Avoid hiring or getting involved with the pronoun people

What's a pronoun person?

My favorite definition to date is:

Pronoun people

People who insist on displaying
— (a) authentic pronouns ("she" / "her" for a woman),
— (b) fantasy pronouns ("they" / "zir"), or
— (c) gaslight pronouns ("she" for a man)
next to their name.

Why should you avoid them?

To avoid trouble for yourself, your project and your company.

The problem with the gaslight / fantasy pronoun people

People who insist on made-up pronouns, as well as those who impersonate the other sex and insist on gaslighting you with pronouns, tend to have a high incidence of mental illness.  They often mutilate their genitals and take sex drugs (we will completely skip discussing their sex habits here).   Types of mental illness that tend to affect these people are malignant narcissism and histrionic personality disorders.  Their suicidality rate is the highest among all groups studied by psychology.

As employees or project contributors, they may start off strong, and even be productive or helpful for a while.  But individuals that fit this profile  tend to be extremely manipulative and will not hesitate to unleash their malice on others they have unilaterally decided to be "threats".  You should expect that they will eventually agitate and harangue other employees that refuse to kowtow to their unreasonable demands.  As they often can't stand if their colleagues refuse to participate in their self-delusion, they'll quickly jump to insulting their colleagues with the standard transphobe¹ smear.  They can often have hair-trigger sensibilities and act offended at / find imaginary fault with the most innocuous of your personnel's comments; this will be used to manipulate you constantly.  Eventually these incidents will grow into perpetual gaslighting of your workforce into meeting their cockamamie demands.

These efforts, by the way, will be called "improving your corporate culture", or "diversity efforts", or some other such idiotic euphemism.  If you don't play along, don't walk on eggshells, don't acquiesce to such demands, they certainly have the option of suing you for "discrimination" and "hostile workplace" bullshit.  They may also decide to publicly vilify your business, and your good name, to exact revenge on you for your crime of not obeying their demands.  Many decent people's lives have been ruined this way.

If you fire them, they can easily sue you.  And (contemporary law itself being a mad house that favors lunatics) they might win!  But even if they don't win, it'll cost you dearly.

While all this is happening, your best performers will leave you and go work somewhere else or take a long vacay.  Face it: smart people don't want to work with crazy, unreasonable, mental cases.  Would you?

Ask yourself: do you want to work with crazies?  Do you want to be there to deal with their bullshit?  Do you want to be sued?  No!  To maximize this outcome, you need productive, stable colleagues and employees.

In sum: you don't have the obligation to be a psychiatrist, a charity, or a Communist vanguard front for any crazy person.  You have a business or project to run.  Get the best people you can get.

The (lesser) problem of the authentic pronoun people

People who insist on displaying pronouns that reflect their actual sex are much less likely to be crazy.

They still pose a danger to your firm or project.

Pronoun display is highly correlated with holding the same set of lunatic beliefs that enable the fantasy pronoun people to be so destructive.  After all, if you didn't believe in the dogma of "there are more than two genders", you would feel zero need to voluntarily remind people of what they can plainly see when they see your face.

This type of person can raise the same hell for you that a fantasy pronoun person can.

But perhaps there is another motive to display the sacred pronouns?  Perhaps social conformity, desire to signal beliefs, or insecurity, are possible reasons?

Let me ask you: Do you want to employ conformists who adopt any moral fashion no matter how idiotic?  Do you want to employ political zealots?

Best not to rattle that bees' nest, don't you think?

How to avoid being trapped by pronoun people

Here are a few tips to avoid them like the plague they are:

• They're so obnoxious about the pronoun thing, they'll volunteer that information without being asked — in their résumés!
  • Throw such résumés in the trash.
• They'll often be signed up for a Github, or something else akin to a professional social network, like Mastodon.
  • Check their profiles out!
  • Red flags: "code of conduct" contributions; discussions where they angrily demand "respect" (obedience) for to their sociopolitical delusions; displays and revelations of their sexual fetishes.
• If HR / hiring overlooked any of the abovementioned red flags, offer them the same interview you'd over to anyone else, but decline to make an offer.
  • If asked why, make up some plausible excuse like "culture fit".
  • Under no circumstance tell them anything they could remotely use to punish your firm in court.

Stay away from the crazy if you don't want the crazy to make you crazy.