14Esther McVey

The Northern Powerhouse

WHAT is this current obsession with gender identity and announcing your pronouns to the world? Why does your name badge need she/her, he/ him, they/them? Isn’t my name sufficient? I thought we had spent the last five decades fighting for colour blindness and getting rid of prejudice, of valuing individualism and for taking people as we find them? Removing labels was surely part of that process.

So how have we now got to a place where people are freer than any generation that has gone before to be who they are – free of other people’s labels – only to choose to put labels on ourselves? Is that not a retrograde step, a new way to find division under the guise of openness? Wearing a pronoun with pride is a new way to ferment division, to find a new them and us.

Identity politics is divisive. It is a form of outing or putting under pressure those who’d rather not say, a way of putting barriers back up that had been taken down.

This isn’t liberating; it is just a political campaign to open up a new division.

As I have a live-and-let-live attitude, what is it to me if someone wants to put their pronouns at the end of their email, or underneath their name on a badge? Feel free.

But I have a bit of news for those who believe this is the cutting edge of trendsetting – using pronouns isn’t new. Chaucer got there first in The Canterbury Tales. He used the singular “they” although their use at the time wasn’t necessary to define people outside their gender binary, but they were used.

However, with this creeping pronoun pronouncement, a new intolerance is born. If you don’t wear your pronouns with pride, you have managed to become defensive and offensive at the same time.

Worse still, some organisations are unacceptably forcing all their staff to display their pronoun on emails and name badges.

I would prefer to wear a badge with just my name on it. That is who I am. You don’t need to call me “she” or “her”... just Esther. That shouldn’t confuse, harm or upset anyone. It is my name.

To paraphrase the catchphrase from the cult classic TV series The Prisoner: “I am not a pronoun, I am a free woman.”

THIS week marked the 37th anniversary of the Bradford City disaster when 56 people died after a wooden stand caught fire during the final game of the season against Lincoln City. It provides an unshakable bond between Bradford and Liverpool, coming just four years before 97 Liverpool fans died in the Hillsborough disaster. Neither city will ever forget the people who went to a football match and didn’t make it home – something that should never happen.