Using 'he/him,' 'she/her' in emails got 2 dorm directors fired at small New York Christian college
The firing of two employees at a religious school in western New York is fanning the culture wars roiling parts of the United States NEW YORK -- Shua Wilmot and Raegan Zelaya, two former dorm directors at a small Christian university in western New York, acknowledge their names are unconventional, which explains why they attached gender identities to their work email signatures. Wilmot uses “he/him.” Zelaya goes by “she/her.” Their former employer, Houghton University, wanted them to drop the identifiers in line with a new policy for email formats implemented in September. Both refused and 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 said in a nearly one-hour video he and Zelaya posted on YouTube shortly after they were let go last month. “If you get an email from me and you don’t know who I am, you might not know how to gender me.” Ongoing culture wars in the U.S. over sexual preferences, ...