Pronouns on Zoom Calls
Zoom names are the modern-day name-tags!
A few years ago, if you’d written that your name was “John Doe (he/him)”, people would look at you like you were crazy. A few years ago, if you’d asked what someone’s preferred pronouns were, he or she (because we were taught to write “he or she”, not “they”) would look at you like you’d checked out early from the asylum. But we live in a quickly-changing world — and, fortunately, the obscurity of the question “What are your pronouns?” is one of the things that’s quickly changing.
It’s changing to the point where — these days — many people display their pronouns publically (in their email footer, for example). Furthermore, this isn’t just members of the trans* community. These days, countless cisgender people include their pronouns as part of their digital signature.
So what’s a “digital signature”? It’s a short piece of text that identifies you, usually your full name (including any titles, like “M.D.”) and sometimes your contact info, or other info about you. And they’ve become ubiquitous! Here’s my theory about it: no one much used them until companies started to take advantage of that space, defaulting to their trademarks unless you changed it. Then, I think, people changed it. And rather than delete the trademarks and leave nothing…
