You know how when applying for a new job, most applications have that ADA section where you mark if you have ever had a disability before, including things like depression. They say it’s just for metrics and it is technically illegal for them to use that against you, but if you mark anything other than “No.” your chances of getting a call back shoot WAY down.
So this is one of those situations where a form is asking something which, on the surface, appears to be an innocent and inclusive question; but in reality has a high chance of getting you permanently labeled as a problematic “other”. If you’re non-binary, you can tell the truth and risk increased prejudice, reduced quality of service, fear of retribution, and targeted harassment… Or you can just put down “female” and avoid most of that, but feel shitty for a while because you had to fundamental lie about who you are as a person to avoid being a target.
They want to be honest and mark their gender as nonbinary, but it’s easier to go with “female” because binary genders are more likely to be invalidated. Even if they try to present androgenous, people often still put them into one category or another. If they’re on estrogen and generally look more feminine, it’s easier to just go with “woman” rather than fight to be recognized as nonbinary.
That was my experience at least when I experimented with nb pronouns in the past. I eventually discovered that I only want to be seen as a woman, but I still found it annoying how rarely people respected my gender back then. It’s a privilege to fit on either side of the binary, so I don’t take it for granted.
Man respect to the community and all that but goddamn I got people who are very visibly masculine at work who go with they/them and I’ve probably called them he so many times on accident.
Like I try to be conscious of it but sometimes it’s hard if I’m just chatting. My brain just assigns someone a he/she and moves on.
I firmly believe everyone should use whatever pronouns make them happy but growing up in a very gender normative conforming society (USA, maybe a little less so now) it can be difficult to make the conscious choice of using the proper pronouns someone told me.
I do try though and I’m not complaining. The people I’ve accidentally misgendered know I am not doing it consciously or maliciously, we’re work buddies. I just know it can be very easy to accidentally do that. Now people that do it purposely with malice - fuck those people.
I consider myself nb. The focus on “getting gender right” is actually more focused on gender in the usa than anything I grew up with. Now it feels like gender norms are back hard, for whatever reason, and have come on hard due to the desire to constantly name it and talk about it along with saying certain way of dressing and acting are gender coded.
We weren’t a gender focused society before as much as now it feels like. And we aren’t gender focused as much as most of the world as we don’t gender things like coffee pots. For me, the last few decades have really made me feel the opposite of what others insist. I feel like gender norms are forced on me and gender titles are forced on me from every single side.
I don’t care what people call me but I do like being called “him” when people don’t know what I am at first online. I’ve got big titties though idgaf when I’m called she, either. I wish we would quit talking about gender so damned much. The sexism is coming back due to it.
It has come back very hard - because it’s on the way out. It’s a last-ditch effort. The last gasp and death-rattle of the old ways. These dreadful people are lashing out like cornered animals because they know they’re facing extinction.
I sincerely believe that if we unrelentingly hold ground right now, a post-gender society is right around the corner.
Yeah I do think we’re in a interesting period right now in the US, we’re past the “reflexively suppressed because it’s unheard of” part of things and into the “a small but extremely vocal minority of hateful people are attacking us precisely because we’re more visible and accepted” part.
Obviously things can and probably will get bad before they get better, but pretty much everything that has recieved this kind of moral panic backlash has only gotten more mainstream as a result. (See: rock music, D&D, kink, socialism, witchcraft, tattoos, etc.)
You can be visibly (and otherwise) “of” the binary, and still reject it. I have put down “they/them” in the past, not because I have a preference for “they/them”, but because I literally couldn’t care less about what gendered words other people use for me. I personally live as a man, dress like a man, etc. because it’s the path of least resistance. I was born with a penis, socialized to be a boy. With few exceptions, men’s clothes are just better, easier to shop for, have pockets, etc. (Sorry ladies.) It’s just easier to live as a man in this place, and I won a biological coin toss.
I don’t care one iota about “being a man” or defending an idealized version of masculinity. I don’t spend any energy whatsoever on making sure that I’m “man enough for the man club”. I just try to do things which bring me joy, wear the clothes I like, and try to take good care of myself and others. If some of those things happen to cross some imaginary line and invalidate my “man card” (blegh), so be it - I’ll hand it in voluntarily every time, it’s toxic as hell.
