- Name is Alex/Jordan/Leslie
- Not allowed to clarify gender
How does this hold up against a first amendment test?
It’ll never have to
Well like any other employee, you can say whatever you like, but you might get fired for it.
I don’t see how the first ammendment applies here.
That said, I think this is a stupid and mean spirited order. It is by design trying to continue the exodus of federal employees while also the tyrannical denial of being able to identify people however they find appropriate for themselves.
Because their employer is the US Government. The very entity the 1st Amendment protects us from.
Not how this works at all. Do you really believe that an employee can just do or say anything while on the job just because they work for the US government?
Lets take Email for example, because that is what we are talking about here. There are policies about structuring emails. An agency can say: Your name goes at the bottom of every email, followed by your position, and then the Logo of the Agency. If you choose to sign your emails with someone else’s name, from “This is such bullshit department” and a logo you made up, you WILL get disciplined.
Your freedom of speech ends at the door. Outside of work feel free, not at work.
Well it’s not a private entity hiring them, it’s the actual govt. Usually the defense is that those are private companies and they can do what they want but that doesn’t apply here
Yes it does apply here. Why would you think it would be different?
There are always policies in government, just like anywhere else you have people working. Freedom of speech is not an excuse to break those policies.
- I → (the) speaker/writer
- you → (the) listener/reader, pl. (the) audience
- they → that person, pl. those people
The writer believes that such an idea is quite stupid. In fact, the writer believes that the audience will find this language extremely obtuse. These methods will only cause more pain to the federal employees in question.
I think we need a tool that automatically rewrites text to remove all pronouns, but I’m not even sure that is possible.
Don’t forget pronouns like who, mine, and ours. In fact, here’s a list of >100
Someone should write a script that completely replaces these with BS standins
But why would a pronoun be in a signature? Something like Her Majesty, Patricia Jones, Dept. of Health?
-
Parker Smith
-
She/Her
-
Department of Defense Black Budget Coordinator
-
867-5309 ext. 1
Questions?
-
So people know how you would like to be addressed.
So is it alright to just assume trump is female? The email signature no longer states her preferred pronouns, so I think this is what she wants?
She did sign that executive order designating everyone as female, too.
This is just begging for malicious compliance.
You want to eliminate an entire part of speech? Then good luck trying to understand what the fuck my email is trying to say.
In the article it specifies you to remove pronouns from your email signature. Definitely less fertile ground for malicious compliance, but it’s still doable.
End every email body with “For your response, I am referred to using (feminine/masculine/any/whatever) pronouns”
Replace it with “[Insert Pronouns Here]”. Make sure to have your desk already cleaned out though.
You
FUCKING PRONOUNCE turns red and screams
Does the reader want to eliminate an entire part of speech? Then good luck trying to understand what the fuck the writer’s email is trying to say.
Could be fun. I bet ChatGPT could automate it.
Exactly… Maybe have a boilerplate disclaimer at the top of each email that does include pronouns, just explaining that the following email has had all pronouns removed so as to comply with the new rule.
“The following email has had all pronouns removed in compliance with blah blah blah. Readability has unfortunately, but obviously, been significantly reduced. Apologies will be made available at a later date.”
Think it is important for people to remove all pronouns from documents. Without, people will be more free to interpret what these messages mean to. This type of malicious compliance will only go so far, sadly.
Comment used it, these, and this. Please remove offensive pronouns, children may be present and children must not learn the english language
children must not learn the english language
Reminds me of…
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as “This dog is free from lice” or “This field is free from weeds.” It could not be used in its old sense of “politically free” or “intellectually free” since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.
I’ve said it before, I remember reading this novel as a teen and finding the parts about language to be boring and far-fetched.
Looking back, it was probably one of the most important things that Orwell discussed. That shit is incredibly powerful, and it fundamentally shapes how we think and view the world without us even realizing it.
I remember reading Thomas Paine in high school and most of the students couldn’t even understand it. That stuff was printed for the average bloke 200 years ago. The stuff that helped light the American populace to take up arms and overthrow tyrannical rule isn’t even comprehendable to our poorly educated populace now. Being a genius isn’t required to foment revolution, but common language is, literally and figuratively.
If you haven’t learned vocabulary, your brain struggles to conceive, identify and of course use it in course of thought. One of the reasons right wing news and cable so often misuses and deliberately butchers important words like traitor, fascist, etc. is they want to strip them of their very important meaning so they aren’t notable when used.
21% of adult Americans are considered to have low English literacy. Two thirds of these people were born in the US. This basically means they can read the words in a paragraph, but not understand the meaning of the paragraph. A further 4% are functionally illiterate.
This is disgusting.
Fuck “No Child Left Behind”. Kids shouldn’t pass elementary school without being able to deduce the meaning of a paragraph unless they have a mental disability. I don’t care if they have to repeat 5th grade three times. And of course any non passing student should be offered tutoring for free long before they get to the point of being held back.
