Letter to my Employer: why I won’t be adding my pronouns

by Anonymous

Ever since the training, I’ve been scrolling down and see who’s doing as they’ve been told and has added their Pronouns.   And there’s definitely been an uptick.  The nicest people I work with – the women who care about outsiders and underdogs – have all added them.  And it’s not surprising really, given how it was spelt it out so clearly: it might seem like a little thing, but it means a lot.  It signals acceptance, validation, allyship.  And it hardly takes a moment to do.  

You’ve added yours.  But not everyone has.  Why not?  Is it because they can’t be bothered?  Did they not read the email?  Or are some of them – like me – using this silence as the only way to express defiance.  

Because I might as well tell you now, I’m never going to add Pronouns to my signature.  Not even when if it becomes mandatory.  

There are those I work with who’d say only a hateful bigot would refuse.  You can judge my reasons for not complying for yourself.  But first let me ask you something about your own decision to add Pronouns.   

You do understand why this whole gender thing suddenly got so big, don’t you?  Because back in 2013 it would have been unremarkable to say that a woman has XX chromosomes in every cell, large gametes, breasts and a vagina.  I might not look very feminine, or feel like a woman inside.  I might even feel quite alienated from my body and dislike it.  But I was still a woman: from the moment I was conceived until I die.   

But things have certainly changed.  In the same training that encouraged Pronouns, we’ve also been told that sex is now a spectrum and not dimorphic.  Your body can be male, female or something in between.  In case you missed it, this ‘new biology’ relies heavily on a clutch of rare medical conditions called differences in sex development (DSD), which occasionally result in someone’s sex not being clearly determinable.  This is held up as evidence that sex is a continuum; a highly controversial conclusion, including among those affected by DSD. 

And I guess you also understand that this is only part of it?  Because the whole idea of sharing Pronouns makes no sense without a heavy dose of Queer Theory.  Once a humanities fringe-interest, this the Wild-West theory holds that you and I aren’t male or female because we have a male or female body, but because we identify as a man or woman (or neither).  

Queer Theory is like a cool mate who says impressive sounding things at a party, but who also has some really dodgy friends (the kind who suggest five year olds should google animal masturbation or who go on TV to argue that the age of consent should be abolished).  I’m presuming you know the whole grubby, back story, right?  

Anyway, it’s Queer Theory that gave us this idea of an internal feeling called ‘gender identity’ which might match your body, or it might not.  But the only way people can tell if you’re really a man or a woman isn’t through your body but your ‘feelings’.   That’s why the training tells us to declare our Pronouns ‘to make people whose gender identity doesn’t match their bodies feel comfortable with sharing their whole selves and save them the pain of being inadvertently misgendered’.   Is that what motived your decision to change your email signature?  If so, the philosophy made more sense to you than it ever did to me. 

But even if you agree with the philosophy, you did you consider the real world consequences of gender ideology didn’t you?  You know biology gives women on average, significantly less physical strength than men, and means we may become pregnant?  You know that this has entrenched manifold disadvantages, specific to women and that women have had to fight for equal treatment in law to men?  You understand that alongside this, women have also fought for single-sex spaces (in sport, in hospitals, and even in work toilets) recognising that there are some occasions when treating people differently on the basis of sex is important?  

And yet you must also have noticed how female spaces are suddenly being removed, relabelled as ‘gender neutral’ or made open to any men who simply ‘identify’ as female.  You must be aware of the injuries women are getting competing against men who are allowed to play in their game because they identify as a woman?  You know a woman has been raped on a single sex hospital ward and how hospital staff advised police this couldn’t have happened as no men were on the ward?  You know they said this because her attacker was male, but identified as female, and had therefore been recorded female.  You understand that this double travesty was a direct result of NHS policy which allows patients to be placed on single-sex wards according to the gender they identified as, and records their sex on that basis? You know about male rapists like Karen White being housed in female prisons.  Perhaps you didn’t.  We all have a lot on our plate.  

But I trust you at least thought about the profound and irreversible damage this ideology might do to the most vulnerable and unconventional kids?  You wouldn’t be signalling your support for an ideology that did this, without really understanding that, would you?  

You must have known that the mother of Kai Shappley (a ‘trans girl’ celebrated in Time Magazine) had feared her son might be gay, and even spanked Kai for feminine behaviour, until she realised this was the conduct of a ‘trans girl’.  

You must also know about the mother of Jazz (the little boy whose surgery has been widely documented on US TV) who described how she knew her three year old son was a little girl because Jazz “loved dolls, dresses, sparkles, everything feminine.”  Jazz is now 21 and on a complex portfolio of medication and has his own medical team, but I guess you decided that Jazz has been well served by unquestioningly ‘affirming’ kids who ‘present as trans’. 

Well, perhaps you knew all this and still decided Pronouns and their underpinning philosophy was important enough to support.

But you do not know my son.  So let me tell you this risk this ideology poses to him.

The mandatory PSHE education at his school suggest a child might know their gender is female if they like pink things, dolls.  My son doesn’t conform to masculine stereotypes.  He likes Elsa dresses and flowers.  His gran describes him as ‘a little theatrical’.  He recently dressed up as his sister, told me he was now a girl and tried and sneak into Rainbows.  Most of us know little boys like this.  Maybe you do.  If so, you are lucky.  They’re awesome.

And yet, if I shared these details with any well-meaning inclusivity educator, they’d immediately recognise what my son really was.  They’ve had the same training our company offers.  They learn such behaviour isn’t boy behaviour.  Boys who are gentle and like having their hair done by girls are not expressing boy feelings.  Instead they should be educated to recognise themselves as ‘trans girls’.  It is then recommended that these ‘girls in boy bodies’ start ‘socially transitioning’ (dressing as girls, being called a girl name), itself a very difficult path for a child to backtrack on.  Then – still children – they usually begin puberty blockers, surgery and lifelong medication.  Why?  Because this is the only way we are told they can be happy.  This medicine includes the cross-sex hormone estragon, prescribed Alan Turing to ‘correct’ his homosexuality.  It doesn’t always work out so well, correcting people, as the thousands of detransitioner testimonies evidence.  

But – you know what – no one is going to tell my son that his personality means that his body is wrong.  No one is going to tell my son he cannot ‘be himself’ without lifelong medication and eventual castration, just because he doesn’t conform to macho stereotypes.  I will never bow down in front of such evil. 

But let’s be honest.  You didn’t think though any of these things when you altered your email signature, did you?

You didn’t think about whether this ideology has a place in a truly diverse workplace, where different opinions are welcomed and where those with gender critical views aren’t harassed and shamed into hiding these. 

You didn’t consider how this ideology is erasing women and removing their spaces.

You didn’t consider the irreversible damage this ideology is causing to the most vulnerable: the neurodiverse, those who have mental health issues or trauma, and those will simply grow up to be same-sex attracted.  

And you never once considered that the non-conformists and the original did not need convincing they needed correcting, instead of celebrating.

Most of all, you did not look and see that this ideology – calling itself kindness – does only harm.

But because I see, I will never signal my compliance by stating my Pronouns.