Raegan Zelaya and Shua Wilmot, residence hall directors at Houghton University, were fired from their positions, after they put “she/her” and “he/him” in their signatures. Alumni are criticising a small New York Christian university for firing two employees who refused to remove gender pronouns from their email signatures. In April, Raegan Zelaya and Shua Wilmot, residence hall directors at Houghton University, were fired from their positions, after they put “she/her” and “he/him” on their emails. In a widely-circulated termination letter to Ms Zelaya, the school wrote that it fired her shortly before the end of the semester “as a result of your refusal to remove pronouns in your email signature” and because she criticised the decision in the student newspaper. Mr Wilmot said he was also accused of making a “threat” towards the general superintendent of the Wesleyan Church. The university is affiliated with the conservative branch of the Methodist Church. Mr Wilmot had written what he described as a “constructive letter” to Superintendent Wayne Schmidt about the church’s views on gender identity and expression, saying they were outdated and problematic. A spokesperson for the university told The New York Times this week that the school “has never terminated an employment relationship based solely on the use of pronouns in staff email signatures”. “Over the past years, we’ve required anything extraneous be removed from email signatures, including Scripture quotes,” a spokesperson said. In a video last month explaining the incident, the ex-residence hall directors, neither of whom is transgender, said their decision to put pronouns in emails was meant both as a gesture of inclusivity, and because people often weren’t able to tell their genders from their first names over email.
via independent: College workers fired for including their pronouns in emails
siehe auch: A University Fired 2 Employees for Including Their Pronouns in Emails The firings set off a debate at Houghton University, a small Christian institution in western New York, which said its decision was not based only on the pronoun listings. When Raegan Zelaya and Shua Wilmot decided to include their pronouns at the end of their work emails, they thought they were doing a good thing: following what they viewed as an emerging professional standard, and also sending a message of inclusivity at the Christian university where they worked. But their bosses at Houghton University, in upstate New York, saw the matter very differently. Administrators at Houghton, which was founded and is now owned by a conservative branch of the Methodist Church, asked Ms. Zelaya and Mr. Wilmot, two residence hall directors, to remove the words “she/her” and “he/him” from their email signatures, saying they violated a new policy. When they refused to do so, both employees were fired, just weeks before the end of the semester. Houghton’s firing of the two staff members has dismayed some of its alumni, nearly 600 of whom signed a petition in protest. And it comes as gender and sexuality have become major fault lines in an increasingly divided nation, and after other faith-based organizations, including Yeshiva University in Manhattan, have argued that First Amendment protections of religious freedom allow them to treat gay and transgender people differently than others.
