A new South Dakota policy to stop the use of gender pronouns by public university faculty and staff in official correspondence is also keeping Native American employees from listing their tribal affiliations in a state with a long and violent history of conflict with tribes.
Two University of South Dakota faculty members, Megan Red Shirt-Shaw and her husband, John Little, have long included their gender pronouns and tribal affiliations in their work email signature blocks. But both received written warnings from the university in March that doing so violated a policy adopted in December by the South Dakota Board of Regents.
“I was told that I had 5 days to remove my tribal affiliation and pronouns,” Little said in an email to The Associated Press. “I believe the exact wording was that I had ‘5 days to correct the behavior.’ If my tribal affiliation and pronouns were not removed after the 5 days, then administrators would meet and make a decision whether I would be suspended (with or without pay) and/or immediately terminated.”
The policy is billed by the board as a simple branding and communications policy. It came only months after Republican Gov. Kristi Noem sent a letter to the regents that railed against “liberal ideologies” on college campuses and called for the board to ban drag shows on campus and “remove all references to preferred pronouns in school materials,” among other things.
Don’t lump me in with those assholes. I support LGBTQI, I just don’t agree with the pronoun block. Why change English to accommodate something that already exists?
I think making the pronoun block front and center of communications and daily life has triggered the conservatives and caused a backlash that will cause way more harm than the pronoun block would ever have done good. If you want a social change to stick you need to align it to things that everybody believes in. A call to use more formal language in communications is traditional and something that the majority could get behind, pronouns are just a progressive idea that will be used for slurs, hate and vitrol.
When you do something for a group that is already facing a ton of hate and then you try and change the habits of the nazis, they’re going to do everything in their power to resist your demands. The current wave of extremist politics is a reaction from the past few decades of extreme swing towards PC culture. Change is gradual. The current conservative bullshit will pass because people really aren’t like that. There are a lot of people that grew up before the culture shift seen in the 90s, 00s, and 10s. When younger generations start saying “you need to do this” the older ones get upset. They don’t understand or don’t agree, or generally don’t want to change. Forcing this down people’s throats and making everything more every day in the open is going to prime people for more extreme hate thoughts, even if they by default would be neutral or even leaning progressive.
The republican party and conservatives have latched on to this shared unease of change and have used it to target LGBTQI in majority conservative states. States that before never were regressive are turning so… because politics and news are talking about it constantly and making the impression that somehow they (older people) are being targeted, even when they are not. It’s another public policy push that distracts us from real issues like healthcare, social security, tax reforms and loop holes that the rich and wealthy abuse, and other major policies that are harming us every single day to prop up some wealthy interest group who benefits from the status quo.
I know this is a long post, but to sum it up: “You get more flies with honey than with vinegar.”