Yeah that was my thoughts as well. Whenever I go into the office I have gender pronoun pin on. Just wondering about emails.
But I don’t think my agency is ready for that stuff anyways. It’s just something to think about, but makes sense about gender discrimination. But if I were a person that goes by anything other than he/him or she/her, I would probably want something like that. Who knows?
My work uses Skype and I can totally put my pronouns there. I always do messages there a lot to let people know whether or not they can IM me. I also leave silly comments here and there that are w/in work standards, for most part.
I’m not bold enough to do this but my boss is. In your profile in slack there’s a what you do field. While I’ve put System Administrator. My boss has put “There’s no place like 127.0.0.1!” Since you can put whatever you like that seems as good a place as any.
I’m always worried about screwing up pronouns… Especially in the case of someone who I knew by one pronoun at one point prior to changing their presentation and I reflexively use their prior pronouns… Of course, I am extremely apologetic about it when I do screw up… but I can’t help but feel guilty afterwards.
I think that if they’re your friends and reasonable people they will understand that a change in habit is not instantaneous and slip ups occur. The fact that you feel bad about it is evidence enough that you truly care and respect them. I have friends who went from he/him to they/them and from she/her to he/him and I have screwed up on occasion. We’re human, it happens.
At least our first and second person pronouns have been neutral for effectively forever. Face-to-face conversations that don’t involve third parties can often be a lot easier, and the two people can bring up pronouns if and when it’s appropriate without having to make a judgement call in advance.