I wrote the other day about how if you’re in a customer-facing role, you’re expected to call male customers “sir” and female customers “madam”. This, from a travel industry talk last year by Billy Kolber, discusses the gendering and inclusivity of the hospitality industry.

When travel destinations and brands say they’re LGBTQ+ friendly, what they really mean is they’re very comfortable serving the rich, white gay men who have been visiting them for the past decade. Most have no idea who the T, Q or all the people represented by the + are, let alone how to welcome us respectfully and personally.

…Our industry is one of the most heavily gendered, with ideas about hospitality and respect that date back to the Victorian era. Virtually everything we know about travel is built on a paradigm of the heterosexual couple, mostly white, mostly American, British or German, traveling around the world.

We hold doors and pull out chairs for women, and hand wine lists to men. We market spas to women and adventure to men. For years, hotels have given couples two pairs of slippers – one big and one small.

This unnecessary gendering happens in all kinds of industries, and it’s not just relevant to LGBT+ people.

Here’s an example from this week: a new study found that during lockdown, more than one-third of women using the Zoom videoconferencing app for work have been told to wear more makeup and have their hair done for video calls; 27% had been asked to dress “in a more sexy or provocative way” because it’s important “to look nicer for the team” or to be more “pleasing to a client”.

How many men do you think were asked to dress more provocatively to be more pleasing to the client?

Kolber:

To be champions of equity and inclusion, we must make our own professional spaces and engagements equitable and inclusive. They must be desexualized. A gender-less future isn’t one where we don’t have gender, it’s one where gender doesn’t impact access or respect.

Journalist Jane Fae has written a heartfelt article to the people who seem to hate trans people so much.

It is a letter to friends I once had “that side of the wall”. Women, mostly, with whom I broke bread, and shared my house. Women with whom I campaigned, long and hard, against male violence. Against rape. Against social exclusion.

You knew me once. You knew who I am, how I am: in truth you still do. You know, should know, I am not the monster depicted by the gender police. How are you not ashamed to be where you are now?

…I do not understand why you are working with some of the most regressive elements in society, who hate not just trans people, but women and LGB folks too. I do not, in the name of all that is commonsense, understand why you would support court actions whose endgame will be the reduction in rights for all minorities, yourselves included.

I do not understand how you can support monsters, masquerading as global statesmen, in furtherance of your anti-trans agenda. I saw you when you praised Trump for owning the trans: saw you, too, when you got into bed with anti-abortion groups and violent neo-fascists in Ireland to own the trans.

And I saw you this very week, when your writings gave succour to Russia, the same day their police were beating up LGBT folks and feminists. To own the trans.

CTV News:

An Ontario pastor who came out to her congregation as a transgender woman last month has been fired after the congregation voted to remove her.

Metalsucks:

Ex-Absu Guitarist Details Being Fired From Band After Coming Out as Transgender

NBC News:

Transgender man files discrimination suit after Maryland hospital cancels hysterectomy… the center canceled the procedure because it “conflicted with the hospital’s Catholic religious beliefs”.

Metro Weekly:

The Trump Administration is planning to tell homeless shelters how to identify and subsequently deny access to transgender women, including warning shelter workers to look for “facial hair” and “the presence of an Adam’s apple.”

Another week, another wise and witty column from Jenny Boylan. I won’t spoil the opener because it really made me laugh and I think it will really make you laugh too.

But the column isn’t just about a funny misunderstanding. It’s about having a disability, about consideration for others, about being different.

I’ve spent too much of my life worrying about looking funny, about not fitting in, both as a partially deaf person living in a world dominated by the hearing and as an L.G.B.T.Q. woman living in a world dominated by straight and cis people. I’m tired of living in a world in which hearing people never think about the rest of us. I’m tired of living in a world in which transgender people constantly have to explain and justify the facts of our existence. I’m tired of living in a world in which, for some white people, the simple statement that Black lives matter is somehow considered radical.

Labour MP Nadia Whittome has a way with words. Today she said the government’s endless prevarication over gender recognition (GRA) reform was “fanning the flames of populist hate”.

She’s right.

We’re now going into the third “silly season” where it’s open season on trans people in the media and on social media. GRA reform is the tenuous justification for it.

What was only ever a minor administrative change (and a manifesto commitment of all the major political parties) has been blown out of all proportion and used to excuse a multi-year campaign of vicious demonisation of trans people, particularly trans women. And that’s having a demonstrable effect on real-world hate crimes. The government could and should have prevented this.

Liz Truss responded:

Let me be absolutely clear. We will not be rolling back the rights of transgender people. It is important that transgender people are able to live their lives as they wish, without fear, and we will be making sure that is the case.

I don’t believe her, and I certainly don’t trust her.

I believe she had every intention of announcing a rollback of trans rights today – her government briefed the political editor of The Sunday Times to that effect a few weeks ago – but was prevented from doing so because the government didn’t anticipate tens of thousands of cisgender women contacting them to say “not in my name”.

