Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: minority

All about gender–sort of

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.


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I am the diversity

I go through my life being a weirdo and pretty much ignoring all the evidence that I am a weirdo because I know I’m a weirdo and I don’t really care. Most of the time. Plus, that’s too many uses of the word ‘weirdo’ in one sentence. But I’m making a point. The point being that I’m a weirdo.

Anyway, the reason I’m thinking about it is beacuse I’ll read old posts at Ask A Manager as a way to wind down at night. The one I chose last night was from someone who knew a new hire from working with him in a different place. In the last place, there was rampant sexism because they hired from a Christian college that proclaims that women should submit to men. The letter writer asked how, if she had been on the hiring board, could she probe for this kind of attitude?

Alison said (broadly paraphrasing), that she would ask about diversity issues. This was for a managing position, so the questions were geared towards that. One of them was, “How do you think about equity and bias around things like race and gender when hiring or developing people?” She had possible follow-up questions to each question. the one for this question was, “How have you known when your efforts to foster equity were working or not?”

I have seen other posts (not necessarily from her) about asking people how they work with people of different genders, races, ethnicities, religions, etc. It’s funny to me beacuse I always have to work with people of different everything. I’m the minority in almost every category I can think of. Protected by law, I mean. Gender, religion, race,  sexual orientation, and age. Agender, areligious, Taiwanese, bisexual, fifty-something. Back in the day, I used to joke that I was a triple threat (race, sexual orientation, gender) and that was before I went even more buckwild.

That’s why I get frustrated when people try to lecture me about looking at it from other points of view. Not that I can’t afford to widen my horizons because of course I can. Everyone can. But it’s irritating because it never feels ilke it’s a two-way thing.

About a decade ago, when being more aware of social inequities came to the forefront, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. Any time issues of, say, gender or sexual orientation were brought up, white cis dudes were given a free pass. What I mean is that the people most pushed on the isuses were minorities themselves. I understood it was partly because of the whole ‘a reasonable perosn will more likely change than an unreasonable one’, but it was frustrating.


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WWDTAOL: cultural gaslighting and pretending to be normal

There has been plenty written about microaggressions and how they can add up. Most of us have at least heard of code-switching and what a toll it can take on a person. When I was in college, i got asked all the time where I was from. Since I was a bitch, I would say with a straight face, Minnesota and wait for the following question. “No, I mean where are you really from?” Normally I would say something along the lines of, “My ancestors are from Taiwan” and that was usually enough to get people to shut the fuck up. Once in a while, someone would continue with something even more insensitive such as, “My adopted daughter is Korean.” Ok. Well. What am I supposed to do with that? There are so many levels wrong with that. First of all, I’m not Korean. Secondly, even if I were, it wouldn’t mean I’d have an instant connection to all Korean people. I’ve had people ask if I knew this other Taiwanese person they know, which is also grating. It shows that I’m a category, not a person to them.

I’ve had well-meaning white people ask me why that’s so frustrating. Or saying that people are just being curious. I hate that because it’ll take too long to explain the whole background of being a minority in an overwhelmingly white state and it’s why so many minorities don’t want to do Racism 101. (Or women and Sexism 101, etc.). It really does boil down to trust me after a lifetime of living as me, I know the intent of people doing this kind of shit. I don’t think they’re being malicious, but it’s ignorance and it’s intrusive. Also, when you have it happen over and over again, it’s a not-so-subtle hint that I’m viewed as an outsider.

That, by the way, is another microagression–people constantly questioning what you experienced as real. That’s the cultural gaslighting I mentioned in the title and it’s exhausting. “Are you sure that’s what happened? Maybe that person you thought mistreated you because you’re Asian was actually just having a bad day!” It’s as if the person who actually has the experience is considered biased BECAUSE they’ve had the experiences so often. You see it all over the place, such as in trials. If you’re black (as a potential jurist), it’s assumed that you can’t possibly be neutral if it’s a case involving a black victim. Same with women and sex crimes. Or, in a more common phenomenon, a man is described as being creepy and so many people, mostly men, fall over themselves to explain why he’s just misunderstood.


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