A new South Dakota Board of Regents policy keeps employees from including their gender pronouns in school email signatures and other correspondence.

    • admiralteal@kbin.social
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      6 months ago

      Honestly, do this anyway. Default to they/them until someone requests otherwise. It’s the best way to normalize it for people who don’t present in an assumable way, without exposing yourself to the same level of potential retaliation that asking leads to.

      • disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        True, it’s a good practice for those you don’t know. I think using it exclusively for the people they’ve known and worked with for years would send a clear message of disagreement with the policy. It’s also not something they can forbid, because it’s rightfully inclusive.

      • BumpingFuglies@lemmy.zip
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        6 months ago

        Please don’t do this. This is just misgendering by default. The vast majority of people are exactly the gender they appear to be on the surface, and if they aren’t, they’ll let you know. I’ve only known one person who wasn’t the gender they appeared (a very masculine-presenting enby), and they weren’t offended at all when I misgendered them at first; they corrected me, I apologized, and that was the end of it.

        However, if you call the wrong clearly-masculine “alpha male” or clearly-feminine “queen bitch” they/them, you’re likely to get a violent reaction.

        • admiralteal@kbin.social
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          6 months ago

          Gross. You care more about preserving the delicate feelings of bigoted snowflakes than actual vulnerable people.

          It’s not misgendering if you use non-gendered language. Non-gendered language is not gendered. Grammatical gender is idiotic and we’d be better off without it.

  • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Mark isn’t going to be able to make the meeting today but Mark wanted to say Mark conferenced with Mark and Sheryl yesterday and Mark and Sheryl are onboard with the new policy and think it’s a great idea. It’s going to take a fair amount of collaboration from the infrastructure team but the infrastructure team (mainly Bob, Greg, and Kelly) are very motivated and the infrastructure team is about finished with the infrastructure teams annual security assessment. Cathy can’t wait to get started.

    • Cathy Newton

    Yeah, wow! Totally seamless!

  • Everythingispenguins@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Just in case anyone is wondering what all the pronouns are. Here is a list of the standard, non standard, informal, and archaic pronouns in the English language

    And it at least implied that you couldn’t use any of these words at all in an email. So simple phrases like; can you do this or I am able to do that. Would be out.

    Personally I think we should just start using the archaic forms just to confuse people.