I do things like letting my daughter paint my nails because it brings her joy, and you better believe I’m wearing those painted nails around the office the next day. If someone has something to say about that, great! Depending on what was said, they’ve either identified themselves as a lovely person, or as someone who can be discarded for their opinions, and that doesn’t cost me shit! If my nails or hair, or the way I speak breaks some “macho man” broseph’s brain and causes them to piss their pants, even better!
I know that it’s a privilege to be able to even have this attitude, but I try to make sure it doesn’t go to waste.
On the flip side, there are those who care very much about their gender, for whom it is very real, and I respect that, as one does. I love all my trans, enby, queer, etc. homies very, very much, regardless of how they choose to present, and I try to make sure they know that. I wouldn’t spend so much cognitive energy on worrying about getting the words wrong. If you do make a mistake with it, admit your mistake and apologize. Just show that you do care. Don’t just brush it off, and definitely don’t double down. In my experience, a reasonable person, regardless where they fall, will forgive you and move on from it fairly quickly.
Honestly I’d be perfectly fine if nobody had a gender and we just did whatever and weren’t dicks to another but that’s a world with very different humans and society.
I very much hate social norms and all that bullshit but wear the mask I have to so I can have a job and provide for my family and not die in the street but yeah … I hate the weird obsession over what is in people’s pants. I hate the weird obsession over who and how people fuck. I hate the stereotypical “boy/girl” dichotomy as a thing because it’s boring and feels stifling for everyone.
So yeah I didn’t mean my comment as a “fuck dudes with beards or other traditional masculine look wanting to use they/them pronouns” more just like a look I try my best and we do live in a society after all. Of course I’m going to be influenced by my surroundings and upbringing to just default he/she and sometimes that just happens.
The thing that helps more than anything else, for me at least, is to spend a lot of time in a community where everyone is invested in getting pronouns right – because it can be hard if you’re doing it all on your own, against the current, so to speak.
Luckily for me my workplace has gradually become such a place, where we used to never volunteer our preferred genders, to now where the norm is to introduce yourself with your name and pronouns if you’re comfortable, put them on name-tags, and we all try to help each other remember people’s pronouns.
The thing that helps more than anything else, for me at least, is to spend a lot of time in a community where everyone is invested in getting pronouns right
It’s the main reason I ever sought out trans spaces: people dear to me coming out and me wanting to learn how to… I guess the most honest way to put it, at the time, was “deal with that”. I can’t say I was particularly understanding or supportive, initially, but I didn’t wanna be an ass to people I care about and figured it’d help me be respectful, at least.
It helped a great deal, not just with learning to be respectful, supportive and just accepting things I don’t understand or can’t relate to, but also with reflecting on my own identity and experience.
My workplace is like this too! There have been a couple times employees have been disciplined, even fired for a pattern of using the wrong pronouns or deadnames. And not just once. Once is a mistake, these people were doubling and tripling down. Idk where they got those people, but it’s always a pleasure when the trash takes itself out!
HR software, though, especially Microsoft products, are fucking terrible at managing name changes and pronouns.
A few months ago I had to work one-on-one with a colleague in another department who I hadn’t met yet. I ended up (unknowingly) addressing them by their deadname because that’s what was showing for me in MS Teams. I was absolutely mortified, and apologized profusely as soon as I realized my mistake. My co-worker was very understanding but sadly this was mostly because it had happened to them multiple times already.
Turns out a bunch of us had (and continue to have) this “display” issue where a wrong name or image is shown, and the only “solutions” are to have all employees simultaneously delete hidden local caches and hope for the best, which is absolutely ridiculous, or just wait indefinitely, do nothing, and the data will magically sort itself out somehow. MS, true to form, claim that their perfect software, sculpted by the hand of God himself, is “working as designed” and that these things are not a big deal.
It took months to get the person’s name change fully propagated everywhere. Somehow, their deadname STILL randomly pops up from time to time, like it’s being pulled from some unknown stale DB copy that didn’t get the changes, or stale cached data is flowing back into a DB somehow? Either way, a database containing employee data which is supposedly an authoritative store of truth, and mostly a collection of short strings, is not supposed to work like that, right? Since it’s Microsoft, though, they can just ignore the issue, gaslight us, and continue getting away with causing humiliation. ADP as well is not far behind when it comes to data handling competence.
