Let’s use coffee education to create queer-inclusive spaces
As a coffee roaster, I’ve been out of the customer service game for a couple of years now. But the truth is, I was never very good at it to begin with, and even though I knew coffee was my home the minute I stepped in the door, I also knew right away that the cafe was not.
One reason for my incompatibility with customer service work is that the cafe was, and still is, a place where people are gendered regularly, superficially, and aggressively. As a queer/nonbinary person, this was something that both grated on me and kept me from being my best self, which is ironically the only self that could deal with the wonderful world of customer’s problems.
This culture of constant gendering existed separate from and piled on top of the gendered microaggression of customers, on my side of the counter. It lived in the ways baristas were trained to talk to customers, in their definitions of polite speech. Because this issue makes its home on our side of the counter, I’m confident that it’s a problem that we can work together to solve.
We aren’t (in this case) looking at a problem of implicit bias or deeply-rooted constructs, we’re looking at a small set of verbal tics that should be very easy to eliminate with a little bit of energy and focus. I want us as an industry of educators to start teaching a few easy principles to degender our customer service language.
Pronouns
If you make a habit of gendering folks, you will inevitably misgender some of them. Sometimes you can’t tell what someone’s gender is. In that case you might know to tread lightly. But, very much more often, you think you know someone’s gender and you’re wrong. In a third case, you correctly identify someone’s gender but they don’t use the pronouns you’ve come to expect from that gender. In all of these cases and many more, your attempts to gender someone will lead you to misgender them.
Misgendering is awkward; sometimes you’ll get corrected, which will feel like the worst thing on earth, until you think about how that person would feel if they didn’t correct you, which is actually much worse. This is rough for both nonbinary folks who, when forced into the two-gender paradigm, will always get misgendered, and also for trans folk, who, for many reasons, might not fit into your idea of what their gender should look like.
The solution is simple: “they’’ for everyone. Don’t talk about people in the third person in front of them if the situation doesn’t require it, but if you do, use “they” pronouns no matter their apparent gender. It won’t hurt anyone and it will help in many situations. Note that “they” is also the preferred pronoun for some genderqueer folk, but that in this case it functions as a neutral pronoun, rather than a designator for queerness. It gives people room to choose to share their preferred pronoun, or not to.
Terms of Respect or Endearment
Instead of calling people sir/miss/ma’am, try using gender-neutral terms like bud, friend, dear, boss, singular use of y’all, whatever you like. It’s a fun place to get creative in your job. For groups I like folks, y’all or yinz (if you’re in Pittsburgh). This is a place to find your own comfort zone, but the normative politeness we were conditioned into as children has become impolite over time, and we need to start growing past it if we want our cafes to be inclusive spaces.
Gender Designators
Let’s say you’re trying to find out who ordered the pastry you’re holding. You ask a coworker, and they tell you it was “that blond woman.” This feeds into a construct of gendering people for no reason, which leads to inevitable misgendering. Instead, your coworker should say “that blond person in the green shirt.” (Note that I just they-pronouned your hypothetical coworker. It’s easy once you get used to it.)
This is a starting primer for routing out those verbal tics that we only ever utilized to make people feel good, welcome and appreciated in our home away from home. If you’re in a training position in your company, write these into your first lesson. If you’re just working it behind the counter, lead by example.
My next post will begin a series about creating company infrastructure to hire and retain gender-diverse employees. Cheers!