Casual Vs. Considerate
(Posting this blog entry’s full text, because I want to share and am desperate to start a discussion on this. Here is the original post.)
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!