Maybe the pinstripes fooled him

[cosmolinguist]

It's times like this, when the ticket-checking guy says "thank you, sir" to me when I'm wearing a skirt and a pretty feminine coat, with longish hair and a handbag, that I really feel for the people whose health and happiness is so adversely affected by being misgendered. I really wish there wasn't so much riding on the observational powers of morons.

Comments

[sfred]

*nods*

We had the first of a series (we hope) of fairly informal Spanish lessons at lunchtime at work yesterday - a colleague is teaching the rest of us - and we noted how often in Spanish one has to gender someone before they've had a chance to gender themself. I think I'd find that really difficult!

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, for all that gendered stuff can be a nightmare in English, it must be even worse in languages with grammatical gender.

[jojomojo.livejournal.com]

It was amazing how often I got 'hello, madam' etc in shops when I was younger and didn't have the beard. Fortunately I was privileged such that I could find it amusing (especially when they realised and got all flustered) rather than upsetting. :/

[cosmolinguist]

I get called "sir" (or etc) a lot when I'm in a phase of wearing both trousers and short hair at the same time, and at first I thought it was funny. (Though I hated it when people realized their mistake and got flustered, but that's probably just my Minnesota upbringing.) There was something fun about subverting people's expectations, especially because I never meant to do it -- I've never intended to be seen as anything but a woman. And there's an appeal to the "I know something you don't know!" element of it. But now like I say I can't help but think how not-funny this is for a lot of people, and so there's no fun in it for me any more.