Scenarios
- 'What are your pronouns?' (in a meeting or to an employee eg at M&S)
- 'My name's Jane' says your geeky colleague James from last week
- An email is sent out from HR - put preferred pronouns in your email footer
One-liners
- You can call me whatever you think
- Hi I’m John
- I’m a [fe]male
In-brief
The idea is for a 'transgender' person to be addressed in the way they want. It's usually he/him, she/her but may be they, them, zie, zir etc. This is 'pronoun hospitaility'.
As a transgender person's visible gender can be ambivalent, people may ask them how they want to be addressed. Where people's sex/gender is more obvious they are not asked. So the visually ambivalent 'transgender' person may feel they are being stigmatised. They may also complain that transgender people do not have to have an ambiguous appearance and that they can look like the opposite sex they identify with. So it's only polite to ask.
However 'Pronoun hospitality is lying to people in the name of love.’ Adam Page
The point here is that the person wants to be affirmed as a gender that they are not, even one that is entirely fictitious. We are all free to choose to think of ourselves any way we like, and this can be more or less helpful for us. We sometimes find our thinking is deluded and we have to realign ourselves with created reality. This is normal and healthy.
What is not healthy is to encourage people in ideas that will not help them. What is also wrong is to force everyone else into accepting that this is normal, so must be politely resisted.
ImageA contemporary example among neighbours is here.
Shield verses
- So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. .… and it was very good.'
Gen 1:27,30 - “Haven’t you read,” he [Jesus] replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’
Mt 19:4 - A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this.
Deut 22:5