good and bad

[kindkit]

The bad: I work in a grocery store and I'm tired. And I want to punch every customer I see buying 10 cans of tuna and 20 cans of beans, or wearing goddamn gloves and then coughing into their hand in the checkout line, or who complains that we're out of stock of something or that we have new temporary policies like "no reusable containers."

I also am being constantly misgendered by customers and it's making me tired and furious and very, very depressed. The worst part is that I don't think they're doing it on purpose; that's why it's such a kick in the self-esteem. I literally do not know how I could present more masculine short of actually shaving my head, but I still get "ma'am" ALL THE FUCKING TIME. I'm binding, I'm in men's clothes as I have been for years, my hair is short and in a masculine cut, I wear no makeup or jewelry, and none of it does any goddamn good. Today, exhausted and stressed, I had to leave the sales floor and sit and cry a little. I wish this fucking testosterone would start having some visible fucking effects.

Dear cis people: you do not need to use gendered honorifics. It's usually pretty easy to avoid them! In particular, you do not need to use them on people who are clearly not presenting as the gender you have decided they are. Just stop. Stop. Stop.


The good: Not sick. Not unemployed.

Have acquired all the Mechanisms albums from Bandcamp. Last night I listened to their earliest one, Once Upon a Time . . . In Space, and enjoyed it. It's like the Decemberists at their most folksy/weird, only more so. I have a feeling I may like the later albums better, as OUaTIS feels very much like the work of a group finding its feet, but it was still full of Tragic Fun.

It's weird to hear Jonny sing. I know Jonny isn't Jon, of course, but it's still weird. Jon, I suspect, does not sing, even though his voice would be pretty good if he tried.


Okay, signing off now as my dinner is ready.

Comments

[vilakins]

I loathe gendered honorifics. I want to snap at people that no woman under 100 likes being called ma'am. I blame you Americans for this imported insult; we never used it before. Now service staff seem to be trained to use it. When it first started I used to say I didn't run a brothel but that was met with incomprehension, and now it's a losing battle. I also no longer get away with being misgendered, dammit, not since I grew boobs in my mid 20s.

Of course anything female-related devolves into an insult.

I have to say, I'm hugely relieved that English is pretty free of gender crap. I used verbs in Germany to get round the special nouns that indicated I was female (I program vs I am a programmer) because I hate them with a fiery passion. English speaker who use -ess mouns, fuck off. I can only imagine how hard it is in say Spanish to be transgender.

Anyway, stay safe! We have idiots panic-buying here but so far I think they're relatively civilised in this town. I've heard of fights and tasering in Australia (but only inter-hoarder)!

[kindkit]

Yeah, English has relatively few explicitly gendered words compared to a lot of other languages. And that -in suffix in German is really annoying. French, at the time I was using it a lot (which is 30 years ago now) was already moving towards de-gendering profession nouns, but a lot of gendered stuff is baked into the grammar. I know some Spanish speakers have created gender-neutral word endings (e.g. Latinx rather than Latino/Latina), but I'm not sure how common that is or whether it's used at all outside of the United States.

[vilakins]

Yes, Spanish is pretty bad (I'm learning it as I have several South American immigrant friends here) in that as soon as you use an adjective, you have to pick a gender. Also, Duolingo, which I'm using now in-person classes have finished, keeps pissing me off with its senora / senorita. I thought that crap was disappearing from a lot of languages like German and French, or indeed already has.