Elderly Woman Fired From Volunteer Position After Asking What Pronouns Meant

An elderly California woman claims she was “fired” from her volunteer position of 60 years after she asked what pronouns meant.

Reporting from The New York Post:

Fran Itkoff, the 90-year-old leader of the Lakewood/Long Beach Self-Help Group, was told her organization would no longer be affiliated with the National MS Society after her “failure to abide by our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion guidelines.”

Itkoff, who has won multiple awards for her and her husband’s work with the organization, became confused one day after she saw several people sign their emails and letters with their names along with their chosen pronouns.

“I was confused, I didn’t know what it was, what it meant,” Itkoff told the social media account Libs of TikTok. “I’ve seen it on a couple of letters that had come in after the person’s name they had the pronouns, but I didn’t know what that meant.”

Itkoff was confused about how the “she/her” pronouns could be labeled as “all-inclusive” if it was referring to females and not males.

A few days after the conversation, on a Friday at 4:58 p.m. Itkoff received her “pink slip.”

“At the end of the day, end of the week, I got an email from her saying ‘they were sorry, but they had to ask me to step down as a volunteer for the MS society,” Itkoff claimed.

“The verbiage she said was you didn’t abide by their diversity, equity and inclusion, so they had to ask her to step down and she can’t be a part of the MS society as a volunteer.” Itkoff’s daughter Elle Hamilton said.