I screwed up today, friends. In a major way. I misgendered a child at work. I am profoundly disappointed in myself. Here's what happened: a man came in with his kid, who had shoulder-length hair and was wearing brown corduroys and one of the shirts we sell as a boy's T-shirt. They went to the boy's swimwear section and started shopping. The kid didn't really say anything, and spent most of the time climbing around on our shelves and so forth. I assumed this child was a boy, and I was wrong! It seems that despite all my desire to revolutionize the way we treat gender in our society, and my recognition that this needs to begin and end with how we treat children, sometimes I am part of the problem. Despite my frequent frustration that we even divide our clothes into "boys" and "girls" at all, I went ahead and assumed that a child wearing a T-shirt we market to boys was, indeed, a boy.
Now, the reason why I acted this way is simple: I wasn't thinking. When I'm at home in the comfort of my room, browsing the internet, in class, etc. I usually have the presence of mind to have things like gender identity and sensitivity with labeling at the forefront of my thoughts. When I'm at work, I go to a different place. I'm more concerned with maintaining a smooth (and this usually means superficial) shopping experience with customers. This means I'm not really going to go around asking everyone their preferred gender pronouns, even though I recognize that I would do that in the ideal world that I'd like to think I'm helping to make. Everyone would do it, and it would be normal! But when I'm at work, I find myself conforming to the present-day definition of normal, even if I don't particularly like it. Now, obviously, if a child takes the initiative to seek out clothes of the "other gender," I'm happy to help. When I made the mistake of using "he" to refer to the girl at the store today, I instantly apologized to her and her father and made it clear that I would be happy to help them pick out clothes of any sort.
As you all know, I'm a bit of a dreamer, so long before today I thought up a solution for this problem, set in the future where I have my own children's clothing store. In this store, every employee is trained to ask customers for their PGPs right off the bat and explain the term for those who don't know it, and obviously none of our clothes are divided by gender. Au contraire, our sections are grouped by color schemes, patterns, styles, etc. Skirts all mixed up with pants and dresses and vests and shirts and so forth, with no one telling anyone what they should or shouldn't be wearing. Where the store I work now has little cards at the register explaining our sizes and return policy, or offering cutesy little phrases in Swedish, my pipe-dream store's cards will have glossaries of important LGBT* terms, links to local support groups and family resources, and so forth.
So I don't know. I think my head's in the right place, but sometimes in the heat of the retail-industry moment, I play the part of an ignorant pawn of tired stereotypes.What do you folks think? Have you encountered similar customer-service dilemmas? Do you find yourself playing an uncomfortable role when you deal with the presumed "normal people" who you interact with? Is there a way to reconcile radical thought with comforting, unobjectionable customer sweet-talk? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this!
My own errors in this area are unrelated to retail, but tend to crop up occasionally in daily life. The issue for me, I think, is when I recognize that someone I'm interacting with wishes to be addressed differently, I don't pay enough attention to being aware of my words. I make a point of not letting someone's gender choices influence how I treat them as much as possible, so I try to focus on what we're talking about and getting to know him/her/... rather than his/her/... appearance or differences. Unfortunately, this means that sometimes I just use the pronouns that my brain auto-fills as it has been trained to by society and I get them wrong. I forget that I'm supposed to be paying attention to that sort of thing. I always feel really bad about it, but sometimes it still happens and I'm not sure how to counter it.
ReplyDeleteI totally understand where you're coming from. We're taught to make all kinds of assignations and assumptions when it comes to folks gender identity and gender presentation. And that can be REALLY hard to turn off or adjust, especially when we're on autopilot. (Because, let's face it. We all go on autopilot sometimes. At work. At home. In class. During a jog. We all do it sometimes.) Changing the way we act when we're on autopilot requires changing the way we make meaning of the world in a really fundamental way, which takes a lot of conscious work that necessarily starts when we're not on autopilot. You've clearly started that work, so I wouldn't beat yourself up about slipping up. It happens to all of us.
