I wrote yesterday about a heated post at Ask A Manager about gender, civility, and how even so-called progressive people can be waaaay behind in DEI issues. It wasn’t surprising that progs can be like that–I’ve been a Dem all my life and have seen it time and time again. What surprised and discouraged me this time, though, was how vehement and negative they were. How willing they were to take the third-handed acocunt at face value that protrayed a potentially trans woman in the worst possible light without even blinking. For a group that usually chews every issue to death, so many commenters took at face value that the customer service rep was rude/snotty/uncivil/out of line, etc.
There were paragraphs written, often in florid detail, about how bad, bad, bad the CS rep was for *checks notes* politely asking someone to refer to her as her gender. Again, this is the line:
“I identify as female, please address me as such,”
That’s it. That was the whole line as it was reported. This was after the SIL had said, “Yes, sir” in response to the CS rep saying she had to put the customer on hold.
This one line was called rude, nasty, snotty, and more. As more than one trans person pointed out, that kind of language isn’t something taht most trans people use any longer. The ‘I identify as’ part, I mean. That is so a decade ago. Nowadays, they are much more likely to say, “I’m a woman.” Nevertheless, people in the comments spent so much time dissecting this one sentence, that, once again, was related third-hand by someone who didn’t even hear the conversation.
Let me repeat that. The letter writer wasn’t there for the conversation. They went to visit their sister-in-law (SIL) and the SIL related the interaction. It wasn’t even something that had happened that day, probably. But it bothered her enough to write a nasty email (LW’s words) to the CS rep’s manager about how
the behavior was rude and the rep made my SIL feel as if she had committed a cardinal sin, but my SIL had no way of knowing their gender other than by their voice because they were on the phone.