Gendered language is increasingly controversial in public life. Christians are grappling with how to engage.
Shua Wilmot and Raegan Zelaya worked in residence life at Houghton University, a Christian school in upstate New York. Even though it conflicted with university policy, they listed their pronouns in their email signatures to help students identify their genders, they said, given their atypical names. When the university requested they remove their pronouns earlier this year, Wilmot and Zelaya refused. They were fired.
“My name is Shua. It’s an unusual name. And it ends with a vowel, a, that is traditionally feminine in many languages,” Wilmot, whose full first name is Joshua, said in a YouTube interview. “If you get an email from me and you don’t know who I am, you might not know how to gender me.”
Zelaya added in the same interview that she felt removing her pronouns from her email signature would imply that “the students who felt safe by me doing that, the students that felt seen by me doing that” weren’t worth “taking this risk and this stance.”
Furthermore, as Wilmot told ABC News, his views regarding gender and identity do not fully align with the theology of the Wesleyan Church, the sponsoring denomination of Houghton University.
The university denied in statements to the press that anyone was fired solely over pronoun usage, adding that its policy required any “extraneous items” be removed from email signatures, including Scripture references.
Houghton president Wayne D. Lewis Jr. told CT, “The ideas that one’s pronouns are preferred, subject to change, and may be inconsistent with one’s biological sex are inconsistent with the beliefs of Houghton University. … We believe the assignment of one’s sex and gender is …