Halifax Bank

Why couldn’t it just say Gemma?
It’s all getting stupid now, if it continues she could end up with a badge a foot square in future.

 

I think the whole pronoun thing is rather silly. Our work put out a mail a while back suggesting we put our preferred pronouns under our email signature. I haven't bothered and would be a bit put out if they made it mandatory.
That said if anyone is changing banks based on displaying pronouns then I'd say that's even more silly.
I'll happily try and respect anyone's preferred pronouns because even though I think its a bit silly it doesn't harm me to be respectful. Though I dare say in a actual conversation I would slip up repeatedly as its hard to break natural habits.

 

My question to everyone is this:
If I know someone’s preferred pronouns… would i choose to ignore that? It’s just courtesy, surely.
If my name was Gaylord Föcker but I’d prefer to be Joan Smith, who does it hurt!

 

Michael Jackson (He/He)

I’ll get me coit.

 

I’ve seen it.
Just can’t get my head round why anyone gives a sh*t.
Absolute joke, as is everyone who objects to it.

 

That badge = "she/hers/hers"

Is that a joke or am I missing the point here?

Gemma is Gemma - what else does she need to have on her badge?

It's getting late.

 

Common sense must have changed meaning over the years if you require it to address a single person "they".

 

We use "they / their" when we are referring to an unknown individual, and this seems to work rather well - eg "Can the passenger who left their watch on the train please collect it from lost property." However, using it for a known person of unknown gender feels very linguistically cumbersome to me. I'm not sure that we have any better options though, within the constraints of English. Curiously, Finnish doesn't run into these issues, as their pronouns aren't gender specific. Yep, probably the most complicated modern European language never saw the need to have separate words for "he" and "she".

 

People are mental, is what I have found in the last couple of years.

 

I can't imagine it being interpreted as an offer capable of acceptance in such a way so as to override the terms and conditions of any individual product. It's a factual statement - "you can close your account," which has always been true, all the customers can close their accounts subject to the relevant Ts and Cs.

It's similar to if you tweeted Sky saying "you're ****" and they said "you can cancel your subscription". Nobody would interpret that as granting a tight to immediately terminate and obtain an apportioned refund - the reasonable reader would always gather that it would be subject to the specific terms of the contract.

 

No
If you want me to address you as Marc or Martha, that’s perfectly acceptable and your choice.

But if you insist on pronouns what you’re saying is that in your absence I have to describe you in your choice of words.

It’s time we had a think about whether that’s ‘right’?

And the gender ideology bigots are putting pressure on corporations to enforce and normalise it. It’s closer to religious dogma than it is to simple ‘respect’.

 

I'm laughing at that far more than I should.

 

It will have gone like this:

Employer to line manager: can I put my pronouns on my badge?
Line manager to decision maker: one of my employees has expressed interest in putting their preferred pronouns on their badge, can they?
Decision maker: sure, why not? It doesn’t hurt anyone.
Line manager to employee: Decision maker said yes.
Social media manager: ooh I’ll tweet about it *does so*

None of that interaction prevented them from making financial decisions. In fact everyone involved bar one (and maybe not even them, depending on who the ‘decision maker’ was) has no involvement in making financial decisions anyway. Different people have different jobs.

 

This is a bit like
"They have a speed camera to catch speeders. They should be concentrating on murderers"

 

I honestly can’t understand anyone who cares. Maybe a couple of times a year we get an all staff email saying ‘so-and-so wishes to now be known as X and their pronouns are he/his’ and we all read it, close the email and carry on with whatever we were doing. We then call the person by their preferred name and pronouns. With absolutely zero fuss. Literally, never even speak about it other than to let a colleague know if they haven’t been near their email and it’s about to be break time and they might see the person before they get back to their computer. We have to call them by a name and use pronouns anyway so we might as well use the ones they prefer. We’ve always ran a system of preferred names anyway, whether that’s because they prefer a nickname or choose a name that’s easier to pronounce (although I hope that’s because they genuinely want to and not because they think they should because others can’t be bothered to learn how to say their name).