In reading Ask A Manager today, there was a letter that really got me down. It was from someone who wanted to talk about a situation their sister-in-law went throughh with a customer service rep. I’ll post it here and summarize it thusly. The SIL was talking to the CS rep and the CS rep said she had to put the SIL on hold. The SIL heard a deep voice, is from the south, and said, “That’s fine, sir.” The CS rep said (according to the SIL) that ‘she identified as a woman and to please address her as such’. The SIL sent a nasty email to the company and said she felt as if she had committed a cardinal sin. The letter writer wanted Alison’s opinion on this.
There were so many people in the comments who said that while the SIL was more wrong overall in sending the email, that the CS rep was rude, brusque, and other unflattering words.
Look. I’m the reigning monarch of two passive-aggressive cultures (Minnesota and Taiwanese). I know how to read between the lines with a fine-tooth comb (yes, I’m mangling and mixing my metaphors). I can give lessons in nuance even though I’m not great at reading it myself. No correction. I’m great at it, but I have to really concentrate in order to do so.
The amount of ‘the CS rep should have said it in a nicer way’ in the comments was enraging, discouraging, and, frankly, boring as fuck. I’m old. I have heard the tone argument for so many issues, I just glaze right over them. Back in naughties feminism: Women are so angry! They need to calm down, those man-hating wimmins!!!!!
Side note: I think it’s amusing that feminists are called man-haters because we like men better than fehinist-haters do. We don’t think they are just dogs who only think with their dicks.
I digress.
First of all, the conversation was being related to us by a third party who only heard about it from the aggrieved first party. Said third party was not in the SIL’s corner and the way the SIL’s words were portrayed which should have painted her in best light possible was still weaksauce. It was one sentence, and I’ll quote:
I identify as female, please address me as such.
That was it. From that, so many commentors clutched their pearls at how RUDE she was for saying that, especially as a CS rep to a customer. Some even said out loud that her gender didn’t matter at all. I know that the commentariat gets weird when it comes to diversity issues, but I honestly did not expect this level of disrespect.
There’s a quote about respect that has been going around the internet for some time. i can’t pin down the origins of it or the person who said it, but it goes like this:
Sometimes people use ‘respect’ to mean ‘treating someone like a person’ and sometimes they use ‘respect’ to mean ‘treating someone like an authority.
And sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say, “If you won’t treat me like an authority, I won’t treat you like a person.”
And they think they’re being fair, but they aren’t, and that’s not okay.
This was running through the whole post. Yes, it was transphobia, but it was also classism. “She’s just a a lowly CS rep. How dare she expect to be treated like an actual human being?!” Again, I would like to say there were comments that were very close to this in meaning if not in actual words.
And the women who wanted to equate having a deep voice and being called sir once or twice on the phone with being consistently misgendered was infuriating. I even said in one of my comments that as someone who was agender and got called ‘sir’ consistently on the phone, I let it roll off my back because it was a one-off each time, and it did not matter. If I was in a job where it happened ten times a day every day? I would feel very fdifferently about it.
Hell, I feel some sort of way about it now, but not enough to correct people. And this is in a supposedly progressive Discord that prides itself on being inclusive. Which, I have to say, they are–and they aren’t. They are more inclusive than many gaming communities, yes, but that’s a very low bar to clear. A very VERY low bar. And I can’t help but notice how very…..male, white, and het they are. In general, I mean.
I know what that means. It means it’s time for me to move on and find another community. This is the way of my being, by the way. I reach the end of something and just move on. It’s not their fault or the content creators’ fault for being who they are or for not evolving in a way that is compatible with my own growth.
Back to the post. When I can distance myself enough, it’s fascinating to see how supposedly progressive people are sometimes more quick to protest that they can’t possibly be _____ist becuase they’re good people. It’s that invenstment in being a good person that makes it hard to say, “Yeah, I fucked up” or, “Yeah, that’s a terrible belief.”
I get it. It’s not easy. Gender, I mean. The zeitgeist around it has changed so rapidly over the last five years. Maybe it’s a by-product of the pandemic, but it has really exploded lately. Pronouns (or not in my case) are being discussed openly and not just behind closed doors as was the case in the past.
I find myself getting caught up in it as well from time to time–fixating on someone’s gender, I mean. So I get how it can happen without ill-intent, but, and this is the important thing, once you are aware that you misgendered someone, you apologize and don’t do it again. Or skip the apology and note that you’re going to do better in the fguture. And then, and this is the really important part, actually do better.
I have to stop expecting people to be better than they are so I can stop being disappointed in them. People are people. Even so-called progressive people have their flaws and their ignorant areas. Maybe especially so-called progressive people beacuse as I said, they were more entrenched in their own goodness and could not handle any pushback on that.
At any rate, the post left a bitter taste in my mouth. It was not the first time that people of the majority were hateful to people in the minority, talking over them (us), and being huffy at even the gentlest of explanation/pushback. As I said, it might be time for me to move on.