Gender politics arrived in Wandsworth this week.
Not through local debate or council chamber controversy, but via national newspapers reporting on a three-year-old internal memo that suggested staff could, if they wished, add pronouns to their email signatures.
Several Putney.news readers sent us the coverage. Clearly this touched a nerve. So while this publication would normally steer well clear of culture war territory, since the battle has arrived at our doorstep, let us try to be useful.
What actually happened
There was a memo. It did say what the reports claimed. In 2022, Wandsworth Council produced internal guidance suggesting that sharing pronouns was “a simple step” to help transgender and non-binary colleagues feel “more seen and recognised.”
The guidance mentioned pronouns including ze/zir/zem, which, to be frank, are rarely encountered in everyday life. Even professionals working in diversity and inclusion report never coming across them outside academic papers.
The council says the guidance was always optional, never mandated, never enforced. That context appeared in paragraph 15 of the Telegraph’s report.
So: the story was not invented, but nor was it entirely straight.
Why 2022 matters
This guidance did not emerge from nowhere. In 2022, organisations across the country, public and private, were producing similar documents. It was the peak of a particular moment in workplace diversity practice, following heightened attention to inclusion after 2020.
Some of those efforts landed well. Some did not. The pronoun guidance falls somewhere in between.
There is a reasonable case that asking everyone to announce pronouns makes it easier for those who need to. There is an equally reasonable case that “optional guidance from your employer” feels like pressure even when it technically is not. Both things can be true.
What is also true is that practice has moved on. Those who work in this field will say that 2022’s approach is now seen as overcorrection. Forcing cultural change, it turns out, tends to make people dig their heels in.
The difficult middle ground
Here is what emerges from speaking to people who think carefully about these issues:
Sex is biological. Gender is something else: how people present themselves, how the brain works, where someone sits on a spectrum that most of us never think about because we happen to fit comfortably in the majority.
Most people are straightforwardly male or female and will never have reason to question it. A small number are not. Both facts can coexist.
The question is not whether transgender or non-binary people exist. They do, and have across cultures for centuries. The question is how workplaces, institutions and colleagues should respond, and how quickly we can reasonably expect people to adapt to unfamiliar ideas.
Mandating language does not work. Dismissing people’s lived experience as “fantasy” does not work either. Somewhere between those positions is where most of us actually live.
Where this leaves us
There is no tidy conclusion here. Gender is complicated, language is political, and reasonable people disagree.
But when national headlines arrive with familiar uncompromising certainty, the job of local journalism is to provide what they leave out. Context. Nuance. The paragraph 15 that explains what the first paragraph obscured.
Whether you think the 2022 guidance was well-intentioned inclusion or overreach, you deserve to know it was optional, it was three years ago, and nothing has changed.
The rest is a conversation we are all still having.
Very calmly laid out thank you
Agreed!
I’m actually impressed by the guidelines, the optionality is very thoughtful.
I do not understand the Zem pronoun. Ze and Zir sort of make sense but Zem? Them is the plural of him or her which does not distinguish between male and female anyway, so what is the point of Zem? As for the nonsensical use of “they” as an alternative for” he” or “she”, all that has ever done is to distort the language and create legal uncertainty. I read an article recently which used that ridiculous term “they” instead of “he” and all it did was to convince me that both people portrayed in the article were drug addicts when in fact it was only the “he” who was a drug addict. Had I been the other person portrayed I might well have made a claim for libel !! Why not use the word “ze” ? At least it is a new word to describe someone who does not want to be called “he”?
Thank you for this thoughtful response. Your confusion about “zem” actually illustrates the article’s central point: organisations pushing for pronoun changes need to prioritise clarity alongside respect.
You’re right that unclear pronouns create real problems. Your libel example shows exactly why precision matters – people need to know who did what.
However, singular “they” isn’t new – Shakespeare, Austen and Thackeray all used it, with the Oxford English Dictionary tracing it to 1375. What’s newer is using it for specific individuals who identify that way.
The article doesn’t prescribe solutions. It argues that organisations advocating change should focus on practical clarity rather than ideological positions. Your preference for “ze” is noted as one viable option – what matters is finding workable approaches that serve both respect and understanding.