Alex Phillips criticises Scottish government over ‘pronoun pledge’

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A huge amount of public workers will be encouraged to use terms such as she/her, he/him, they/them or zie in their email signatures despite 60 percent saying they are against the move. While others have praised the move which will “foster an open culture that is supportive of the LGBTI+ community”, according to the Daily Telegraph. GB News presenter Alex Phillips has mocked Nicola Sturgeon for the plans.

She said: “The Scottish government have decided all 8,000 of their workers must take a pronoun pledge to add their gender identity to their email signatures. What a McNonsense!

“Given the relatively tiny percentage of the population who question their gender, making the entire workforce play woke word games seems utterly ridiculous.

“Of course there will be some who decide to play pronoun bingo for the sheer hell of it to exercise their own little campaign of crawling for microaggressions among their peers.

“This comes after the Foreign Office has also made top diplomats sign off memos with preferred pronouns.”

A spokesman for the Scottish Government told MailOnline: “It is an individual’s choice whether to include their pronouns in introductions and email signatures.

“The Scottish Government is making progress towards our ambition to be a world leading, diverse employer where people can be themselves at work, with a workforce that reflects the diversity of the people of Scotland.

“As an employer we are committed to a progressive approach to advancing LGBTI equality. We encourage any action that makes people feel included and respected in our organisation.”

It comes just months after professional networking site LinkedIn will let users add their preferred gender pronouns to accounts in the United States, Britain, Sweden, Canada and Ireland from Wednesday in a nod to global debate about what it means to be male or female.

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Users in the five countries will now be able to say on their profiles whether they like to be referred to with the gender neutral they or them rather than he or him or she and her – a step the platform said responded to demand from members.

“Clearly members want to feel empowered about how they self-identify,” said Bef Ayenew, head of engineering for identity and profile at LinkedIn, which has 738 million members in 200 countries and regions worldwide.

“We’ve already seen them ‘hacking’ their names and adding their gender pronouns because the feature itself was not available, so there is clearly an express need to do this within our member base,” Ayenew told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

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According to a survey conducted this month by the Censuswide consultancy, both hiring managers and job seekers showed strong approval for the inclusion of preferred pronouns on resumes.

Among those looking for jobs, 70 percent said they felt it was important for recruiters to know individuals’ chosen pronouns, a statement 72 percentof prospective employers agreed with, adding that their inclusion “showed respect” for others.

Other social media platforms already allow users to opt for gender-neutral pronouns.

In 2014, Facebook announced a “new custom gender option to help you better express your own identity”, the social media platform said at the time, allowing users to opt for non-binary definitions of their gender.

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