Federal employees told to remove pronouns from email signatures by end of day
Employees at multiple federal agencies were ordered to remove pronouns from their email signatures by Friday afternoon, according to internal memos obtained by ABC News.
Signature /= footer
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This is so stupid. I know plenty of cishet people who include their pronouns in their sig because they have a gender neutral name.
Or, in my case, for solidarity and normalizing it.
That's why I do it too!
That is why I do it three!
My name tag at work also has my pronouns on it.
Ty for being an ally, king.
<3
Yes, this is why they care. It's part of woke ideology.
is the woke ideology in the room with us now?
Of course it's daft to mandate what people can and can't put in their email footers but I don't get why people put pronouns in footers.
I'm cis male and he/him. Others can call refer to me as it/them or she/her if they wish.
I dislike bananas but I don't put that in my email footer.
I haven't seen it in a while anyway. I thought it was a fad from the late 10s
Privilege. Privilege is the reason you don’t understand.
Ok, me and everyone else who doesn't publish their preference for bananas in their footer I guess.
Is your dislike of bananas an important part of your identity, both personally and how you are treated by society at large? Does making it known that you dislike bananas either verbally or through your appearance lead to a realistic possibility of facing abuse and opression, not limited to potential loss of livelihood or life?
If not, perhaps, you can see how the two things aren't very comparable.
No, but how people refer to me in the third person is also not an important part of my identity.
Someone's choice of the pronoun to assign to me says more about them and the nature of our relationship than it says about my identity.
"I don't care about misgendering" says person of the always assumed gender.
I think that's kind of reductive honestly.
Like most people I try not to be an ass, and generally try to get through the day without offending anyone.
If I know someone well enough to care about their gender obviously I'd do my best not to misgender them.
OTOH if I'm emailing customer support to ask where my order is I just couldn't care less what the person's gender is.
A persons right to identity is not dependant on how much you care about the interaction, or any other factor. Say you have to escalate the customer support ticket, and you want to say "your colleague X was helping me. He said X was not possible blah blah" this is easier if those pronouns have been visible to you, you don't have to make an assumption or default to gender neutral pronouns which may not be appropriate depending on the individual.
I'm not imposing of anyones right to identity and frankly to suggest otherwise in any professional context would just be silly.
Like a great many people I send and receive emails all day, corresponding with people from all sorts of organisations.
An infinitesimal portion of people include pronouns in footers, and I suspect the people who do are cisgender with vanilla pronouns.
I get that I'm the only one here being blunt about it, and I'm happy to take the downvotes, but honestly how does anyone navigate the day to day without imposing on people's "right to identity" if no one is announcing their pronouns in their email footers?
The obvious answer is, very few people care very much about this.
Why would you assume that the people who have their pronouns on display are cisgender? That's baffling
Trans people, like myself, put their pronouns on display so that they can avoid being misgendered in the exact way I've described to you.
The only cis people, I'd imagine, who bother to do the same are people who are doing it in allyship with trans folk.
Very few people care very much about this
Sure, okay, yeah. And the people who do care, put their pronouns there for you to respect.
Quite frankly, if an infinitesimal set of your emails even include pronouns in the footer to begin with, why is it such a bugbear for you?
You're right that its odd to assume that people specifying pronouns are cisgender. I guess there are two reasons for that assumption.
Firstly, 100% of the people specifying pronouns very obviously identify as the prescribed gender. For example, Robert looks and sounds like a guy and specifies he/him. Ain't no one gonna misgender him. Ok it's an assumption to say that he's cisgender but one with an extraordinarily high probability of being correct.
The second reason is just my own attitude I guess. It's impossible for me to know what I would do if I were trans or had gender dysphoria, but I suspect that while I would be proud of being uniquely me, and happy to share that with close colleagues, I wouldn't broadcast it because it's just not relevant. I honestly genuinely believe that if I suffered gender dysphoria, I would just kinda swallow that rather than inserting it into the complex and delicate matters that I email people about. If someone at the revenue service misgenders me while deciding whether to waive $100k in penalties and interest for a client, I just wouldn't care because that person doesn't know me and what they think of me says more about them and their relationship to me than it says about me.
In this context, I assume people with gender dysphoria don't publish it, and that most people who do include pronouns in email footers have vanilla pronouns and include them to normalise the practice.
It's also not really a bug bear per se. I'm a grumpy jaded old man and I'm fairly critical of most things. Yesterday I got a bit ranty about names of things on google maps. Because I spend so much time reading and writing emails, I'm naturally critical of all authors, and footers in particular. Maybe I'm weird but I could talk about disclaimers included in email footers for hours.
I can at least provide you 1 data point that I, as a trans person who experiences gender dysphoria, include my pronouns in my footer and many other places to avoid being misgendered. And I can tell you from my lived experience that its not something you just "swallow".
You might be able to bottle it up in an incredibly unhealthy way like a lot of men do with their emotions in general, and end up with life long issues. But if I experience particularly bad dysphoria, which can come about from being misgendered, giving my focus to the same incredibly important emails you're talking about would be impossible. Thus, it is of business importance that my pronouns are visible, so that nobody misgenders me and risks impairing my ability to do the thing I need to do.
Again, I know its really hard to relate to when you don't experience it. But its a real experience, and the cisgender people who are putting their pronouns there are doing so in solidarity with trans folk. It makes trans folk less "other". If everyone puts their pronouns there, or at least if a lot of people who aren't trans do it, then you can't identify a trans person by whether or not they share pronouns.
Anyway, I think we've both said what can be said without rehashing old points. It is my sincere hope that you can better understand and empathise with the trans experience here, if nothing else :) have a nice day.
Its awesome that you use any/any pronouns but some people have massive feelings of gender dysphoria from being misgendered. I understand it can be difficult to relate to an experience you've never had, but it is a real experience and shouldn't be minimised.
I know a guy who saw skin tone bandages at a school and lost his mind. He ranted about it for days. People I know still refer to him as the "skin tone bandage guy"
Believe it or not, there are a number people who are "upset at pronouns in email guys" who lose their minds over this and its actually a public service to identify people with anger issues before they do real harm
This is why those policies exist. If everyone has their pronouns in their bio/email, the people with uncontrolled anger issues don't have clear targets.
Assuming everyone with an opinion contrary to your own has uncontrolled anger issues is probably a pathology. Maybe get that looked at.
There's no assumptions. The guy was red faced and ranting for days over. Because he saw bandaids marketed at diversity.