And I think she is still trying to find a way to reduce trans people’s rights without changing the underlying legislation, such as changing the current guidance around the Equality Act to make it trans-exclusive rather than trans-inclusive as it currently is. That would enable her to say that she hadn’t changed the letter of the law while undermining both its spirit and its practical application.

Whatever she decides to do, if she actually decides to do anything, her government is complicit in “fanning the flames of populist hate”.

Its ill-judged consultation became a referendum on an extremely marginalised group’s basic human rights, and even though the majority of responses were in favour of reform it has repeatedly refused to publish its response, let alone take any action.

Not only that, but it has refused to correct any of the misinformation and outright falsehoods that now circulate about what GRA reform means and what a GRC entitles the holder to do. It’s not as if accurate information is hard to find. It was in the government’s own consultation documents.

The longer the government refuses to say what it will do, let alone actually do anything, the longer it leaves a vacuum that bad actors are only too happy to fill.

Three years ago, the Tories painted targets on trans women’s backs and ran away. Whether by malevolence or incompetence, I don’t know. But I do know that their inaction now looks very much like cowardice.

I went to the optician yesterday. It’s a new branch so I’m not known to the staff, and as I had a mask hiding most of my face I wasn’t too surprised to be misgendered on the basis of my voice.

I was going to trick you by saying “You’ll never guess what happened next! They sure chose the wrong day to mess with ME!” but if you know me, you’re not going to be fooled.

What happened next is pretty much what you’d expect from me. I had a quick, friendly, quiet word with the person I’d heard misgendering me. I told her that it was no big deal, but with the whole being-a-woman thing I’d prefer it if she could use female pronouns.

You’ll never guess what happened next!

What happened next is pretty much what you’d expect too. She said oops, she said of course, I said really it isn’t a big deal, I said it’s just a bit embarrassing, I said I get it a lot because of my voice, and we chatted about other things that were much more interesting. Half an hour later she and a colleague were providing extremely opinionated and often very funny commentary on the various pairs of glasses I was trying on. It was a lot of fun, and there was a lot of laughter.

Unless it’s intentional, misgendering is no big deal. It happens all the time, often many times a day. Sometimes it gets me down – it’s particularly horrible when it happens on air – but I know that it’s almost always unintentional. People are busy and thinking about other things and tend to work on autopilot. As I’ve written before a lot of the cues we rely on aren’t so clear if you’re not presenting as stereotypically feminine, if you are but half your face is behind a mask, or if you’re just a voice on a telephone.

And we all have moments when our brain just goes blehhhhhhh and something flops out of our mouths. Last week I tried to thank a helpful guy in a hi-vis vest who gave me directions; torn between saying “cheers” and “thanks” I said “chanks”. I immediately went bright red, hit the window button and drove away in a state of extreme embarrassment, my kids giggling gleefully because they had a new in-joke to torment me with.

So when misgendering happens it’s no different from someone who hears my name as “Karen” or “Kerry” instead of “Carrie” because of the Irish in my accent, or if they get it wrong because like me they’re absolutely hopeless at remembering people’s names. It’s a tiny, honest mistake that’s the product of, y’know, growing up in a culture with a binary system of gender classification based on observing a handful of biological markers and stereotypes that doesn’t take into account the beautiful variety of human brains and bodies and identity and expression.

Yeah, that old thing.

I’m going for comic effect here but there’s still a sensible point in there. If you’ve ever worked in customer service or any kind of customer-facing role (and I have, so this applies to me too) you’ll have had it drummed into you that you call your male customers sir and your female customers madam (and the more difficult the customer, the more important that becomes: for example, the returns desk at M&S is one of the politest places on earth, at least on the till side of the desk). It becomes an ingrained habit: if you hear a male voice, you call him sir as a mark of respect. And that works really well unless the voice’s owner isn’t a him and she really would prefer it if you didn’t call her sir.

It’s going to take a long time before that’ll change, and in the meantime misgendering is a kind of ambient noise: it’s always there for me, like traffic noise in a city, so most of the time I don’t notice it let alone comment or complain about it.

Sometimes it’s self-correcting, such as when someone I’ve known for a very long time exclaims “what a guy!” – a term used to indicate grateful thanks for doing something awesome – before immediately adding “Oh! Fuck! Sorry! I didn’t….” I find that kind of thing quite funny, and I just wish my friend didn’t feel bad for saying something that doesn’t bother me.

Whether or not misgendering bothers me isn’t really the decider for whether I’ll say something or not. It’s more practical than that. If it’s a company or service – a bank teller asking me if my account is really my account, an insurance agent questioning whether I’m really the policyholder, a receptionist asking if Carrie is going to join me in a moment – then I’ll correct the mistake because if I don’t, it’ll happen again.

It’s the same with people. If I’ve never seen the person before and won’t be spending another moment in their presence, it’s a waste of energy – theirs and mine.

It’s only if I think I’m going to be misgendered repeatedly by someone that I’ll usually say anything, and I don’t make a big deal of it. I’ll gently correct the error in exactly the same way I would if they kept calling me Kerry – and in the same way I’d expect them to correct me if it was me getting their name wrong.

I try to treat other people with kindness and consideration, and I would like them to do the same for me.