ReplyDeleteAs for how I negotiate my radical views on gender with wanting to provide a comfortable space for others (as a teacher, as an office assistant, out in public, wherever), I take a slightly different approach than you. I frequently try not to ask people their preferred gender pronouns in highly public settings. And I generally try not to ask strangers for theirs. It's not that I think they're not important, but rather that I don't want to put someone in a position where they feel any need to out or explain themselves. For me, it's a matter of respecting their privacy/safety. But, like you, I'm still incredibly committed to not assigning a gender to other folks based on my assumptions. So the approach I've been trying to take is to restructure my speech so that I don't have to use gendered prounouns at all, or just use "they"/"them". It's partly out of a desire to not put folks in an uncomfortable situation, and partly a conscious rejection of the idea that I need to know anything about someone's gender identity in order to interact with them. I'll obviously respect any pronouns that someone asks me to use, but I'm trying to stop making assumptions.
That being said, I've got a long way to go before this becomes second-nature to me. But I am working on it.
I definitely like the tactic of not using gendered pronouns when you can avoid it. I think I need to start retraining myself to use "they" more often in casual conversation. I was such a grammar pedant for so long that it still tastes a little funny, but I think I can swing it. One thing I do try to do while working is to greet people without saying "sir" or "ma'am" or anything like that, or referring to people as "folks" instead of "ladies," etc. It's amazing how aware one has to be to slip out of assuming gender.
DeleteWhile your heart is in the right place, I, for one, do not think the retail setting is somewhere that opening with the question "what is your preferred gender pronoun?" would go over well until it is accepted as a question you ask people whenever you meet them. When I shop, I'm not looking for a relationship with the store employee, I'm looking for flattering pants that are work-appropriate and have functional pockets, so being chatted up is somewhere between irrelevant and invasive (depending on the situation). I would rather be asked if there's anything they can help me find.
ReplyDeleteI think, from your description, you handled the situation just the right way; you apologized and offered to help them find whatever clothes they wanted. Most people think their own gender is obvious, as a short-haired 6-year-old in shorts and t-shirts, I sure did, and thought it crazy that other people didn't know I was a girl. My point here is that until PGPs become the norm, many people will expect that everyone can just tell, and find the question weird (and sometimes offensive, if it implies to them that you think they are performing their gender wrong).
Your ideal shop sounds pretty cute, and having items grouped by color scheme first and then by type of garment makes a lot of sense for ease of mixing and matching.
Yeah, I definitely don't envision PGPs making their way into the standard retail greeting anytime soon. We'll see what kind of world we live in when I have my own store. Incidentally, we already tend to group a lot of our clothes by matchability - we call them "color stories," which I think is an adorable term.
DeleteA lack of mindfulness (in this case about making assumptions based on presentation) is indeed something worth working on.
ReplyDeleteFor me the linchpin of my issues with gender is when qualities that should stay purely "descriptive," as in, reflective of the facts of the matter and useful for conveying information about those facts, transition into the "prescriptive," as in, standards imposed on what members of the genders SHOULD be like. I don't mind statements like, "Women tend to have less body hair than men," but I take HUGE EXCEPTION to statements like, "Women should have less body hair than men." Or even, "More women like to wear skirts than men," but not "Women should like to wear skirts more than men." So that worldview, while you may have made a mistake in the "descriptive" arena, you behaved perfectly when it come to the "prescriptive" issue-- that is, you applied no prescriptions at all, and let the child assert for herself what she was. In my mind, that's what really counts.
And really, is it the worst thing ever for someone to mistake her for a different gender? I think it's no more insulting than it is to mistake someone for a sci fi fan when they're really only into fantasy-- one is just as good, value-wise, as the other, it's just an issue of factual accuracy, an easy thing to correct.
Well, the problem is that it's nigh-impossible to communicate a prescription/description distinction in everyday conversation. While I may not have said this explicitly, I think my assumption (especially in the context of assumptions other people probably make about this kid all the time, judging from her father's reaction) signaled to the child that "girls should not dress the way you do." My apology and continued help after being corrected was my attempt to send a new signal: "It's totally fine for you to dress this way and it doesn't need to impact your gender identity."
DeleteIn this particular instance, I can't really say how she felt about being incorrectly identified as a boy. In fact, I don't even know if that's how she would identify, if she had her druthers! She didn't talk much, and it was her father who told me she was a girl. That being said, I think gender is a much more central part of someone's identity than what genres of fiction you like - or at the very least, we're socialized to hold it as much more integral. While it might not be a big deal to briefly assume that a kid in boy's clothing were a boy, what if it were the other way around? What if this were a kid who was "born a girl" and assigned that gender, but was dressing like a boy because he wanted to identify as such, and I referred to him with female pronouns? That might hurt a whole lot, and is really the sort of situation that I'm more wary about when I'm training myself to not assume gender identities.
