Mother, should I build the wall?

[Scooter]

People who are present or absent may be referred to in the third person in the presence of others; knowing the appropriate pronouns would be useful in that case. Those who are averse to showing others the respect and courtesy of using their appropriate pronouns can always resort to using the person's name in third person address.

[ex-khobar Andy]

Here's the ad I was talking about.. It's actually an ad for Indeed, which is a job placement company - so I suppose they know the law as it pertains to them.

Just to be clear: I have absolutely no objection to someone choosing, for whatever reason, to use whatever pronouns they want. My question is a serious one: if the feds forbid you to ask the sex of an interviewee for excellent reasons and I have no quarrel with and support those reasons - how can they (the feds) be comfortable with asking, in an interview, what pronouns the applicant wants?

In any case, as Big RR points out, during an interview there would be no need to refer to anyone by a third person pronoun.

I would hope that this might become an issue only once the job is offered and accepted; and then it should be up to HR to sort this out and let the coworkers know which pronouns to use. I think that few of my colleagues of the past 30 years would have any problem with that.

[MajGenl.Meade]

Oh Andy . . . in a former life as a recruiter, we struggled with employers who were angered when told that "yes, we understand that you are trying to improve diversity in the workplace as mandated by the government" but "no, as mandated by that same government, we cannot send you only black engineers to interview for the job"

(And nor, of course could we ask employee-clients on the phone "are you black?" or mark their index cards with secret dots)

Somehow we all got through the horror