Using totems in the workplace
The Law Society? Really?
Under HR and people management:
Using pronouns in the workplace
I think you’re supposed to learn that in the very early grades, or even earlier, as you learn to speak the local language. I don’t think it’s something adults need a refresher on.
Judging by name or appearance is not always an accurate method for determining a person’s pronouns.
Yes it is. Being able to tell who is which is another very early skill.
We frequently, and likely subconsciously, interpret or ‘read’ a person’s gender based on their outward appearance and expression, and ‘assign’ a pronoun.
However, our inference as to that person’s gender identity may not be correct.
Getting it wrong is extremely rare. This isn’t something adults don’t know how to do, or need instruction in.
Everyone deserves to have their chosen name and pronouns respected in the workplace.
No, everyone doesn’t. The workplace is the workplace. It’s a place for getting stuff done. It’s not a place for massaging the egos of special flowers who have special pronouns. The childish hobby of “choosing” a new name and a luxury pronoun is not something anyone “deserves to have respected.” On the contrary, such foolery deserves contempt.
Although you may feel it personally unnecessary to do so, and it may even make you feel a little uncomfortable at first, sharing your pronouns helps raise awareness and acceptance of different, including non-binary, gender identities.
But those identities are a fiction. HR departments should not be telling employees that they have to adopt a stupid new language that’s tedious to learn and worthless when you do learn it. The People of Gender need to grow up.
Oh, I dunno. The acronym for ‘People of Gender’ is POG. Arguably therefore, whtever they are into gets sooner or later turned into a POGSTY.
Works for me.
I see no issue with a person asking to be called a different name, as names are just labels to get a particular person’s attention or to identify to others which person is being referenced. This is something that we already naturally do, particularly when we have multiple people with the same name. Referring to people by their surnames, middle names, or nicknames becomes an everyday occurrence so that we can avoid repetitions of “which Michael are you talking about?”
A person asking to be called by some other name is thus not much of a break with what we already do. The only novelty is that the trans person is probably asking for a name that is not normally associated with their sex. But this too is not much of a break, as plenty of names have different sex associations in other cultures. Just so long as people don’t ask to be called ‘cool’ nicknames like Arnold ‘Ace’ Rimmer, I don’t mind.
But the pronoun thing, no, that’s not the same at all. As the article notes, people naturally go with certain pronouns when referring to others. As a species, we excel at recognising patterns in what we see, and so usually instantly see which sex another person is with great accuracy. Our understanding of language and its structure is also deeply ingrained long before we reach adulthood, and in english at least this means we modify our speech without even being aware of the process.
Asking to have bespoke pronouns is thus either a request to break our unconscious pattern recognition, or a request to break our unconscious use of language. Either we retrain ourselves to see specific individuals in line with their self-fantasy and then use the pronouns which naturally arise, or we see them as they are but retrain ourselves to use the pronouns that go against our reflexive use. Notably, we can’t do both and arrive at the outcome that the trans person wants: if we see them as the sex they wish to be (female, in the case of a trans woman), and use the pronoun that runs counter to what we would default to for that sex, we end up using male pronouns anyway. Two reversals cancelling each other out.
Hence the natural process of conversation has to be reinvented just to accommodate a fantasy: after noting the person’s sex unconsciously, we must then consciously scan the person for markers that they are attempting to pass as the opposite sex and/or any identity tags which specify preferred pronouns, then reformulate our sentence to take this into account. A request for pronouns is a request for special attention, much more than a change of name.
It is also worth pointing out that this is only made necessary by that person failing to pass as their desired sex. If they actually passed, the desired pronouns would arise naturally.
I have seen transmen that pass well, and no one thinks of ‘misgendering’ them. The instinctive pronoun is he. I had a student who was a transman that I wasn’t certain was trans until half way through the semester when he answered a question (that had nothing to do with trans) in a way that promoted trans ideas. He was easy to get along with, intelligent, and a great student. He looked male in every way, including male pattern baldness (in his 20s). The only hint that he was not always male was the name on my role, which isn’t unambiguous if you know that men were called that in the distant past; it could just be anachronistic.
