary interaction. People who don’t fit the gender binary on any particular day shouldn’t be treated as surprises or freaks or whatever. Normalisation of things like pronoun usage (similar to clothing choices, hairstyles, voice) not always matching binary expectations hurts no one, but helps quite a few.
Normalising certain things is very beneficial: such as women having abortions, being an atheist, people in untraditional societal roles, with other cultural habits than me, etc. etc.
I think it’s a net benefit to have everyone be cool with navigating gender nonconforming situations in everyday and we should teach people to refer to others in the way they prefer.
=8/-DX
Is that true though? Is it true that making everybody memorize everybody else’s pronouns would be a net benefit? You say it would make “correcting pronouns in cases where people get it wrong, a more ordinary interaction” but would it? And what does “getting it wrong” actually mean? Wouldn’t a simpler route just be to decide that “getting a pronoun wrong” doesn’t matter all that much and move on? Pronouns aren’t badges of honor or shame, they’re just utilitarian devices to keep conversation simple.
“For a cisgender person (a person whose gender is in alignment with the sex they were assigned at birth- more on that another time!) there is little to no risk in sharing your pronouns.”
1. I was NOT “assigned” a sex “at birth.” There was absolutely no option to choose any other sex to “assign.” Sex is genetically determined, and is involuntary, not something that anyone can “assign.” There’s no such thing as “sex assigned at birth.”
2. “A person whose gender is in alignment with” their sex: who, pray tell, is that? I absolutely reject “gender.” There is no objective set of beliefs about what cultural traits are inherent in maleness or females. You don’t get to tell me that I “must” have accepted the cultural oppression that is “gender,” merely because I recognize that sex is a biological reality. Don’t call me “cis.” ESPECIALLY don’t call me “cis” while at the same time yelling that misgendering people is wrong.
What would nonbinary people do if there was no binary? How would they demonstrate they were above it all if there was no “all” to be “above” (or outside, beyond, whatever)? The emphasis on pronouns and gender identity to me represents a tendency to reify something that is arbitrary and made up. Claiming to be Special and demanding Special Treatment just lets everyone else know just how unspecial and boring they are in comparison which, I think, is one of the major points of the whole excersize. They can be seen as being free and unfettered (dare I say Brave and Stunning) only if the rest of us are stuck and kept in the gender ghettos of our assigned-at-birth identities. How does one celebrate a freedom that is dependent upon the continued captivity of those who are expected to honour and applaud it?
Like many others have already pointed out, many of us rely on using our initials (and avoiding any kind of gendering) to be taken even remotely seriously in our fields. If it’s obvious that I’m female, for example, I will get far fewer responses to applications for jobs within my field, stupid patronising old dudes saying things like “I suppose you can type, then, love?”, tech-bros making rape “jokes”, the same dudbros complaining about “yet another bitch, why do they even bother?”, and infinite other *sexist/misogynist* fuckwittery.
There’s an automatic assumption that somehow being female will render someone incapable of learning to use specialist software, or presenting reports in the required style, or “getting along with” the rest of the team…
In the event that I *do* get that work, I will then be punished again for not fitting into those dudbro fantasies of how “geek girls” should look – long hair, tight-fitting clothing, high heels, etc. (Of course, if I looked like that, I would be assumed to be the secretary, and ignored again…)
Basically, this stuff matters. Those who don’t like it? Maybe take it up with the *dudes* who are causing the problems. Those are the same dudes who are bullying/harassing the others who are non-conforming. The same dudes who have harassed/attacked those of us who have been gender non-conforming our entire lives.
By the logic of the Medium essay and #17,
• To normalize atheism, Christians should write they are Christian on their signature.
• To normalize abortions, women not having abortions should write they are not having abortions on their signature.
Skeletor @12 rightly satirized this absurdity. My two examples would have the opposite effect that allies intended. And a comment on the Medium essay says,
Most people are not trans. Therefore, most instances of these “normalized” pronoun announcements would be totally unsurprising to people. They would quickly fade into the background. (If people kept telling you whether they like chocolate, you would soon stop finding it worth listening to. “You like chocolate? I assumed you did. Most people do.”) Wouldn’t the result be that trans people and their “unexpected” pronouns would be exactly as atypical or surprising or easy-to-get-wrong as they are now?
But getting even some “cissies” to do the “preferred pronoun” thing is still hoop jumping at the behest of the Special Snowflakes, thus catering to their need for validation and whatever degree of self-centeredness and narcissism they might posess. It shows they can bend at some wills, or at least browbeat them into submission.The pronoun announcers get to score somelly Points and a pat on the head.
It shows they can bend some wills, or at least browbeat them into submission.The pronoun announcers get to score some Ally Points and a pat on the head.
Oi.