I wake up every morning and retype my preferred pronouns in my email signature. I am more woke than you.
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Okay? You do realize I’m not trying to convince you, specifically, to remove them from your email sig right? I would kind of hate to see what would happen if you tried to figure something out from first principles.
What’s weird is that this doesn’t happen in practice. As mentioned, my employer is BIG on DEI and we have policies around including preferred pronouns in our email for example. This has had almost no impact on my life at all, but for some people in my company it means ALOT to them that the company acknowledges that they exist and are welcome.
You can’t have it both ways. It can’t be “this hardly impacts anybody so it is not worth doing” AND “this changes everything about everything it is too MUCH!”
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When I see a concerted effort to make gender pronouns clear, it tends to be by large businesses likely at the recommendation of HR or some kind of contracted experts brought in to lower their liability insurance rates rather than wanting to cultivate broader social change.
Whether when I’m in America or abroad, I see very little concern about pronouns. It feels like more like a fabricated issue to keep social conservatism relevant not unlike the bathroom bills.
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Maybe you should add this to your email signature.
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You should ask transgender people or nonbinary people what it means to them (or read what they say about it anyway). Just because conservatives weaponize something doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have it’s own merit.
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As someone who has been right in the middle of a large business making this change, thats not my experience.
It worked like this.
- I started doing it.
- A gay woman in our LGBT society asked me about it and we had a chat.
- There was a few emails back and forth in the LGBT society.
- A senior exec with a trans niece started doing it.
- It started to spread from there
I imagine looking from the outside it would be easy to take a cynical view. Mostly this stuff is led by people who give a shit.
We cant do anything good that would impact the bottom line, but doesnt mean the other stuff is purely self interested too.
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What does it mean to be transgender? Like I’m a guy and identity, maybe loosely, with the arbitrary social construct of guyhood at this particular time in history, but I could maybe also identity with a different social construct, that of a woman, presumably for a diverse array of reasons. Great. You do you, but I don’t think i need to be roped into people being unhappy with whatever social construct is typically assigned to them, other than to accord them basic dignity. I’m also fine with people who don’t want to be any gender becase they believe gender is an arbitrary fiction. That’s fine, then don’t identity with any gender. I’ll call you whatever you prefer. These complexities are why I stick with “God is dead” as my email signature.
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When people push for these kinds of changes that don’t actually seem to accomplish anything besides some sort of signal that could just be made overtly I assume they have an end goal in mind that does actually accomplish something.
If you want to have pronouns in your email signature go for it, it certainly doesn’t offend me to see other people doing this though again it seems super out of place given that those pronouns are not even going to be used if the person responds to the email.
Gwendolyn Christie is playing Lucifer.
This is similar to my experience. Also, these two things are not mutually exclusive:
- The change was initiated by good people with good intentions and it has had good outcomes.
- The worst person you know in Head Office will jump on this to cynically check the “DEI Achievement Box” on his/her/their annual Goals and get a bigger bonus.
Of note, in my personal experience with two large companies making big DEI pushes, in each case the “movement” started with LGBT groups. This is increasingly being recognized as corporate best practice and it is being driven by the right people. Corporate VP leeches will somehow turn it into a compensation top up for themselves, because that is what they do and who they are. But it’s not a reason to not do this stuff. It’s even more empowering for those sociopaths when you establish a culture where only shareholder returns matter and the corporation should never try to achieve something else.
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Full stop - just because you don’t see it accomplishing anything doesn’t mean it isn’t accomplishing anything. So there’s that.
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Ha. Yes.
Im leading a push to get diversity metrics added to scorecards. I cant decide if what you described is a good or a bad outcome for that.
Come on now. First Principles here sat in a darkened room and thought about it on his own. What other possible way of approaching this problem can there be?
This is disingenuous gotcha style quoting, come on.
Nah, go for it. Even if you get cynical careerists VPs to be nice to LBGT people for only the wrong reasons, it’s worth it. If you don’t put this on their scorecards, they will choose to put “Eliminated at least X positions” on their to do list.
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OK. The points stands even with your additional wording. You don’t know everything and you aren’t talking to the right people. Sorry to burst your bubble.
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I mean. An actually trans person ITT said the sigs were good… yet hes here saying its better to do it another way… because… he thought about it for a bit…
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What are the sigs for all the people fired by your company for arbitrary reasons, plunging them into despondency? Are they inclusive and empowering? What happens to employees who don’t identity with the company or don’t refer to their colleagues as “team members” or “customer pleasers”? Are conditions of corporate dysphoria also treated with respect and concern?
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This is basically the “I identify as an attack helicopter” joke.
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