Nota bene: A similar issue is when people have only one name. I had a coworker who was in the system as “Fnu [her one and only name]”. “Fnu” is not her name. It’s a hack meaning “First Name Unknown” by a system that mandates a first name and a last name.
Thanks for taking the time to write all this out! I haven’t been exposed to most of it but one of my non binary friends told me that it took forever and was a complicated mess to get a work email without their dead name (they go by their last name now, so ended up getting initials where the first name would go as a stopgap). I def. still saw their deadname pop up from place to place. And the high up supervisor, god bless him, tried and tried to get their name and pronouns right but he’d sometimes slip up if we was thinking hard about something else. But to his credit he fully committed to learning pronouns and names for everyone and really led by example.
Oh, yeah, when i was identifying as nonbinary without being a girl, I would just be honest and say nonbinary/genderfluid in all the forms, now I usually put female but that’s because now I identify as a nonbinary girl. And it didn’t really affect how people referred to me in person, they would just assume based on appearance, and for online stuff they would always just respect whatever I put. But a lot of it was just demographic data collection and didn’t affect anything anyway.
I don’t get the whole pronoun and identity thing, but I am a cis gender male so why would I? I know I don’t have to getit either, it’s not about me and I support people where it is a concern. But this i do get, and I hate that it’s a thing. People should feel safe no matter who they are.
Same. It’s how I feel about any form that has the option to disclose things like my cultural background or anything LGBTQ related. Feel like it’ll end up being a target on my back if I answer honestly…
Exactly why I created a new internet identity when I joined the fediverse with the intent to be open about myself.
My usual web identities are too tied to my civil identity, and the socio-political context in France is not so good, while still better than in the USA.
Moreover, I don’t come from a very tolerant social background. I had to be really independant to begin deconstructing my previously learned biases. (A never ending effort.)
I don’t get it, sorry
You know how when applying for a new job, most applications have that ADA section where you mark if you have ever had a disability before, including things like depression. They say it’s just for metrics and it is technically illegal for them to use that against you, but if you mark anything other than “No.” your chances of getting a call back shoot WAY down.
So this is one of those situations where a form is asking something which, on the surface, appears to be an innocent and inclusive question; but in reality has a high chance of getting you permanently labeled as a problematic “other”. If you’re non-binary, you can tell the truth and risk increased prejudice, reduced quality of service, fear of retribution, and targeted harassment… Or you can just put down “female” and avoid most of that, but feel shitty for a while because you had to fundamental lie about who you are as a person to avoid being a target.
They want to be honest and mark their gender as nonbinary, but it’s easier to go with “female” because binary genders are more likely to be invalidated. Even if they try to present androgenous, people often still put them into one category or another. If they’re on estrogen and generally look more feminine, it’s easier to just go with “woman” rather than fight to be recognized as nonbinary.
That was my experience at least when I experimented with nb pronouns in the past. I eventually discovered that I only want to be seen as a woman, but I still found it annoying how rarely people respected my gender back then. It’s a privilege to fit on either side of the binary, so I don’t take it for granted.
edit: less -> more
Man respect to the community and all that but goddamn I got people who are very visibly masculine at work who go with they/them and I’ve probably called them he so many times on accident.
Like I try to be conscious of it but sometimes it’s hard if I’m just chatting. My brain just assigns someone a he/she and moves on.
I firmly believe everyone should use whatever pronouns make them happy but growing up in a very gender normative conforming society (USA, maybe a little less so now) it can be difficult to make the conscious choice of using the proper pronouns someone told me.
I do try though and I’m not complaining. The people I’ve accidentally misgendered know I am not doing it consciously or maliciously, we’re work buddies. I just know it can be very easy to accidentally do that. Now people that do it purposely with malice - fuck those people.
I consider myself nb. The focus on “getting gender right” is actually more focused on gender in the usa than anything I grew up with. Now it feels like gender norms are back hard, for whatever reason, and have come on hard due to the desire to constantly name it and talk about it along with saying certain way of dressing and acting are gender coded.