I get mistaken for a boy relatively often, and I don't really mind. I know that when I don't wear makeup and don't do my hair I conform to a lot of people's conception of "boy" if they don't look too closely. I think it's kind of funny, actually. It bothers me more when people assume I'm a little kid, because then I know they're not really looking at me and not making any effort.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I'm usually pretty careful about referring to people's gender and stuff, although I make mistakes sometimes too. Recently at work, I was checking someone's ID (for a credit card transaction), and the person in the picture had long hair and looked like a woman while the person in front of me had short hair and looked like a teenage boy. I of all people shouldn't have fallen prey to that mistake, but we're always a little on edge about credit card fraud and people bring in other people's cards and IDs all the time, so I kind of jumped the gun and told the person that the credit card holder had to be present, and they said, "That's me." I looked at the ID again, and yeah it was her. I was really embarrassed, because even though I hadn't said anything about gender, I was pretty sure she knew that I thought she was a boy. So I apologized and said I didn't look carefully enough and she was fine with it. I was really kicking myself, though, because my ID has long hair too, and the same thing could easily have happened to me.
I think eventually, as people of non-obvious gender become more and more common, we as a society will start retraining our brains not to categorize so quickly and this will be less of a problem. Right now, though, gender is one of the things that we tend to assume should be obvious at first glance, and so our brains automatically add up all the data they observe about a person and make a snap judgement about what gender category they must fit in. (Race is often the same way, incidentally, which is why being mixed or being of a non-obvious race prevents interesting and unique little problems.) Maybe one day we'll all start seeing gender as a less obvious (and less important) aspect of a person, and we'll be slower to jump to conclusions about it.
We had an LGBT awareness lecture in PA school. We were discussing asking every new patient how they would like to be identified, and that we should explain to everyone that we ask that question to all patients to avoid offending people. Except I don't think that's enough to avoid offending people. In an ideal world, we'd all be open minded and educated on LGBT issues. (And we wouldn't just be asking new patients- what if someone's identity has changed since we last met them.) In the real world, people find the notion that you cannot tell what gender they are by looking extremely offensive, and opening a new patient-medical practitioner relationship by offending someone is terrible idea. Especially if they're not a new patient- I've had patient get extremely irritable when I ask them "do you have any allergies?" and the response was "isn't that already in my chart?"
ReplyDeleteI applaud your idea for the store. Culture isn't going to change (not quickly, anyway) if someone doesn't put in effort to make something the new norm. I just find it difficult to picture this store attracting a large enough clientele that appreciates being asked off the bat to offset the amount of people who will get weirded out and/or offended by being asked right off the bat. (Though I do know friends who would totally go out of their way to shop there. ...If it's in NYC.)
On the other hand, the grouping strictly by color, patterns, style... even better if it's strictly by size! I can see going over extremely well. And maybe training the staff to be as strictly neutral as possible until they know otherwise? (Maybe I'm being naive about that part, but that's generally my strategy in real life.)
"I just find it difficult to picture this store attracting a large enough clientele that appreciates being asked off the bat to offset the amount of people who will get weirded out and/or offended by being asked right off the bat."
DeleteYes, this. I wonder if it might be better to have a sign up saying, "Please feel free to inform our associates of your preferred personal pronouns. Here at Riley's Raiment (or whatever it would be called), we pride ourselves in welcoming and serving persons of all genders and gender expressions," or something like that.
This avoids the awkwardness of asking people who would find it really intrusive to be asked, which to my mind fall into two main categories 1) People whose gender identity conforms and has always conformed to their biological sex and present as such, and 2) People who are really unsure about their gender identity and not comfortable discussing it with strangers, but would still like to shop somewhere where they can try on and buy both a slinky evening gown and a sharp three-piece suit and not have anyone look at them funny.
Meanwhile, people who have a preferred pronoun but are aware that it isn't necessarily clear from their presentation can clearly see that discussing pronouns is a totally normal and acceptable way to start the customer/associate interaction at Riley's Raiment, should they choose to do so.
Please don't name my store anymore. Other than that, yeah, this seems mostly legit.
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