Modern life

Agree that it's perfectly fine to address somebody by their name. It's not even relevant what their gender is - why should I care?

In any case, that wouldn't define you - self-identification as male/female now has nothing whatsoever to do with your working parts.

Utterly vulgar Paper and pathetic and childish.

So next up, add a pic of your fanny, just to clarify?

Life was so simple back then. Mr, Mrs or Miss. 100 or more genders! Far too much for my little brain.

a lot of people overseas think wendy is a male name. although they can see i am female .why you got boys name?actually its a girls name.

If you have someone’s name and it wasn’t clear as to sex, then why be so rude as to not start the letter/email Dear Riley Brown? Putting dear sir or madam is quite frankly childish in that situation. Pathetic

Absolutely kittylister why do I SO often agree with your common sense approach to the daft world we now live in. More power to your elbow you wise woman you (I expect that will be considered patronising)

I rather like it and will use it on all of my work correspondence from now on.

I would start ‘Dear Sir or madam’ if not sure but, was actually taught to assume male if not evident and write ’Dear sir’. (Yes, that was back in the fifties.) Maybe the company has an instruction to their staff to add that to the signature.
I agree with those who prefer the addition of a title in brackets after the signature but, does that still work in these days of multiple genders?

I suppose there are a lot of names these days that could be either male or female. A few that I've heard of that spring to mind are Ryley, Kendal and Dearden. If I saw those names at the end of a letter I wouldnt be sure if they were male or female. So if I had to follow something up and refer to that person, I wouldn't know whether to say he or she. So I suppose it sorts that issue out and nobody is offended.

The pronouns are nothing to do with how you address people sarah it’s about how you refer to them when a pronoun would be used.

Why is it important anyway what your gender is? In this day and age it should not matter.

I wonder who thought that that one up?Why not address correspondence to who ever puts their name to the letter they are sending ie John Smith /Mary Smith and let them sort out who they want to be.

Agree Saggi

More and more names seem to be gender neutral these days.... my grandson is a Riley....but I’ve heard it attached to more girls than boys. If I find the need to write to anyone I just use their name and no title. So: John Smith ...of such and such address.... do we need titles.

Yes - it’s easy to be polite even if we think someone is being daft in situations like this. Why wouldn’t we be? I save my ire for gender nonsense that impacts women and their rights to safety, dignity and privacy.

Baggs in many work places you have to comply with the officialnworkplace style.

And to a pp, the "Dear Margaret Smith" was the official "house style" at one of my jobs back in the 1980s!

A friend said they started this at her workplace. Another addition was to use "they" in emails rather than he/she/him/her which led to all sorts of grammatical issues and tortuous sentences.

If you’re replying to an email and unsure of gender or pronoun just start with ‘Good morning/afternoon, thank you for your recent email ....’ perhaps?

The pronoun is not really about how you address them in a letter/ email = that’s easy - but about how you would refer to them when a pronoun is used. I generally use their full name if it’s given eg Dear Margaret Smith - with emails just first names are quite commonly used now

Or you could reply, with To whom it may concern. No gender no names. That used to be used.

I agree lemon. The power and influence of the self id gender group is out of all proportion to its numbers.

Jane10 Certainly this example is just ‘woke’ but is presumably how their HR dept has instructed staff to sign off letters.Covering their arses in case anyone complains!

The gender thing isn’t a load of tosh hen in general, even if it might bbecin this particular example.