Dear Council colleagues,

I’m passing on a request from a junior scholar. I wholeheartedly support this person’s desire for a “Mx” option in ConfTool. Dr. and Prof are great gender-neutral options for people with PhDs and/or academic appointments but non-binary folks without those privileges don’t have an option that reflects their identity.

I'm very pleased to hear about your goals to make TEI more gender-inclusive. On that note, I'm not sure how involved you are with the Newcastle conference, but when I was submitting my abstract it required an honorific and only gave Ms, Mr, Dr, and Prof as options. I had the same issue with the same conference tool when submitting to SHARP for this year, but they were able to add a custom option after I asked about it. It would be great if Mx was an option going forward! I only bring this up to you now because you mentioned gender inclusivity as a goal of TEI.

Can we leave an action item for the next program committee, so they are prompted to add a custom non-binary option to our deployment of ConfTool?

Since conference registration is happening now, it might be nice to do it for this year, if it’s possible.

With good wishes,

Janelle

Janelle Jenstad (she/her)

Professor, Department of English, University of Victoria

Traditional territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən peoples – the Songhees, Esquimalt and W̱SÁNEĆ

Co-Coordinating Editor, Digital Renaissance Editions, the New Internet Shakespeare Editions, and the MoEML Mayoral Shows Anthology

Director, Map of Early Modern London; Director, Linked Early Modern Drama Online

Co-Applicant, The Endings Project

Email: jenstad@uvic.ca, lemdo@uvic.ca, or london@uvic.ca