Y’all are just going to have to follow me on this one. Saturday Night Live used to have a series of sketches entitled “Deep Thought by Jack Handey”. It was purely satire. While this blog isn’t satire, and my mother’s maiden name was Handy (no E), I still felt the title of it. Let’s jump in.
I’m still working on my inability to stay out of the comments sections on social media. I rarely comment on anything, but sometimes the comments are just sheer entertainment, sometimes more entertaining than the original post or video itself…but I digress.
This is the point in my writing where I start to make some folks mad. As I was watching a TikTok video earlier today the creator talked about how in their household, as Black people, even the dog has to speak. I can write a-whole-nother blog on how this was challenging for me as a neurodivergent kid who took a while to learn that concept, but again, that’s another blog. One of the commentors on the video noted that their children “had better say yes sir or no ma’am”. And this set me off.
The reason this set me off was because while I believe the goal is teach respect, I have seen instances where the word “sir”, or “ma’am” was used in anything but a respectful manner and number two, while I’ve done no research on this, it is my opinion that in black households and in the black community, teaching our children to use the words “sir” and “ma’am” was/is a defense or safety mechanism. Because you dare not have encountered a white person and not said “yes, ma’am” or “no, ma’am”. The outcome could be fatal for you, and your family.
However, I think we’ve lost the nuance in why those words were considered to be respectful in general when addressing folks. And maybe we should look a little deeper as to what respect actually means. Is it the arbitrary use of words like “sir” or “ma’am” or is it actions in general? I consider myself to be a rather respectful person, but was not raised to say sir or ma’am. I was not raised to call my aunt aunt anything, my aunt’s name is Yvonne and that’s what I call her. I highly respect her and always have. My godchildren are not required to address me with a handle, (Ms., Auntie, etc.) unless that is their parents’ wish. It is not my choice that they called me Aunt Corris or anything along those lines. I am even sometimes prone to not respond when my college students refer to me as Ms. Davis, because I forget that that’s who I am. If they call me Corris, I am not bothered as long as what they say after is respectful. But we also offer the lesson of while you may refer to me by my first name, in conversation with others about me you should refer to me as Ms. Davis…again, nuance and politics.
Now you might remember that the subtitle of this blog was “Politeness and Gender Identity”. We’ve gone over politeness but now you may be pondering what this has to do with gender identity. An additional thought, as I thought more about the use of the word sir and ma’am extended to pronouns.
People who know me personally, have likely already heard my discourse on labels. I firmly believe that labels exist to make us feel better. We process our environment and are comforted by being able to place people and objects into boxes, categories if you will. Being able to label a person as male or female, in accordance with our cultural and social standards of what male and female mean, makes us comfortable. The problems start when those standards don’t match universally (because they don’t) or when the individual encountered does not neatly fit into the boxes the society has tried to make us think are the definitions of those words.
Exclusively referring to people as sir or ma’am, becomes one of those problems. If you encounter a person who is not wearing a button that tells you their pronouns, and you assume based on your visual observation of them that they are one gender, you may be wrong. I am occasionally misgendered, but it doesn’t really bother me. For some people it is traumatic, and triggering. If we purport to care about our fellow humans, shouldn’t we care enough to not cause them trauma unnecessarily?
Food for thought: outside of racialized situations, does not saying sir or ma’am cause you harm? Does using a person‘s correct pronouns (note that I didn’t say preferred there) cause you harm?
Lifting as I Climb 
Thanks for your thoughts, Ms. Davis! And to your questions:
As a queer woman who has many times been misgendered by others in my life, I like non-gendered titles, if one is needed to be polite or for politics, I often defer to a persons work title, to avoid the situation entirely.
I relate to she/her pronouns, and I was born as the gender that I relate to. But as a survivor of gendered violence, I don’t always want to accentuate that part of myself that became the target of my aggressors. Maybe then it’s no surprise that I’ve been misgendered before.
Even though my gender matches the gender I feel that I am, this does not mean that I get to ignore someone else’s preference. Especially knowing that those preferences are often a matter of not just psychological safety, but real personal physical safety. Out of respect for these victims of crime, I avoid gendered greetings, and I dare say this is not about politics but about morality.
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