Closing their accounts en masse
Halifax customers are closing their accounts en masse today after its social media team told them to leave if they don’t like their new pronoun badges for staff in what is being branded one of the biggest PR disasters in British business history.
One account holder told MailOnline they have already pulled out investments and savings worth £450,000 while many more said they are closing ISAs, cutting up credit cards or transferring balances to rivals after they accused the bank of ‘alienating’ them with ‘pathetic virtue signalling’.
It’s Andy M, you see. He told them to close their accounts if they don’t like Halifax’s Pronoun Religion, so they said we’ll do that little thing.
The Mail adds the piquant detail that Halifax “was propped up by the taxpayer to the tune of £30billion as part of a 2008 bailout.” That’s quite a lot of money, really – not pretend money but literal money.
One customer replied: ‘There’s no ambiguity about the name “Gemma”. It’s a female person’s name. In other words, it’s pathetic virtue signalling and is seen as such by almost everyone who has responded to the initial tweet. Why are you trying to alienate people?’ Within 20 minutes a member of the Halifax social media team, calling himself Andy M, replied: ‘If you disagree with our values, you’re welcome to close your account’.
Andy M’s response has outraged customers, and seen hundreds claiming they will boycott the bank with many saying they have closed their accounts. Others have cut up their credit cards or getting rid of insurance policies and said the threat was the final straw after it cut 27 branches alone in 2022.
One told MailOnline: ‘My entire family have now transferred their accounts to Nationwide, cards etc. Loss to Halifax is in excess of 450K in investment accounts and savings’. Another said: ‘I closed my credit card account today, after fifteen years of being a customer’, while one exiting customer who is now changing ISAs said: ‘If they politely said try to use the pronouns on the badge – I would have done my best’, but left because he perceived their threat meant ‘there would be hell to pay if I got it wrong’.
I didn’t think it meant that, I just thought it was insulting on top of the standing insult to women.
Former Doctor Who scriptwriter Gareth Roberts, a Halifax customer since 1988, told the bank: ‘I’m a homosexual man. I’m appalled by your adoption of this homophobic, woman-hating claptrap, and by your attitude to customers making perfectly reasonable objections to it.’ Company director Anders Jersby ended his Halifax car insurance policy and said he would never deal with Halifax again thanks to ‘their antics with pronouns’.
When the Doctor Who people don’t like you, you’re not as hip as you think you are.
Natwest, Nationwide and HSBC all have optional pronoun policies for badges. HSBC even shared the Halifax post, tweeting its 101,000 followers: ‘We stand with and support any bank or organisation that joins us in taking this positive step forward for equality and inclusion. It’s vital that everyone can be themselves in the workplace’.
Oh ffs. Now banks are “standing with” other banks in solidarity over…pronouns. Right on, brother!
And it’s not just Andy M, either.
On its website, Halifax say any customers they deem to be ‘transphobic’ could have their accounts closed.
Underneath a page titled ‘what we stand for’, they say: ‘We stand against discrimination and inappropriate behaviour in all forms, whether racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic or ableist, regardless of whether this happens in our branches, offices, over the phone or online on our social media channels.
‘Such action may include account closure or contacting the police if necessary.’
More standing. Other banks Stand With Halifax, and Halifax Stands Against whatever it decides is transphobic and all the other listed items. They’ll report you to the cops “if necessary” i.e. if they think you deserve it.
H/t Lady Mondegreen
It actually is not vital that everyone can “be themselves” in the workplace. It is vital that everyone be a good representative of the company in the workplace. Being myself might mean wearing my pajamas all day, but my boss wouldn’t tolerate that. Being myself might mean dancing the Twist to blasting rock-n-roll (it isn’t) but my boss wouldn’t tolerate that. They allow us to “be ourselves” within the limits that are acceptable by the company. For instance, I dress in a somewhat eccentric manner. It is within the range of the company dress code, my students love it, my colleagues love it, and they allow it. But to dress the way I do at home? Nope, not acceptable.
Being myself means being feminist, atheist, pendantic, and a few other things. I am welcome to be a feminist in the workplace as long as it doesn’t disturb the work and I don’t force the view on my students. I am not really permitted to be an atheist in the workplace, though I’ll admit I’ve defied them on that. Pedantry? Come on, it’s a college, so yes, but again within limits. Being myself means spending most of the day writing, but while I am in the workplace, I must focus on work. I do my writing when I am off work.
Then there’s the question of “being yourself” by being someone you are not. Why should fantasy role-playing and delusional behavior be okay in the workplace? That should be left at home. No discrimination against people who wear dresses while being male, or vice versa, but no joining the role playing fantasy. Be “yourself” on your own time.
iknklast
Be careful. That sounds a lot like you’re advocating holding people to standards of professionalism. And as we’re all of course aware, professionalism is white supremacy culture.
Whoops. Missed a closing tag there.
Sounds like the Social Credit Score is coming in faster than we thought. So, bow down to the men in womanface or no access to your own money for you! Take away access to credit cards and payment systems and starve the defiant into submission.
The part about this that makes it so mind-blowing is that it’s utterly irrelevant, anyway. I don’t talk about my bank teller. I go in, I get my money, I walk out. So the notion that I’m going to need my teller’s pronouns (which are only used in a third-person conversation) is utterly inane, and more than a bit narcissistic.
In the rare instances I might refer to the teller in third person, it might be something like, “I spoke to the teller, and she told me I needed to go talk to someone in the office, so here I am.” I am unlikely even to glance at the teller’s name tag to read the name, and even if I did I’m likely to forget it five seconds or less after I read it. There is no chance I’d be aware of custom pronouns even if I were willing to use them.
It’s extraordinarily sinister. I can’t help imagining someone mentally ill who tweets something their bank doesn’t like and finds their account closed and therefore no access to their benefits and out on the street. In my neck of the woods, there are quite a lot of mentally ill people living in the community without much support because several residential hospitals closed down over the last couple of decades. They’re already extremely vulnerable and have been let down by successive, uncaring governments.
It’s horrifying to think that their bank’s slavish pandering to fashionable ideology could be the end of them.