Schools celebrate 'International Pronoun Day' with 'ze' buttons, advice on pronoun 'privilege'
Wednesday marked International Pronoun Day, which entailed more than just leftist activists sharing a hashtag on Twitter. Universities recognized the day by providing students with resources concerning various pronouns like “ve” and “xe,” as well as a “how-to” guide.
At the University of Virginia, the school’s Office for Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights hosted tabling events in multiple areas of the campus. One table featured buttons displaying the pronouns “he,” “they,” “ze,” and even ones with fill-in-the-blanks and “ask about my pronouns.”
The “they” buttons at one booth vastly outnumbered the buttons with the more traditional “he” pronoun, according to a photo obtained by Campus Reform.
[RELATED: College lists ‘ne,’ ‘ve,’ ‘ey’ as gender neutral pronouns]
“The whole issue, I think, is clearly something that a small, vocal group is trying to force onto the general populace,” one UVA student who preferred to be unnamed told Campus Reform. “From living on a college campus for years, I can say that concern with gender pronouns is the outlier, not the norm. The students involved get a false sense of contributing to the betterment of the world and the administration increases its inclusivity score and gets another moral badge to wear.”
Meanwhile, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee hosted a gender pronouns guide on its LGBT Resource Center website.
”Asking and correctly using someone’s pronouns is one of the most basic ways to show your respect for their gender identity,” the school instructs students on the guide. “When someone is referred to with the wrong pronoun, it can make them feel disrespected, invalidated, dismissed, alienated, or dysphoric ( often all of the above).”
”It is a privilege to not have to worry about which pronoun someone is going to use for you based on how they perceive your gender. If you have this privilege, yet fail to respect someone else’s gender identity, it is not only disrespectful and hurtful, but also oppressive.”
UW Milwaukee also provides tips on what to do if someone uses the wrong pronouns.
”Taking an active role in your classes, you may hear one of your students using the wrong pronoun for someone. In most cases, it is appropriate to gently correct them without further embarrassing the individual who has been misgendered,” the school claims. “This means saying something like “Alex uses the pronoun she,” and then moving on. If other students or faculty are consistently using the wrong pronouns for someone, do not ignore it! It is important to let your student know that you are their ally.”
[RELATED: Prof sues over gender pronoun usage]
The school’s how-to guide, posted further down the page, features fill-in-the-blank sentences for sentence parts including subjects and objects, as well as possessive and reflexive pronouns.
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