Job Candidate Rescinds Application After Noticing Pronouns In The Recruiter’s Email Signature
Imagine being so invested in other people's private lives you turn down a job in this economy.
fizkes | Shutterstock There's a reason the Kamala Harris campaign's branding of conservatives as "weird" has stuck so easily. There is simply no other accurate and succinct way to describe some of their views, especially their obsession with other people's personal lives.
A recent story on Reddit highlights the depth and breadth of these very strange hang-ups so many people have nowadays — a fixation with other people's bodies and identities so intense that they're willing to hobble their own lives over it.
A job seeker rescinded their application after seeing pronouns in the recruiter's email.
As we all know, the job market right now is incredibly difficult and downright cutthroat, especially if you're in an industry like media or tech, where layoffs are incessant.
It only takes a second's glance at social media to find scores of stories from people who've applied to hundreds upon hundreds of jobs and haven't even gotten an interview, and just as many who report having gotten several interviews that went absolutely nowhere.
Now imagine going through all of that, getting to the final stretch, and deciding you'd rather just stay unemployed because someone has pronouns in their email signature. A person who is not only a complete stranger to you but whom, nowadays, you're unlikely to ever even meet in person!
That is, in a word, weird! But that's precisely what a job candidate did — all because they noticed the recruiter had pronouns in her emails.
The job seeker claimed the recruiter and company are 'justifying mental illness' by using pronouns.
"I work for a staffing agency," the recruiter wrote in her post. "The main reason I have pronouns in my signature is because my name is both a male and female name."
As she explained in subsequent comments, she constantly gets emails addressed to "Sir" and "Mr." because of her name. She got sick of it, so she threw her pronouns in her email signature. End of story.
Reddit
Not that it actually matters, because WHO CARES?! What difference does it make whether she's trans, non-binary, or the straightest, most conventional person on Earth? What difference does it make to anyone's life but hers? None.
But this particular job seeker clearly has been primed by propaganda to not only be unable to think for herself — and she is a woman, as confirmed by the recruiter — but to feel that other people's identities are somehow ruining her life and the lives of those around her.
In her email, she wrote, "After seeing that your signature includes pronouns, I've made the quick decision that this company isn't for me, as I don't justify mental illness or play the pronoun game, and I don't want to be involved with a company that does."
Okay, well, you just used pronouns in that sentence four times, but go off.
The obsession with pronouns and gender identity is deeply strange, and if you're one of these people, you need to get a grip.
Listen, I could bloviate at length here about how utterly incorrect the very notion is that pronouns, or the gender identities they sometimes connote, have anything to do with mental illness. I could hit you with a thousand links to scientific studies, medical experts, and gender non-conforming people themselves telling their own stories.
But honestly? There's no reason to bother.
We're now years into this "debate," and the science has long been settled by the scientists, doctors, and mental health professionals who work on the subject for a living. It's also an easily Googlable fact that transgender people only comprise .6% of the population of a country of more than 300 million people. Them somehow being a mass menace isn't even mathematically possible.
So why bother wading into this debate when the debate is so bone-shatteringly stupid. You might as well believe that crime rates are rising because marauding bands of Berkshire pigs are holding up 7-11s coast to coast.
Or, more to the point, you might as well believe doctors are performing "transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison," as your dear leader claims without evidence — not that you should even need evidence for something so brain-meltingly dumb.
The people who believe in the supposed menace of pronouns and transgender people simply don't care about facts any more than they tend to care about the science of the climate change they deny is real as the earth burns down around them. They are only willing to listen to their own biases, and whatever hucksters and politicians (same thing) are willing to reify them. So whatever. Believe what you want.
But being this invested in other people's private lives, identities, and, by extension, genitalia is absolutely bizarre. Being so hung up on other people's lives that you're willing to shoot yourself in the foot over it is not revolutionary. You're not bravely taking a stand. You're making an absolute buffoon of yourself.
A pronoun is just a word, a part of speech. If you think a part of speech can actually hurt you or anyone else, you have much bigger fish to fry.
But there is an upshot to all this insanity. As this recruiter put it in her post, people getting all upset about pronouns may be bizarre and annoying, "but if it weeds out [jerks] like this, that’s an added bonus." Silver linings.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.