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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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So you use 'they' until the person you're interacting with reveals themselves. Teams texts, a Skype call, or a company headshot usually takes care of this.

I work with a lot of fellow, foreign employees, and I swear that there has never been any enduring confusion over somebody's gender or sex. Yes, an odd-to-my-ears name occasionally stumps me, and this is often rectified within 24-48 hours just by inference, without anybody prompting for pronouns or confirming genitals. Furthermore, most of the people I'm interacting with do not have not have these models for novel gender theory born from the West. They work for a US company, so on some level they 'get' why it's being asked (because despite DEI and inclusions practices, everybody is bowing down to American corporate culture), but I have a hard time imagining them getting utility from this on a more fundamental level.

On paper, I get the argument you're making. In my reality, 99% of the company folk I see with pronouns in their signatures or profiles visibly match their birth sex. There is no confusion or ambiguity regarding who or what they are. And this generalizes across all the Americans, Indians, Koreans, Serbians, and more that I see listed in my recent Teams history.

The one time I have ever experienced a 'pronoun snag' was with a goateed male with a generic dude name like 'Doug', and even he preferred the ambiguous 'they'. I believe that this entire concotion of modern gender theory fused with HR nannying is for his benefit, not poor people across the pond struggling with language barriers.

The only context I can imagine not knowing the sex of one of your colleagues being a problem is if you've been emailing someone back and forth and you agree to meet in person: "I'll meet you just outside the conference room at 3pm", and you don't know who to look for. But this can easily be rectified by:

  • A blanket policy of including the person's staff photo in their email signature, which many companies already have
  • A staff directory which includes staff photos, which many companies already have
  • The person telling you who to look for: "I'll meet you just outside the conference room at 3pm, I'll be wearing a red scarf." (which they would probably do anyway even if their name was unambiguously gendered and their staff photo was in their email signature)