Ask HN: Does your employer want you to state pronouns in email signature?

I don't understand this point if view. I see it like stating your name - it lets people know what to call you. It doesn't have any relationship to what your genitalia are.

> "Tech isn't political" is itself a political stance. (And a hard to support one, IMO.)

Funny how the only people who say this are the people who want to drag politics into everything. Tech is no more inherently political than, say, electrical engineering. That is to say, not at all without tortured logic that could be applied to almost anything.

At a startup in TX we have been encouraged at various times to place them in email signatures and other communications. I’ve never felt particularly pressured to, it’s presented as a suggestion for being actively inclusive. It sends a signal, which perhaps is the point(that could be perceived positively as being welcoming or negatively as empty virtue signaling), but I wonder if it’s actually all that helpful. I can’t recall a situation where it wasn’t obvious what someone’s preference would be and were there a question in the moment I’d probably temporarily fall back to gender neutral they/their rather than interrupt the flow of conversation to look up their preference in an email signature. I’m not among those this is intended to help though and only have a few people in my extended friend group that are, so I’m open to hearing if this is actually important/helpful to those people.

Email signatures would change from being

Bob Jenkins - Cloud Services Developer

to

Bob Jenkins (she/her) - Cloud Services Developer

This means that people writing about Bob don't assume that Bob is a particular gender, and helps them use the correct gender.

It's a small effort to increase politeness.

I think I agree with "I honestly think it is amazing". I'm nearing middle-age and I rarely thought about gender issues and, in my twenties if I was asked to start a conversation about them, I wouldn't have even thought to talk about gender identity.

But identity is fundamentally important. If someone chooses a mean-spirited nickname for you, and refuses to use your actual name, it's not a pleasant experience. Yes, I know, "man up", but if that person is in your workplace and you are there for years and years, it wears you down. If others then join in, even thinking it's a bit of fun, then that would make me pretty miserable at work. It sure did when I was a child.

The reason you and I are amazed is because a swathe of the population have been forced to live as a lie, as someone they're not and most of them for their entire lives. They've married and had children and died of old age and maybe one or two people really knew that it was all a lie they had to project because showing their true nature would have them stoned to death. Yes, an extreme example. But let's say they came out in their 30s, they still lived for a substantial time as someone else, because nobody talked about gender identity, how it may change, or not be simple as "her or him".

This is not a conversation you or I had. Not ideas we read about, were exposed to. I am going to assume, in good faith, that you did not suffer any of these issues. I didn't.

It is amazing and I hope that eventually a better normal is reached, whether it's proffering pronouns or not, where people are not abused because of who they are.

I would guess that you may have been amazed to see SpaceX's kit land itself on a floating sea platform. Read that vegetables have been grown in microgravity or that we can now detect gravity waves. They're amazing but they're not hostile towards us, they're just new phenomenons that weren't around when we were kids.