Perth worker sacked for incorrectly addressing non-binary colleague

VaughanJB said:
This story is about bad management.
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Yes it is.

Disgustedman said:
Happily the company settled with the employee they terminated for an undisclosed amount of money. Now they have the fun job of trying to replace an experienced worker.
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All the employees who are left will have a difficult time working with the accuser. The work dynamic has been upset because of poor management. I‘ve seen this before, though not the same scenario.
 

Using the word "they" is ridiculous. They refers to more than one person. They all don't work there. They all don't do this or that. Just because a person don't consider themselves male or female, you can't fire or punish a person who refers to them as a he or a she. I have a great nephew who is now my great niece. Life was so much more simpler back in the 50's and 60's.
 

Maybe just get rid of all gender pronouns. Do we really have to grammatically specify that Sally is a girl, if we specify that Sally is a person? That would take some time to adjust to, but would be less cumbersome.
 
I'm not buying this "reported" incident by the The West Australia. All the other accounts for this supposed incident only cite one source- The West Australia. To me, this has fake news all over it. No names of anyone connected with this incident., no business where it happened. No real details. I can "report" that the world blew up three days ago, that doesn't necessarily mean it's true.
 
I guess those events are a part of this DEI virus we have these days. As a kid my mom insisted that we address adults with yes sir and yes mam. To this day I still do. I'm 77 and I call our neighbor Miss Gene and her husband Mr Dana although our ages are pretty close. I like those customs and think I'll stick with them, besides I'm retired and my age allows me to escape the rath of someone being pretentiously offended.
 
Beezer said:
It's funny.

Clerks call me all kinds of names...dude, boss, sir, chief...etc. But this one guy at this one Gas Station always calls me 'doctor'. I get a real kick out of it. I can't tell if it's just a nickname, or if he is really mistaking me for someone else who is an actual doctor.
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Beezer: My husband was always called Dr. but I think the garage man thought he was his Dr. ?????
 
You know, this reminded me of a personal experience that some of the ladies here can help with.

So, I was at work at the time, and there was a woman in a supervisory role from Romania. She was very competent, and professional. I got on with her very well, and we worked together daily. She was married to an Italian chef, and they were planning of having a child in the not too distant future.

Anyway - let's say her name was X. When the occasion was appropriate, I would address her as Ms. X.

One day, while we were chatting, she asked me not to address her as "Ms". She said I should have addressed her an "Mrs". I tried to explain that I used Ms. because it's neutral, and if in doubt, why not be neutral? But she let me know she found it offensive in some way.

Now, I was happy to address her as Mrs., but I guess it's something that stuck with me, because I still think of it. :D

I don't know if this is a right/wrong thing. But would the ladies here have been offended by someone using "Ms"?
 
VaughanJB said:
You know, this reminded me of a personal experience that some of the ladies here can help with.

So, I was at work at the time, and there was a woman in a supervisory role from Romania. She was very competent, and professional. I got on with her very well, and we worked together daily. She was married to an Italian chef, and they were planning of having a child in the not too distant future.

Anyway - let's say her name was X. When the occasion was appropriate, I would address her as Ms. X.

One day, while we were chatting, she asked me not to address her as "Ms". She said I should have addressed her an "Mrs". I tried to explain that I used Ms. because it's neutral, and if in doubt, why not be neutral? But she let me know she found it offensive in some way.

Now, I was happy to address her as Mrs., but I guess it's something that stuck with me, because I still think of it. :D

I don't know if this is a right/wrong thing. But would the ladies here have been offended by someone using "Ms"?
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It wouldn't bother me @VaughanJB.

I think modern women probably would prefer to be called Ms rather than Mrs because, as you say, Ms is neutral. I don't understand how it could be viewed as offensive unless, of course, in Romania it may be impolite not to use the term Mrs for a married woman.
 
VaughanJB said:
I don't know if this is a right/wrong thing. But would the ladies here have been offended by someone using "Ms"?
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No, but I read Ms magazine when I was much younger. To me it is six of one and half a dozen of another.

But some women want to be called Mrs. because it signifies that they are married, or maybe that they got their man, or maybe that they aren't living in sin, or maybe that they aren't a feminist, or maybe that their children were born in wedlock, etc. Those are just guesses.
 
CaliS said:
At 62, it's difficult to change the way I talk. That being said, I do try to be as accommodating as possible to people's preferences.

Being fired for something like this is absolutely ridiculous; showing a lack of empathy for the older person and a double standard for human rights.
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I try to remember to call someone who requests it "they". But in my one experience, it was terribly difficult to remember that because They looked like a man, had a man's haircut, talked like a man, walked like a man. He was a man, not half female and half nothing at all. What really made me angry was that when I accidentally referred to him as "he", my daughter said I was trans-phobic.

