I work for a large, hyper-woke tech company. I had no intention of working for such a company; instead, a company I did take a job with was acquired by this other company.

This company, like many West Coast companies in the US, injects the politics of the progressive left into every aspect of its operation, touting the principles of DEIJ (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice). Whatever your feelings about these sorts of initiatives, it is under those auspices that gender ideology has taken a firm hold in many workplaces.

Acceptance that a man can become a woman is normalized by implicitly comparing the opposite belief (namely, that sex is immutable) to believing in categorical racial differences. It does this through aligning the minority (read: victim) status of racial groups with that of trans-identified men. If this seems preposterous, it is nevertheless effective, as it enables activists to take advantage of the severe social stigma against racism and co-opt it into a full-throated defense of the nonsense that “transwomen are women”. (It also explains why so many gender-critical voices are accused of “white feminism”.)

Do they know they are endorsing the beliefs of a movement whose purpose is to take away legal safeguards from women, such as the right to single-sex spaces and single-sex sports? If they do know, do they care? Maybe they figure it’s easier to go along to get along, lest they, too, be attacked.

In any given company, it is difficult to tell how much of this takeover is top-down versus bottom-up. It probably doesn’t take more than one or two loud voices on the subject to cow a company into cooperation, given the appetite for social media pile-ons.

Duly, our CEO issued a statement in support of the Trans Day of Remembrance in October. As you might expect, pronouns are very popular. The virtue signaling on this issue is such that many people, rather than simply including their pronouns in the places in profiles designated for this purpose, include them along with their names. As I work remotely, this results in my staring at pronouns all day long. I have to say, this drives me mad—especially when men throw on a (he/him) after their names. Do they know they are endorsing the beliefs of a movement whose purpose is to take away legal safeguards from women, such as the right to single-sex spaces and single-sex sports? If they do know, do they care? Maybe they figure it’s easier to go along to get along, lest they, too, be attacked.

Despite the atmosphere of conformity, I decided I needed to speak up. Given that I, like most adults, have to work, I decided that I didn’t want to work at a company in constant fear that my dissent would be discovered and possibly punished. Putting myself on the record at the beginning would settle the matter: either I’d be fine or I’d be in trouble, but at least I’d know which. I want to be clear that when I say I wanted to put my dissent on the record, I do not mean that I desired to evangelize radical feminism at work. Rather, my goal is to take ideology and activism out of the workplace, where it doesn’t belong. Disagreements on political and social issues among employees should be expected as a matter of course; accordingly, companies should avoid explicitly endorsing any ideology short of the accepted norms of workplace manners. (According to which, I’d be fine using anyone’s preferred pronouns.)

In my letter to the CEO, I did not mince words. I was explicit about disagreeing with gender ideology and stated unequivocally that I believed its promotion in the workplace was equivalent to a company promoting a specific religion. I also gave several specific examples of activist behavior in a public Slack channel and why I believed that such behavior is inappropriate. I also provided a vision (which I acknowledged was just that, fantasy) of what a company that accommodated the specification of pronouns but did not actively promote gender ideology.

Finally, I provided a few resources, specifically a link to Helen Joyce being interviewed about her book, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality. I will include here the quote from that interview that I also included in the letter:

And I think you can't ignore the fact that it's men who want this. Nobody gives a shit about women is the thing that I've learned in the past few years, they really, really, really don't. And you know, formally, this is a symmetric thing: men can identify as women, and women can identify as men—we only ever hear about the trans women, and they're men, so we only ever hear about male people who want access to things that they're not actually entitled to.
- Helen Joyce

As radical feminists, we know all too well that, in the large, “no one gives a shit about women”. That is why it is so vital that everyone with the will and the means to express dissent about gender ideology do so—in every place that matters to her.

I have to confess it felt good to express my genuine disappointment and anger—albeit in very civil language. I wasn’t expecting anything to change as a result of my letter; indeed, given that anything written can be subject to discovery in a lawsuit, I assumed that my email would not even receive a reply. And indeed, that is what happened: nothing. And yet, something did happen. The most important question that I’d raised in the letter was answered, albeit by silence: I could in fact remain in my job despite going on the record as a dissenter. This has given me the confidence to use my profiles at work to express, instead of pronouns, my stance as a Proud Gender Atheist.

It is strange and somewhat sad that radical feminism has to spend so much time fighting what is a rear-guard action: literally fighting for the definition of woman as an adult human female.

If this does not seem a large-scale victory, we need to put it in perspective. Maya Forstater is still fighting in UK courts three years after losing her job for expressing dissent against gender ideology. Just this month, Jennifer Sey resigned from her position as Brand President of Levi’s because her advocacy as a private citizen against school closures during COVID ran counter to the woke mob. Trans rights activists and the progressives they have co-opted into blindly supporting them are making it clear that the stakes for expressing dissent are very high indeed. But that is the reason that we need anyone and everyone who does not want this ideology to become the unquestionable status quo to raise her (or his!) voice now.

It is strange and somewhat sad that radical feminism has to spend so much time fighting what is a rear-guard action: literally fighting for the definition of woman as an adult human female. And yet, if we do not win this fight, all other fights will be forever unwinnable as they will simply be moot.

If you can, speak up. Even at work.

~Anonymous

Letters from the Front: Women's Free Speech