Pronouns at Work
Asking people to use pronouns has deep implications that can cause division. Maybe we should rethink these policies.
There are a few reasons for me to not include pronouns in my email or any introductions. Or maybe one deep reason that manifests itself as several more shallow reasons.
Normally I could leave this topic alone and simply let people do what they want and continue doing what I want. But it seems to grow and push itself into my space without my invitation. More and more people I work with have pronouns in their bio. We use Microsoft Teams, and every time I log in, there is a bright purple highlighted space encouraging me to add pronouns. I don’t think I have seen anything else in Teams highlighted like that.
But I’m a man. My picture is part of my online avatar at work and my brown shaved head and masculine face leave little to the gender imagination. My first and middle names are masculine, and my voice is pretty deep. There is no ambiguity. There is nothing to clear up. Nobody is teetering on the brink of misgendering me. For me to put pronouns in my email signature or Teams bio would be to pretend that there is some ambiguity I am clearing up. It would be redundant. It would in some sense be lying.
Even if someone “misgendered” me, so what? But that is a type of privilege I suppose.
Because my identity is deeply tied to a biological, material reality as opposed to a linguistic form of rhetoric, someone using the wrong pronouns with me does absolutely nothing. Their words do not change who I am. (Isn’t this true of everyone?) If my identity was solely based on the words of other people, or their confirmation of my linguistic pronouncements, then maybe I would be a bit more sensitive. But maybe allowing your identity to be linguistically constructed is a bad idea.
It’s true that words affect our world, but they only affect the actuality of whatever potential already exists. They do not change the nature of that potential.
If I include pronouns, what I’d also be doing is implicitly accepting the foundations of a political viewpoint I disagree with. For me to place pronouns in my email or use them in an introduction is to imply that gender is ambiguous and socially constructed. All of the critical social justice political movements require, as a foundational premise, that human societies are socially constructed, not based on human nature.
Modern feminism assumes society is completely constructed for the purpose of placing power in the hands of men through what they call the patriarchy. There is no room for the nature of humanity. Transgenderism (queer theory, not necessarily transgender people but the ideology itself) assumes the expression of the masculine and feminine are completely socially constructed for the purpose of promoting heteronormativity (heterosexuality is the norm and everything else is abnormal). There are no ties between gender and biology.
Not only do I not believe gender or sex to be ambiguous or socially constructed (without any ties to biology), my entire world view is based on humanity having a nature tied to biology.
For many, this world view is at least in part if not entirely religious. For many people, asking them to place pronouns in their signatures or introductions is asking them to deny the foundations of their religion. For any science minded person familiar with evolution, it is asking them to pretend evolution isn’t real. Humans have evolved a nature that differentiates them from every other animal and to deny that nature is to deny the process that created that nature.
Even if someone says that what they are doing is just a way to make people in a community feel comfortable, it’s still requiring me to state something I don’t believe in order to do so. In fact, it wouldn’t make them feel comfortable if I wasn’t implicitly stating that I agree with their world view. The statement has to carry an implicit meaning in order to have the effect of providing comfort, otherwise it would have zero effect. I’m all about being nice to people, but I shouldn’t have to publicly deny foundational realities in order to do so. There are probably better ways to be nice that don’t warp the nature of reality.
Now from what I have read, asking employees to include their pronouns is legally fine. But what happens when you are compelled to do so? That can happen either by a blunt statement to do so, or implicitly by producing a companywide template for signatures that includes a space for pronouns. But even if it is not something your company is compelling you to do, it still sends a signal and can set people up for the bias we are supposedly trying to avoid.
How will we view those who have pronouns in their bio or signature? How will we view those who do not? How will they view each other? One thing about putting pronouns in your bio that we can likely all agree with is that people who have them did not, and will not vote for President Trump. I don’t think we can honestly deny that there are political links to pronoun announcements.
Pronouns are linked to politics. Let’s not encourage political signaling at work.
My pronouns are we, us, our. They want to weaken and divide all of us and I’m not having it.