Oregon, despite being home to Powell’s books and thought of as progressive has one of the worst high school graduation rates,ath and literacy rates in the country. After the pandemic they straight up removed many math and English requirements from high school curriculum under the guise of “equity” for those affected by the learning disruptions cause by COVID. It was pretty clearly less about serving disadvantaged students than raising the abysmal education statistics.
That said, educators are doing as much social work now as they are education as society collapses in on itself and generational poverty, social ills related to poverty, poisons in our environment and relating depression and anxiety from young to old metastasize nationally. Teachers cannot hope to fix all that in a few hours a day let alone make up for years of lacking learning environments outside of school for their students.
They’re teaching phonics still in 3rd grade.
Yeah, I know a little about what they’re dealing with. My sister-in-law is a high school history teacher. She still has to bartend at least two nights a week to afford to raise her kids. On top of all that extra unpaid work.
The Oregon thing is new to me but not surprising. They’d already begun changing teaching to be about passing the standardized tests rather than learning by the time I graduated high school, over 20 years ago.
I had my son read this book. He was partway through and began exclaiming how much it paralleled today.
Hugely pedantic here, but only “it” is a pronoun there (specifically an anticipatory subject, a kind of expletive pronoun), the others are adjectives.
They should replace all pronouns with [redacted].
emails
\sigh
shemails?
my new bio: (masculine neutral/masculine possessive)
but they banned mentioning gender, change it to (identifying with the societal archetype of the sex producing the small reproductive cell)
my new bio: (masculine neutral/masculine possessive)
Isn’t it nominative/objective?
I don’t see “he/his” or “they/their,” I see “he/him” and “they/them.”
I put all of them in, ie he/him/his… just to remove ambiguity.
And pronouns remain in my sig. Ain’t going anywhere.
Probably! Been a long time since I’ve been to school.
I guess Trump doesn’t want to be referred to as He/Him
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-appears-accidentally-declared-every-174749266.html
Hmmm, I see…
Hope you’re not named Elle.
Trump’s idol **inrich ***mler would be offended too!
Or He-Man
Can’t? I think the better way to phrase it, is that everyone is freed from being forced or intimidated into using them, which was ridiculous to begin with.
The whole thing was sexist. Just say your name, no one needs to know any more than that. You’re a human, that’s enough.
People don’t need to be defined by all that other crap.
Trolling or stupid? Trolling…or stupid? I just can’t tell anymore.
Wow, did you rub all 3 brain cells together to come up with that? Your mommy must be so proud.
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I work with military and the more conservative ones are bitch-made and demand to use the properly gendered honorific. Seeing CPT CUMBRAIN as the sign-off on an email doesn’t let you know how to address them. Commissioned officers get called either sir or ma’am, and some will turn into cry baby bitches if you don’t get it right. They love their pronouns.
I mean… Those kinds of officers could do with being bothered every now and then. It’s like with cats. If you let the officers go without shenanigans they get arrogant. I think the appropriate rate is something like 1 bothering per 6 months for every 20 specialists under them? That seems harsh but really good specialists can bother their entire chain of command in one go!
It says email signatures.
And good; it’s ridiculous, virtue-signalling bullshit and you’ve got to let it go.
You fuckers need to let your vice-signaling go. Funny how “freedom” to ignore pronouns quickly gives way to banning them. The only freedom you guys seem to care about is the freedom to be ignorant pieces of shit.
Yeah, turns out reality is more nuanced than that.
It’s useful for people with unisex names like Taylor, Chris, or Jordan, especially in email, where you may not have any face-to-face contact.
Or for people with names from cultures not associated with English naming standards such as Chinese or Indian cultures working in western companies or governments.
Pop quiz anti-pronouners! 星辰 Xīng Chén, girl or boy? 美莉 Měi Lì, girl or boy?? Would you like to buy a pronoun now?
The first is male, the second is female, but I study Chinese so that’s not very fair of me.
Yes, that’s a reasonable position.
I’m been told that it is not just virtue-signaling (it is), but that it is also a virtue (allyship) in action. Normalizing sharing that information make it easier for people that have a more complex relationship with their gender than I do.
And good; it’s ridiculous, virtue-signalling bullshit and you’ve got to let it go.
You’re expressing a VERY strong negative reaction on words in an email signature. Why are you so threatened by what someone puts in their email signature? How does it challenge or change what you are that you’ve put so much thought into it to get this angry about it?
Because it’s very, very silly identity politics and the majority of people agree. You’ve got to let it go and focus on important things, like the insane and ever-increasing wealth inequality.
Identity politics for email signatures? There was no federal policy around email signatures like this until folks like you decided to make it politics forcing removal.
Ah yes, folks like me, of course.
Do you find my statement offensive? Are you not celebrating this new policy? How would you not be folks that share your mindset be like you?
I don’t know if celebrating is the right word. I’m not American and would never have voted for Trump, but in isolation this seems fairly benign and I think a majority of people will be glad to hear it. You might disagree, that’s fine, I’m not interested in an extended argument about it.
