Mick Hartley

It seems to be endemic now:

Home Office staff have been told to be careful about pronouns when addressing colleagues and to avoid using words such as “mate” and “homosexuality”.

Staff at the department’s homeland security group, the unit responsible for tackling terrorism, were given a lunchtime presentation advising them on how to address people’s gender identities. It said that some people used “mixed” or “split” pronouns, such as “he and they” or “she and they,” meaning both were acceptable and they could be used interchangeably.

You'd think that a security unit tackling terorism might have better things to do…

Other people did not conform to these pronouns, staff were told, and used “neopronouns” such as “zie” or “ey”.

The presentation said: “People use mixed pronouns for many different reasons — there’s no ‘one size fits all’ for NB [gender nonbinary] people or people that use mixed pronouns, just as there isn’t for men or women.”

Staff were told that a person’s sex, gender identity and “gender expression” could vary and “not correspond”. The Home Office said the material, which was leaked to the Guido Fawkes website, was used as part of an internal event in the department and was not official government guidance.

The presentation included a list of words to avoid, including “mate”. It showed an example of an email in which someone corrected a colleague when they had used the word. In the response, the person said: “Sorry for calling you mate.” It was not made clear why the word should not be used.

Sorry for calling you mate, mate.

Staff were also told to avoid referring to someone as “homosexual” or using the word “homosexuality”, because it was “generally considered a medical term now” and could “reduce the person to purely sexual terms”, adding that “people tend to use gay instead”.

Other terms staff were encouraged to avoid using included butch, femme, transsexual, sex change, pre-operative and post-operative. Also blacklisted were “transgendered” as it “suggests a condition of some kind”, and “transgenderism” because it “suggests an ‘ideology’ that could be argued against”.

Not at all an ideology. Absolutely not. 

It's all so childish…so pathetic….