Wokewash, and when a "pronoun" is not a pronoun

Some time ago I wrote (here) about a bit of wokery I had (wrongly, as it turned out) spotted in my alumni magazine. I had written to the editor of that organ:

When, on page 20 of issue 93, I saw reference being made to "racialised [sic] minorities" I assumed that a hastily used spellchecker had been allowed to substitute "racialised" for "radicalised".... [But] perhaps in some horrid hyper-woke world people do  actually use the term "racialised" to mean "taught by a racially isolated environment to discriminate on grounds of race"; I hope not, 

The editor, though, put me right. In the world of academe, writers fearing being no-platformed have adopted this mealy-mouthed sort of pussy-footing about possibly contentious issues.  But this disinclination to call a spade a spade (no pun intended; besides I'm not just talking about race) isn't restricted to the world of academe and/or public discourse. 

In this Saturday's edition of The Times...

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(and oh yes, I do still toe the line inscribed (chiselled?) in Hart's Rules, and italicize the The [for the one published in London, that is – the New York Times will have to make do with lower-case roman]; old habits die hard.

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That link is to the 37th edition (brown) ; what's happened in later editions of Hart's Rules (blue) may well be less jingoistic.
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)
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.... an article discussed the relation between wokewash (my word, on the analogy of "greenwash" and "sportswash") and dubious practices, One of the cases it discussed concerned a Halifax campaign, featuring this name-badge:

Last month the Halifax hit the news for a less happy marketing gimmick. Customers were no longer being invited to answer the question, "Who gives you extra?" Nor was there any other question or invitation. Just an assertion, "Pronouns matter", followed by the hashtag "It's a people thing". Below was a photograph of a name badge of a Halifax staff member called "Gemma" with pronouns listed below. In this case "She/her/hers".

A number of customers responded swiftly to the message. As they pointed out, there is no ambiguity about the name "Gemma". Gemma is a woman's name, so adding pronouns to Gemma's badge was, as one customer said, "pathetic virtue-signalling" by a company hoping to hitch on to the end of the tedious Pride-month bandwagon.

Now obviously there are some names that reward this treatment. In an <autobiographical-note /> included here my own name was given a sex-change (when I self-identified as a member of the CU Ladies cricket team). But this bit of virtue-signalling stuck in my craw ... 

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 (As did their use of the term "pronoun". My understanding is broadly the same as this Collins definition:

Quite straightforward: it's something that takes the place of a noun. "She" is a pronoun; the object pronoun "her" is a pronoun; the possessive pronoun "hers" is one too; the possessive adjective "her" is not; and it's this sort of "her" that I detected on that badge. "She"  implies the object pronoun "her", just as "he" implies the object pronoun "him"; so the object pronouns don't need to be stated. Knowing this, I read the Halifax "her" as a possessive adjective. 

But the definition in the Cambridge English Dictionary gets to the inclusive point:

To avoid sexual ambiguity. I like to start a biographical note (such as one I've just written for a literary magazine, but that's another story) Bob Knowles is <yadda-yadda-yadda>. He <yadda-yadda-yadda>... But I have no intention of ever saying (without my tongue IMPALING my cheek) 'My pronouns are "He, him, his"'.
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....That article goes on:

What people will not be focusing on [HD: distracted by the Twitter-storm and associated media kerfuffle, as described in the article] is the fact that Halifax has become yet another one of the high street banks that has decided to retire from the high street.

...This year alone Halifax has closed 27 branches across the country. In other words, while it witters on about the pronouns of an employee called "Gemma" and people become agitated about either this being a great leap forward for humanity or that Gemma could hardly be anything other than a woman, they fail to notice their chances of ever having any interactions with Gemma or any other physical, actual employee of the Halifax. In reality you won't need Gemma's pronouns because a Halifax customer's chances of ever encountering a Gemma diminish every week.

Other things that end up getting covered over include the Halifax's simple poor performance as a bank. For example, its appalling mortgage rates. While the internet was tearing into the Gemma issue, you had to search the financial pages to discover that at the same time the Halifax had once again hiked its mortgage rates, with the lender's 60 per cent LTV remortgage rate rising by almost 300 per cent in a year. Gemma may be better news fodder, but she actually covers over the real stories.

But there's a lot more, about many other money-making enterprises apart from Halifax, in the article, which would repay a read. Its closing lines are worth repeating:

There was a time when people thought Woke Inc was well-meaning at best, naive at worst. But as the saga of Gemma reminds us, when a company advertises its woke credentials, we should assume it is trying to hide something. And then go looking for it.

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