Why trans-phobic? Is someone who says he is half female and half nothing a female? What if They were never planning to physically transform into a female?

I had a good friend in 1975 who was transitioning to being a female. He had the hormone therapy done here (at which time, my friends and I referred to the person as "she" - not hard because she was much better endowed than I was). Then she moved to Denmark or Sweden to have her female body completed. I don't know what happened to her after that. I think she was really lonely because she made some offhand remark about gender reassignment surgery and I said I'd heard of it because I had read Christine Jorgensen's book years earlier. So he confided in my friend (a woman) and I. I felt honored that he felt safe enough to do that.

Anyway I was angry with my daughter because she was accusing me of being something I am not. It is not my fault I've only met one trans person other than the guy I thought was faking it. It's also a long-ingrained habit to use she when referring to a female and he when referring to a male.
 
This is not exactly on the subject, but when my cleaning lady, Maria (from Peru originally, but a naturalized American) first started working here, she always addressed me as Ms. Jane. (Let's say my name is Jane Doe.) It took a few sessions for me to convince her that in America, we either just use the first name, or Ms. /Mr followed by the last name. But combining Ms. with a first name sounds like something out of Gone With the Wind.

She referred to all the other people she worked for the same way. I don't know how they felt about it.

I think anyone employed by anyone else should ask at the beginning how to address the other person. Some people might object to just being called by their first name, especially if they are much older than the first person. But somehow, that Ms. Jane business always made me uncomfortable. Finally, she got used to just calling me "Jane," and I'm glad I stopped being Ms. Scarlett.
 
Getting back to the gender-specific pronouns, it wasn't exactly "easier" when they were in the closet, but the pronouns were certainly easier. I think this is a ridiculous distortion of the English language. "They" refers to a plural number of people, things, etc. Using that word for a single person makes everyone's head start spinning.

I think the latest survey on this showed that the use of they/them for a single person is very unpopular all over the country. I doubt that it will ever catch on.
 
Sunny said:
"They" refers to a plural number of people, things, etc. Using that word for a single person makes everyone's head start spinning.
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I'm having the same problem understanding that myself. It sounds like a grammatical error, unless one person is actually two persons, which is physically impossible. Depending on context, it could be a pronoun referring to a combination of personalities contained in a person with split personality disorder.
 
CaliS said:
At 62, it's difficult to change the way I talk. That being said, I do try to be as accommodating as possible to people's preferences.

Being fired for something like this is absolutely ridiculous; showing a lack of empathy for the older person and a double standard for human rights.
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Firstly, thank you for those who answered my question. If nothing else I think it illustrates that you can still trip, even when you're trying hard not to!

As for @CallS - your first sentence says a lot. What I mean is, if I meet a stranger, I don't consciously analyze their appearance. Like breathing, like blinking, it all happens automagically. A woman comes across as a woman, a man a man. I don't have to think about it, analyze it, weigh up the evidence. We're just programmed by y3ears and years to know the difference between the sexes. That is why, I think, it's difficult to change - you're not consciously doing these things.

I'm reminded - and I truly don't mean offense here - but back in ye olde days we knew there were men who dressed in women's clothes. We knew them as as Transv*******. I understand this is an offensive term now. I don't know why it's offensive. Also, surgical procedures to change a persons *******s has been a thing for many decades - there's a movie about it from the 70's that I won't mention. What's changed now is that we have a greater understanding of our bodies chemistry, and we can prescribe drugs to affect change.

That issue here is what does that mean to people like myself and perhaps CallS. It's just not our norm, and we don't think about such things. I mean, since when did I worry about pronouns?
 
I agree, Vaughan, but I think the confusion goes beyond the age of the listener or reader. Here's an example:

I was reading an advice column in the Washington Post, which knocks itself out using politically correct (woke) terminology. Someone wrote that his daughter, with whom he had issues involving the daughter's boyfriend, was coming for a visit, and he was asking for some advice.

The answer from the columnist was something like, "When they arrive greet them warmly, and express how happy you are to see them."

My reaction was: Huh? The daughter is bringing her boyfriend for the visit? But the person asking for advice didn't say that. How many people were coming on this visit? Just the daughter was "they?" What's going on?

Obviously, this was of zero importance to me personally. But imagine the confusion and misunderstanding that can be engendered if everybody starts talking like that all the time.

However, we interestingly do use "they/their/them" for a single person all the time when we don't know who they are. "Somebody must have left their wallet here."
 

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