We weren’t a gender focused society before as much as now it feels like. And we aren’t gender focused as much as most of the world as we don’t gender things like coffee pots. For me, the last few decades have really made me feel the opposite of what others insist. I feel like gender norms are forced on me and gender titles are forced on me from every single side.
I don’t care what people call me but I do like being called “him” when people don’t know what I am at first online. I’ve got big titties though idgaf when I’m called she, either. I wish we would quit talking about gender so damned much. The sexism is coming back due to it.
It has come back very hard - because it’s on the way out. It’s a last-ditch effort. The last gasp and death-rattle of the old ways. These dreadful people are lashing out like cornered animals because they know they’re facing extinction.
I sincerely believe that if we unrelentingly hold ground right now, a post-gender society is right around the corner.
Yeah I do think we’re in a interesting period right now in the US, we’re past the “reflexively suppressed because it’s unheard of” part of things and into the “a small but extremely vocal minority of hateful people are attacking us precisely because we’re more visible and accepted” part.
Obviously things can and probably will get bad before they get better, but pretty much everything that has recieved this kind of moral panic backlash has only gotten more mainstream as a result. (See: rock music, D&D, kink, socialism, witchcraft, tattoos, etc.)
You can be visibly (and otherwise) “of” the binary, and still reject it. I have put down “they/them” in the past, not because I have a preference for “they/them”, but because I literally couldn’t care less about what gendered words other people use for me. I personally live as a man, dress like a man, etc. because it’s the path of least resistance. I was born with a penis, socialized to be a boy. With few exceptions, men’s clothes are just better, easier to shop for, have pockets, etc. (Sorry ladies.) It’s just easier to live as a man in this place, and I won a biological coin toss.
I don’t care one iota about “being a man” or defending an idealized version of masculinity. I don’t spend any energy whatsoever on making sure that I’m “man enough for the man club”. I just try to do things which bring me joy, wear the clothes I like, and try to take good care of myself and others. If some of those things happen to cross some imaginary line and invalidate my “man card” (blegh), so be it - I’ll hand it in voluntarily every time, it’s toxic as hell.
I do things like letting my daughter paint my nails because it brings her joy, and you better believe I’m wearing those painted nails around the office the next day. If someone has something to say about that, great! Depending on what was said, they’ve either identified themselves as a lovely person, or as someone who can be discarded for their opinions, and that doesn’t cost me shit! If my nails or hair, or the way I speak breaks some “macho man” broseph’s brain and causes them to piss their pants, even better!
I know that it’s a privilege to be able to even have this attitude, but I try to make sure it doesn’t go to waste.
On the flip side, there are those who care very much about their gender, for whom it is very real, and I respect that, as one does. I love all my trans, enby, queer, etc. homies very, very much, regardless of how they choose to present, and I try to make sure they know that. I wouldn’t spend so much cognitive energy on worrying about getting the words wrong. If you do make a mistake with it, admit your mistake and apologize. Just show that you do care. Don’t just brush it off, and definitely don’t double down. In my experience, a reasonable person, regardless where they fall, will forgive you and move on from it fairly quickly.
Oh yeah they know I’m not doing it purposely.
Honestly I’d be perfectly fine if nobody had a gender and we just did whatever and weren’t dicks to another but that’s a world with very different humans and society.
I very much hate social norms and all that bullshit but wear the mask I have to so I can have a job and provide for my family and not die in the street but yeah … I hate the weird obsession over what is in people’s pants. I hate the weird obsession over who and how people fuck. I hate the stereotypical “boy/girl” dichotomy as a thing because it’s boring and feels stifling for everyone.
So yeah I didn’t mean my comment as a “fuck dudes with beards or other traditional masculine look wanting to use they/them pronouns” more just like a look I try my best and we do live in a society after all. Of course I’m going to be influenced by my surroundings and upbringing to just default he/she and sometimes that just happens.
The thing that helps more than anything else, for me at least, is to spend a lot of time in a community where everyone is invested in getting pronouns right – because it can be hard if you’re doing it all on your own, against the current, so to speak.
