What are your pronouns?
Mine are (self/relative to all). The well-intended idea is making it worse. Learn how and what does work.
Pronouns are a very popular progressive idea created to increase respect and inclusion for transgender, and other non-binary identified persons. And deal with sexism in some arenas. But how effective is it at doing more than putting a stake in the ground for where a person stands on the question of whether gender is determined at birth? A 2022 Pew Research Survey says the expression of gender bias is getting worse. The findings—60% say a person’s gender is determined by their sex assigned at birth, up from 56% in 2021 and 54% in 2017. There is less approval for self-determining our identity in the recent reporting years, the same period of the popularization of specifying our pronouns.[1]
The pronoun specification has always been about trying to bring about a reduction of bias, but it doesn’t have a good track record. In fact, I believe that such efforts are widening the divide rather than closing it. Further, the well-intended proponents are missing the mark on the real source of bias and offering an effective means for reversing it. They are working from a theory of change with is based on core errors of the source of bias and its effective confrontation. I believe the practice of specifying pronouns likely fosters bias. It harms those working with the pronoun change practice, those with related methods, the intended beneficiary, and those stuck in a more biased view. We need a better theory of change!
How could that be? Doesn’t showing respect with yard and street plaques, and being on the side of the impacted by those prejudiced count for something? Only if it brings people closer together does it count. And we have to track outcomes if we are to get to score points. And we have to start from the right source of bias.
The Invisible Sources of Bias
The sources on the surface are many. More accurately called symptoms. E, g, Family and societal conditioning, but there are two deeper underpinnings that are not considered and yet create the lens through which we interpret life and produce the symptoms.
The first is our undeveloped nature. That is the working of our being that keeps us asleep and mechanical. And therefore, blind to our dysfunction. We have many characteristics that steal our attention and energy unless we learn to manage them and bring them under our control. One of the core distractors in a wisdom school that arose in Armenia is called Identification. That is, seeking ideas, groups, or relationships as the same as us. When it is threatened or misunderstood, we feel it is happening to us and suffer. We feel a need to defend it and hurt when we think it does. We cannot separate our being from its being.
The greater the identification, the more familiar it is; hence, it is more unrecognizable as being in a waking sleep and being mechanical. Identification is often invisible as a result. It is chained so tightly to our eyes that we see by means of it, like contact lenses we have forgotten about. We may not even be aware of a liking or disliking, we take things as being the way they should be, and we mistake the familiar for the normal. As a friend of mine commented when I told her of my idea for this blog, “Identification” is taking things personally.” Often this attitude of personalizing is not noticeably either pleasant or unpleasant: it is our world, our air; after all, we can only look out on the world from the citadel of our own person.
Frequently, too, we honor our identifications with golden names. For people such as ourselves, our “loving” involves identification. The modern passion for being “passionate” is a passion for identification. But maybe not all our loving; maybe some of it is free at moments, or at least relatively free, from identification. Our good name depends on the good name of our friends, so we defend them. We feel offended when they are criticized or attached. Our president, our spouses, our gurus. Our local sports teams, when we go beyond enjoying them, become of this source is tied to our self-respect can far too often lead to violence on a futbol pitch or parking lot. This is not loyalty but identification. We are one and the same with them. Our Children’s school results are our report cards forms our society. Without development, our lives are unknowingly ruled by our identifications, and our world is interpreted by these emotional identities. We join groups and form clubs and associations around identifications with what seems right and normal but hold our emotions and interpretations without our awareness of their effects.
Knowledge is not the problem: identification with our knowledge is. Loving our children is not the problem. Identifying with them is. We seek to control, shape, and react to them based on the effect we interpret they will have on how we are seen and valued. We think we will be judged in light of how they are judged. We are bonded to them and how they are seen in the world. If we identify
it is emotional engagement and attachment. The emotionality will invariably be a form of like or dislike, attraction or repulsion. The one thing identification cannot be is impartial. Identification is practically the law of life, whether inside families, socially, at the office, in the factory, in clubs, and even in groups. With our heritage and Place of origin. A crippling idea in modern times is what constitutes knowledge and what does not. We make non-behavioral, nonscientific methods, like indigenous science, outside the acceptable ways of knowing.
We perhaps identify most with our “best” ideas. And label them as such. But, a close second is our children, good name, career, social class, gender, and race. When we have a good taste of identification and its effects, we can take action to make it passive. We can loosen its grip on our emotions and its power over us. But without the development of our inner being and related aspects of our nature, it is a prime source for all nature of bias and prejudice. This is why the intention and justifications of groups seem so right and normal because if it is wrong, we are. If it is harmful, then we are bad people. We can’t live with this image ourselves, so we make the other option wrong. “We have met the enemy, and he is us”, as Pogo said in the comic strip. The ‘not like me’ is formed and held tightly but with a falsely grouped set of ‘like me.”
Better Connection Than Pronouns: Essence of each individual and their contribution
We are identifying with our pronouns and many other things. And they are groups that create a division of identifications and are ineffective at bonded groups. The appropriate connection is to the essence of each individual, which is their most authentic aspect of us. If we bond people to pronouns, we set several problems in motion. They need to fit in with others and their ideas, not think for themselves. There is no such thing as a gender perspective, but people start to build one. In fact, there is no such thing as a definable gender. This should be obvious from the new categories of gender we keep honoring. A person has their own characteristics related to them personally. They are the gender at birth, but it is one of one gender and not a category. Singular!
The ultimate diversity is the essence of each being. We want our identity to be with ourselves but to develop ourselves, so we do not fall into identification. And as important, it is critical to remember we are a whole nested inside of other wholes. A human nested in a community, inside a Life Shed. And therefore, To remember all this, Iuse as identifiers, e.g., pronouns, ” self/in relation to all” (other living beings.) It puts me focused on my Essence and not what category I am in. This is the indigenous way my grandfather spoke about each human. It is why he called me the “positive contrarian.” He saw as Essence for me. Anyone who exists is a self, not a gender, with an Essence, with a set of distinctive ableness to develop and contribute. We don't develop proplr based on gender or race, but on Essence. We don’t ask people to contribute based on gender or race, but on the particular contribution that their Essence is called to make within a strategic direction of an organization. And you design work systems based on self-determination of that, not so we have an equal mix of race and gender or any other artificial category. If not, we are working from generics putting people in categories that have false or inappropriate clusters of ‘likes.”
When we use pronouns, we are teaching people to drop out essence and to identify with artificial categories. Everyone easily moves into seeing issues by category of race and gender and fights to resolve them, forming an identification that we cling to and then work on symptoms with conflicting identifications. In South Africa, with Colgate, we dropped all references to race and gender (and other human-contrived categories; and changed the work design system to work with Essence Contribution, where each person worked from a self-determining agency. Everyone could move to the top rank and not be subject to external or “higher person’s evaluation or approval. We were the only company in South Africa, during the move out of apartied, that had zero violence between persons and groups. Mandela presented The Constitution Award to Colgate for the rate of implementing the Constitution. We did ongoing, extensive development of everyone, learning reflection on our inner being, like managing identification and how it works. See extensive case stories in my books.
Stop using pronouns. Well-intended people are making the problem they seek to solve worse. Give no format for identifications or avoid being swept into violence that builds from categorizations and the identification it fosters in everyone on every side. And work on the Errors in thinking that got us into the mess. Including why and how all categories come about and how human development (not training) is needed to fulfill the higher capacity based on Essence and specific contributions from each Essence.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/americans-complex-views-on-gender-identity-and-transgender-issues/