The Australian Christian Lobby wants all levels of government to ban the practice of stating preferred pronouns on email signatures.

The religious lobby group is up in arms over news that the City of Melbourne is following in the footsteps of thousands of inclusive organisations around the world who allow staff to add a simple message about how they prefer to be addressed.

The conservative group say the practice weaponises emails turning them into tools of political correctness that may leave the local government authority open to future litigation.

“The Australian Christian Lobby is very concerned at Melbourne City Council’s promotion of LGBTI political correctness, including the use of ‘they’ as a required pronoun in staff emails.”

“This new process will compel the use of declared pronouns in reply emails or phone calls, marginalising those who adhere to the biological truth of male and female,” the ACL’s Victorian spokesperson Mrs Jasmine Yuen said today.

The lobby groups said by allowing gender labels the council was not being inclusive of those who were opposed to them.

“The ACL call on all levels of government to be inclusive – not selective – by respecting the majority of the wider community who are on the side of biology and assert that humans are born either male or female,” Mrs Yuen said.

A spokesperson for the council said there was no compulsory policy and it was up to staff how they wished to be addressed.

“The City of Melbourne considers the use of pronouns in email signatures a matter of personal choice,’’ a spokeswoman said.

“We fully support staff choosing to use personal pronouns in email signatures, however, there is no requirement to do so.

“The use of pronouns is listed as optional in our corporate email signature guidelines,” the spokesperson said.

The council said it strives to be inclusive of the LGBTI community and asked staff to be committed to “speaking out and acting against homophobia, biphobia, intersexism and transphobia” regardless of their own sexuality.

Graeme Watson
he / him / his

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