"No one in our company openly mocks pronouns, but a cis, straight Hispanic female colleague offers that her pronouns are 'She/Her/Ella.'"

"... She is using pronouns to further her own personal branding.... This is an appropriation of a space that queer and trans people won so their most basic identity could be appropriately recognized at work. There are other venues in which to be proud of one’s cultural heritage. This colleague leverages identifying pronouns for her own benefit, diluting the concept for everyone else. Ethically speaking, is it OK for her to use pronouns this way?"

This is a question sent to the NYT work advice editor Roxane Gay by a man who calls himself "a queer person of relative privilege (white, gay, male, senior in the organization)."

The column is titled "It’s Not OK to Police Co-Workers’ Pronouns/Even if you think they’re using their identities for personal branding."

You might mistake "Ella" for the Hispanic colleague's name, but you can tell from the context that it's the Spanish pronoun "ella." That is, she's using the convention of announcing your pronouns to announce her ethnic identity.

The man wrote in, all sensitive, as though he's going to defend the "space" that he sees as belonging to queer and trans people, but he gets he told he's the one transgressing. Gay advises the letter writer to do "some deep, thoughtful reading about intersectionality" and figure out why this bothers him so much, "why you feel you should dictate how someone else uses their pronouns and why you assume that for queer and transgender people, their pronouns represent their most basic identity."