More venting about the importance of paying attention to where you are

[anna_wing]

Two of the things that surprised me when I worked in New York City twenty years ago were (a) that the US dd not have a system of national identification for its citizens (a lot of things that had puzzled me in US fiction were suddenly clarified - Australia and the UK are the only other rich countries that I know of that also don't); and (b) the extraordinary sex-segregation in terms of gender i.e. social behaviour (I had never in my life and reasonable travel experience elsewhere seen toyshops that divided toys by the sex of the child).

I was also surprised to discover that in certain places and social contexts a woman in the US with short hair is assumed to be a lesbian. In any major East or Southeast Asian metropolis, a woman with short hair is, depending on place, context and style: a white-collar professional woman; a blue collar worker woman; an older woman; a woman of sporty habits; a woman who has just come out of a meditation retreat in a Buddist monastery/nunnery during which she took temporary vows and shaved her head; a woman with or recovering from a serious illness; a normal urban woman who likes the style and can afford regular hairdressers' appointments.

Western dress, including trouser suits, is also common office wear for several of the above categories, depending on the fashion of the day. And obviously, jeans and a T-shirt are genuinely unisex fashion the world over.

National identification usually includes sex as part of legal identity. You are in fact legally either male or female, in the local context (we don't know or care about the conditions in your home country). Some countries allow citizens to change their legal sex, usually under specific conditions. Some don't. Sex does tend to entail gender, in the sense of behavioural expectations. But because sex is legally fixed, it doesn't actually depend on behaviour, so depending on context, the range of acceptable gendered behaviour is much wider than it appeared to me to be in the US.

In view of the above (AND NOW I AM FINALLY GETTING TO THE POINT), if you walk into a restaurant in a country where all the above points are relevant, the waitress in that restaurant is not going to guess, just because you have short hair and are wearing what you think of as men's clothes in your home context, that you think you are "male-presenting", especially if your identification (I assume a vaccination certificate or a credit card) also has a sex identification and it's female. Because you are not, in fact, "male-presenting" in the local context. You look like a normal urban woman. So complaining online about her for "misgendering" you because she called you Ms XYZ instead of Mr XYZ is a nasty piece of arrogance and your own silly fault. It's not on her to "ask for pronouns". It's up to you to tell her. If you'd bothered to look around you, you might have noticed that you weren't in your country or for that matter, in your internet bubble, any more.

Edited for clarity.

Comments

[tree_and_leaf]

Wait, you need to show ID to book a restaurant in countries in East Asia? Why?

[anna_wing]

Sorry, that wasn't clear. In a lot of places now you have to show your vaccination status before you're let in (I understand a lot of European countries do the same now) which depends on some form of official identification. And of course in some places, for a big booking, they will require your credit card details. This person was complaining that they were addressed as a woman because their identification was for a woman, so I assumed that they were in that situation or similar. Otherwise, the only place I've ever had to formally identify myself when booking was a super-fancy kaiseki place in Kyoto, which required me to make a booking through the concierge of my hotel if I was a foreigner (I don't speak Japanese so it was easy for them to tell.... )

[tree_and_leaf]

Ah, yes, thanks, that makes more sense,