Pronouns again.
A reader flagged this story and it almost got lost in the swirl of ethics chaos this month, so I want to get it up quickly today. Chad Scharf was the vice president of software engineering at the Jacksonville, Florida, location of Bitwarden, which is a cybersecurity firm based in California. I suspect that headquarters locale is at fault for the fact that Bitwarden decided that all employees should include “their “preferred pronouns” in their personal profiles on Slack, an online messaging platform. This was, of course, part of its diversity/equity/inclusion embrace.
DEI is a cover for government, corporate and other sinister educational efforts to engage in discrimination, progressive virtue signalling and indoctrination, and the only way to slow it down until the courts step in is to show some backbone and say, “No.” That’s what Scharf did. He declined to list any preferred pronouns, and that should have been the end of the issue. There is a clear and reasonable presumption that an employee with a male name who doesn’t specify pronouns is content with being identified by male pronouns.
Apparently Bitwarden is a bit crypto-fascist, or Borg, or bully, and wouldn’t let the matter drop. It pressured the VP to be assimilated, and eventually Scharf did the kind of thing I would do, which is to faux comply with the equivalent of “Bite Me!” He listed his preferred pronouns as “Assigned By God.” A Catholic, Scharf believes that there are only two genders and that a person’s gender “cannot be changed, chosen, or manipulated.”
This is, of course, his right, and it is unethical for an employer to insist that he act in defiance of those beliefs unless they interfere with his duties. In Scharf’s case, they don’t.
Never mind. Two employees, and assholes, in the Bitwarden human resources department declared they were “offended” by Scharf’s pronoun statement, because people like them regard any position they and their ideological clones disagree with as offensive, intolerable, and probably “unsafe” as well. Company management—it’s in California, remember, sided with the assholes, and demanded that Scharf remove “Assigned By God” from his employee profile page. He refused, and was fired.
Now he is suing. His lawyer, veteran religious rights advocate Jennifer Vasquez, argues that the company violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “Bitwarden violated Title VII when it placed Mr. Scharf into a disfavored class by promoting its gender ideology, when it failed to approve his reasonable request for accommodation, and when it terminated his employment,” the lawsuit states. “Had Chad set aside his religious beliefs and acquiesced to Bitwarden’s promotion of gender ideology, he would not have been fired, which means his religious beliefs were the cause of his termination.”
Weeeellll, that’s not exactly right. His “Bite me!” response could also be viewed as deliberately provocative, but the company was also mistreating him by insisting on his capitulation to its woke pronoun policy. I hope he prevails, and that he doesn’t have to go all the way to the Supreme Court to do it. The important thing now is that he isn’t accepting woke ideology coercion, and if more reasonable people follow his example and refuse to capitulate, grovel and comply, this totalitarian movement to establish political homogeneity will eventually collapse.
I hope.
Ethics Alarms 
All of this was 100% unnecessary. There is neither the need for nor any value in making someone list “preferred pronouns.” as a matter of policy. There’s also no need for being a jerk about these things. My dad was an exec in IT for most of his career and one of his team members had a screensaver that showed the Virgin Mary. A coworker was Jewish and said he was offended by it. My dad told him he wouldn’t see it if he stayed out of this person’s cubicle, to concern himself with his work, not other people’s screensavers, and to only come back if someone displayed something genuinely offensive or potentially disruptive, like porn or profanity. That was that.
Forcing people to identify pronouns has never been about accommodating the mentally ill – as you would never use their ‘personal pronouns’ in front of them – you’d either use their name or speak to them in 2nd person pronouns like “you” and “your”.
Forcing people to identify pronouns is a public mark to force people to conform or be labeled as hated.
Burn your incense and declare Caesar is lord.
I’d call it hate speech!
“A Catholic, Scharf believes that there are only two genders and that a person’s gender “cannot be changed, chosen, or manipulated.””
Also, this could have been completely read by 99.999999999999% of people 6 years ago as this sentence:
“A human being in the tradition of virtually every other single human being in the history of mankind, irrespective of his personal religion which happens to agree with that age-old human assessment, Scharf believes that there are only two genders and that a person’s gender “cannot be changed, chosen, or manipulated.”
My pronouns are
I me my mine
Thou thee thy thine (Yes, English does have a T-V distinction, blame the Normans)
Ye you your yours
She her hers
He him his
It its
One ones (in the impersonal and replaced in the interrogative with who whom whoes)
We us our
You yours (but plural as god and Chaucer intended)
They them their
Because if I’m going to be dickish then gosh darn it, I’m gonna be nerdy about it.
George Harrison is smiling somewhere…
One (see what I did there?) could also say, “I me my mine we us our”, the rest of the pronouns are for OTHER people.
And I still favor use of the singular they as both grammatical and more elegant than the clunky “he or she.”
No one (oops, I did it again,) who uses the singular “you” has a leg to stand on when they argue against they.
Do you have any thoughts on the androgynous “he”, where “he” could refer to either a man or a woman if the sex is not yet identified, and “she” is only used if the individual has been identified as a woman?
From The Female Man By Joanna Russ, published 1975
I’ve seen women writers refer to a hypothetical person where sex isn’t important to the topic as “she”, and that doesn’t bother me.
Nor me. I’ve done it. In bar associations, where the woke wun fwee, they always use “she” in such situations. Why not? There are few centuries to make up for before its even….
Hear hear (can we unite in blaming the ubiquitous spell check for those persons who would write ‘here, here’?) for one’s usage of ‘they’. I do believe it flows better. One of the problems that just grates on me is how some of these tortured constructions just bring the flow of a narrative to a screeching halt.
I guess the expanded Scharf family has officially had its day in the sun.
Why do people say their pronouns are plural (they, etc.) but use the singular when referring to themselves? Shouldn’t they say “our personal pronouns are they, and so forth” rather than using “my”?
We are not amused.
Flaunting our inner royalist are we?
I am amused by thee. One can only hope that one’s reaction is appropriate, even if not preferred.
Þou doþ amuse me. Or ys yt doəst? I þink doþ ys correct.
One could always make a pronoun list like this
Pronoun: https://stevewitherspoonhome.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/biteme.jpg
Which is “Bite Me” using the Klingon Alphabet.
Watch the totalitarians scramble around trying to figure out what it means.
valkygrrl, I think Steve just out-nerded you.
-Jut
He should have listed his personal pronoun as Mxyztplk and let them agonize over the proper pronunciation.
Bonus points for the Superman reference!