‘When our organizational culture shifts to where asking for chosen names and pronouns is the standard practice, it alleviates a heavy burden for persons already marginalized by their gender expression or identity.’  There is no information on the numbers of students on campus who do not identify as the traditional genders, as the university’s official data only recognizes male and female…. After a backlash from critics who called the proposals ‘ridiculous’ and ‘absurd’, the university clarified that nobody would be forced into using the terms.

The University of Tennessee has told its staff and students to stop calling each other ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘him’ and ‘her’ – and to start referring to one another with terms like ‘xe’, ‘zir’ and ‘xyr’ instead.

The Knoxville branch of the public university, which has 27,400 students, sent a memo round to its members filled with unusual new parts of speech to avoid referring to anybody’s gender.

According to a gay rights official at the university, the new language regime will make the university ‘welcoming and inclusive’ and stop people feeling ‘marginalized’.

New regime: Pictured above is a conversion table given to staff and students at the University of Tennessee’s Knoville campus to instruct them in the use of non-gendered pronouns.

The university published the instructions on its website on Wednesday after they were emailed to every member of the university by the institution’s Vice Chancellor for Diversity.

Officials have since insisted the the guidelines are not compulsory and that they do not want to ‘dictate speech’.

Donna Braquet, who runs the university’s Pride Center, wrote the guidelines, which are accompanied with a long table demonstrating how to replace the regular parts of speech.

She also advises staff members not to call roll in class, and to instead greet every student by asking them to announce their name and pronoun of preference.

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Read another article on this topic: Professors threaten bad grades for saying ‘illegal alien,’ ‘male,’ ‘female’

Read an opinion article on this topic: Ze and Zir He Created Them: Gender Revolt in Tennessee

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