As a butch dyke in the United States, I spend a lot of time unconsciously waiting for the other shoe to drop. The gender identification shoe. More often than not, on first contact, I am taken for a man. And again, more often than not, within the first few seconds, the people I meet reassess.
What happens next, depends on the person.
There are the people who realize their mistake in calling me sir, drop the gendered address during the rest of the interaction and that’s it. There are the good liberals who are embarrassed and usually apologize. Some of those people, unrelated to their ability to assess gender, don’t know when to shut up. They blather on and on, usually being hyper-friendly, trying to prove what nice people they are. It’s really not necessary. I never think of accepting a broad gender spectrum as an indicator of niceness. And then there are the people who realize their mistake, consider the fact that they were “tricked” an act of aggression and are aggressive in return. On some level, they are whom I expect each time I walk up to clerk, or buy tickets at a movie or order in a restaurant.
I didn’t realize how much I had incorporated waiting for that other shoe until I went to Japan. In Japan, the shoe never dropped because it never got picked up. I was just a man. No matter how long I talked, no matter what I did with my hands (all giveaways in the U.S.), I was an American man with my American wife.
I didn’t realize until I got back to the States, what a relief it had been. What an easy gig not having to deal with people and their issues.
So, a question–do you correct people when they say “sir”? Sounds like you didn’t in Japan: did that feel strange to you, at the same time as a relief?
(I know this is an old post, but I just found it after writing a post related to this issue.)