Are you listing your preferred pronouns in your professional email signature?

12 comments

1. Gimme a break

2. No. Never seen in an e-mail signature either, though I’ve noticed it popping up with increasing frequency on social media (espec. linkedin and twitter).

   Maybe I’m old, but I just don’t get it for the vast majority of people. If your preferred pronouns don’t match with what I’d expect based on your name (you’re a Fred who prefers she/her or a Lucinda that prefers they/them, for instance), then by all means go ahead and include it, and I’ll respect it.

   But if you’re a Frank (he/him), then.. yeah, that’s what I was going to call you anyway, so.. why?

3. I dont, but I’ve thought of it to make others’ lives easier – I have an androgynous name that doesn’t really point most people to either direction and I’ve thought it might come helpful, but then again I rarely use my full signature since I usually only email the same people I’ve already met.

4. No. A large portion of my professional correspondence is in languages other than English, where the concept of “preferred pronouns” does not even exist.

5. I guess this is something American that I am too European to be able to understand… Or maybe I’m too old. First encountered it during a Microsoft seminar and I was completely bewildered.

6. No. It’s being advertised within our (English) company but I find it hard to get behind the concept of being anything other than male, female or neutral (looking at the definition of Zi/zir etc they all seem to just fall under non-male / non-female which ‘they’ already covers). I support the idea of feeling you’re the “wrong” gender and wanting to present differently but the 2 trans people I know quite clearly portray themselves as their preferred gender so it’s not even necessary

7. Yes: King / King / King !!!

8. I’ve only ever seen it with people that have an unisex first name.

9. No. Why would I do that?

10. I think it is ridiculous, but if people want to use them, fine, none of my business. If I am at some point forced or in some way coerced to do so, then there will be a problem.

11. Ofc,
    I’m an Apache helicopter.

12. Preferred pronouns is not a thing in non English languages. In many languages verbs and adjectives are conjugated by gender not just pronouns and that renders the point moot.

    I suppose if your gender is not apparent you’d say you prefer to be treated as another gender instead of please use these pronouns. It just wouldn’t make sense to whoever you’re speaking with. You’d need to specify pronouns, verb conjugations and adjectives. And you have to choose male or female, there’s no neutral zir, xir, zorg or whatever, unless you wanna develop a new form of grammar conjugations for all verbs and adjectives.

    Oh and the whole anglicizing latin languages by removing the gendering using x (i.e. “latinx”) is ridiculous. Bottom line is, leave what belongs in the US in the US and don’t imply that our languages are not inclusive enough. It’s insulting and it’s not your culture.