A new South Dakota Board of Regents policy keeps employees from including their gender pronouns in school email signatures and other correspondence.
A new South Dakota Board of Regents policy keeps employees from including their gender pronouns in school email signatures and other correspondence.
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.
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.
“They” as a neutral singular pronoun has been in the English language for hundreds of years.
Enbys also use it as a personal pronoun, sure - but no one gets to dictate that it can no longer be used as a neutral pronoun for everyone of any gender.