In a move that has been widely criticized, NASA leaders recently terminated a test project that allowed employees at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center to display pronouns in their official agency identifiers.
In a move that has been widely criticized, NASA leaders recently terminated a test project that allowed employees at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center to display pronouns in their official agency identifiers. The decision affected more than 100 employees who saw their stated pronouns vanish from communication platforms.
“Unfortunately, as a nonbinary person in astronomy, [this decision] doesn’t seem bizarre to me at all,” says Lucianne Walkowicz, an astronomer at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium and co-founder of the JustSpace Alliance. “Because trans and gender nonconforming people experience high rates of harassment, assault and other forms of violence, each moment we have to assert our identities carries risk.
Driven by word of mouth, rather than any official encouragement, over a month or so, more than 100 GSFC employees added pronouns to their identifiers. And, a Goddard employee adds, participants were told that the tech demo would pave the way for an official pilot program at GSFC and perhaps even be deployed agency-wide.
Shih later elaborated in a conversation with Scientific American. “The intention wasn’t to trivialize the huge importance of gender pronouns for the LGBTQ+ population,” he says. “And unfortunately, communication wasn’t obviously as effective as we would like. I think people got the impression that we were trying to trivialize the whole focus on gender pronouns. That was not the intent at all, certainly not trying to equate gender pronouns on the same level as sports teams.
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