Luckily for me my workplace has gradually become such a place, where we used to never volunteer our preferred genders, to now where the norm is to introduce yourself with your name and pronouns if you’re comfortable, put them on name-tags, and we all try to help each other remember people’s pronouns.
It’s the main reason I ever sought out trans spaces: people dear to me coming out and me wanting to learn how to… I guess the most honest way to put it, at the time, was “deal with that”. I can’t say I was particularly understanding or supportive, initially, but I didn’t wanna be an ass to people I care about and figured it’d help me be respectful, at least.
It helped a great deal, not just with learning to be respectful, supportive and just accepting things I don’t understand or can’t relate to, but also with reflecting on my own identity and experience.
My workplace is like this too! There have been a couple times employees have been disciplined, even fired for a pattern of using the wrong pronouns or deadnames. And not just once. Once is a mistake, these people were doubling and tripling down. Idk where they got those people, but it’s always a pleasure when the trash takes itself out!
HR software, though, especially Microsoft products, are fucking terrible at managing name changes and pronouns.
A few months ago I had to work one-on-one with a colleague in another department who I hadn’t met yet. I ended up (unknowingly) addressing them by their deadname because that’s what was showing for me in MS Teams. I was absolutely mortified, and apologized profusely as soon as I realized my mistake. My co-worker was very understanding but sadly this was mostly because it had happened to them multiple times already.
Turns out a bunch of us had (and continue to have) this “display” issue where a wrong name or image is shown, and the only “solutions” are to have all employees simultaneously delete hidden local caches and hope for the best, which is absolutely ridiculous, or just wait indefinitely, do nothing, and the data will magically sort itself out somehow. MS, true to form, claim that their perfect software, sculpted by the hand of God himself, is “working as designed” and that these things are not a big deal.
It took months to get the person’s name change fully propagated everywhere. Somehow, their deadname STILL randomly pops up from time to time, like it’s being pulled from some unknown stale DB copy that didn’t get the changes, or stale cached data is flowing back into a DB somehow? Either way, a database containing employee data which is supposedly an authoritative store of truth, and mostly a collection of short strings, is not supposed to work like that, right? Since it’s Microsoft, though, they can just ignore the issue, gaslight us, and continue getting away with causing humiliation. ADP as well is not far behind when it comes to data handling competence.
Nota bene: A similar issue is when people have only one name. I had a coworker who was in the system as “Fnu [her one and only name]”. “Fnu” is not her name. It’s a hack meaning “First Name Unknown” by a system that mandates a first name and a last name.
Thanks for taking the time to write all this out! I haven’t been exposed to most of it but one of my non binary friends told me that it took forever and was a complicated mess to get a work email without their dead name (they go by their last name now, so ended up getting initials where the first name would go as a stopgap). I def. still saw their deadname pop up from place to place. And the high up supervisor, god bless him, tried and tried to get their name and pronouns right but he’d sometimes slip up if we was thinking hard about something else. But to his credit he fully committed to learning pronouns and names for everyone and really led by example.
Oh, yeah, when i was identifying as nonbinary without being a girl, I would just be honest and say nonbinary/genderfluid in all the forms, now I usually put female but that’s because now I identify as a nonbinary girl. And it didn’t really affect how people referred to me in person, they would just assume based on appearance, and for online stuff they would always just respect whatever I put. But a lot of it was just demographic data collection and didn’t affect anything anyway.
The Author’s comment when they posted this on Bluesky:
I don’t get the whole pronoun and identity thing, but I am a cis gender male so why would I? I know I don’t have to getit either, it’s not about me and I support people where it is a concern. But this i do get, and I hate that it’s a thing. People should feel safe no matter who they are.
Same. It’s how I feel about any form that has the option to disclose things like my cultural background or anything LGBTQ related. Feel like it’ll end up being a target on my back if I answer honestly…
Exactly why I created a new internet identity when I joined the fediverse with the intent to be open about myself.
My usual web identities are too tied to my civil identity, and the socio-political context in France is not so good, while still better than in the USA.
Moreover, I don’t come from a very tolerant social background. I had to be really independant to begin deconstructing my previously learned biases. (A never ending effort.)
It’s about not being on a list