I have not yet seen a transwoman that passed; if I did, I did not realize they were trans. It does seem like most of the fuss comes from transwomen for a couple of reasons. Obvious being entitlement and aggressiveness of men who have been brought up as men, but the other would seem to be the difficulty in passing as women. That may be why they are so determined to have the rest of us pretend there is no difference between the transwomen who are shoving their way into women’s sports and the women who are being shoved out of women’s sports.
There are drag queens and female impersonators that pass well.
I don’t think how well people pass should be a concern. The term “misgendering” should mean referring to female people as male, and male people as female. Thus, a drag queen or a transwoman referred to as female is being “misgendered”, and in some (many? most?) cases they actually seek to be misgendered. But the correct terminology is and always will be to refer to them as male.
When someone is pretending to be a police officer or a priest or a college professor, but is not that thing, then it is an error to refer to them using the inaccurate title. It may be polite to go along with the pretense, or we may be misled into believe this person actually is the thing, but it is not factually incorrect to ignore the desired title, and whether they appear to fit the pretend role well doesn’t change that.
Trans people are “misgendered” by default. What they really mean is “mispronouning.”
Make sure you get the pronouns exactly right too, otherwise you unwittingly transform into a homicidal transphobe. :P
iknklast @3,
I’d say that another reason why there are fewer issues regarding trans men is that there just isn’t as much concern about biological women in men’s spaces. When women want to compete in men’s sports, the only concerns you hear are occasional speculation about whether or not they actually are good enough or if they’re being given a spot for novelty/political reasons. In my bar-going days, you would occasionally see a woman barge into the men’s restroom because the line for the women’s was too long, and guys just shrug. And of course there generally aren’t specific “set-aside” positions in political or other organizations that are formally reserved for men (obviously plenty of informal norms that have caused some things to be de facto reserved for men).
You write “he” because that’s how you thought of her?
Don’t overlook the feedback button which allows you to tell the Law Society whether you found the article useful or not.
And you turn them into a suicidal TIM!
Gw, yes probably. As I mentioned, the use of sex appropriate pronouns is an unthinking reflex upon perceiving a person to be male or female, and iknklast mentioned that this person passed as male, which would have triggered said reflex. And I agree that trans men have an easier time passing than trans women, because they have a secret weapon: testosterone promotes facial hair. They almost always are small for men, but they very commonly look male all the same.
Sackbut #4
That’s confusing a person’s sex, though, not his/her gender. Remember that in Genderspeak referring to someone as “woman”/”female” or “man”/”male” (or any other “gender” for that matter) is to make a claim about what’s going on inside the other person’s head. Exactly what is being claimed is almost never specified, but it pretty much boils down to “thinking and feeling in whatever ways TIMs and TIFs respectively happen to think and feel.” For those of us who don’t think or feel in any of these ways (and if you reject the whole framework of “male” vs. “female” ways of thinking and feeling, that includes you pretty much by definition), any “gendering” what so ever would have to be considered misgendering.
My terminology error. I should have said that “misgendering” is using feminine terms for a male person, or using masculine terms for a female person. Terms meaning pronouns, titles, end other words that are gendered in English. I was trying to make the claim that “misgendering” is a linguistic error having nothing whatsoever to do with people’s personal feelings about themselves; gender is exclusively a language concept. Thus, what trans identifying people are demanding is not “correct gendering” but instead constant “misgendering”.
Screechy #7: Absolutely. A transman is more threatened than a threat if the men in the space realize it is a woman, not a man. A woman is more threatened than a threat to a transwoman, though of course there are some women that are larger than some men.
GW #8: Yes. For half the semester, I didn’t know for sure woman or man; the student definitely looked male.
I also suspect there are fewer transmen loudly shouting TMAM because they were originally socialized as women. While there are exceptions (Chase Strangio for one), most of the shouting and name-calling seems to be coming from TiM.
I was at a play last night where there were two bios that used “they/them” as pronouns. It sounded quite pretentious.