Just Took The Floor At An All-staff Meeting To Tell Management, In Front Of As Many Employees As Possible, To Respect My Pronouns.

JESUS CHRIST

I've been working here for six fucking months now. My pronouns were on my resume. I wear a non-binary flag beanie on cold days. I wear a shirt that says "I DON'T CARE WHAT I LOOK LIKE, MY PRONOUNS ARE THEY/THEM" T-shirt to most all staff meetings, I had an entire conversation with the facilities office staff about my gender when being put into the system. And STILL there has been ZERO effort outside of my immediate team members to get it right.

So, for context, I work at an elder care home and a few months ago the state mandated staff take an "Inclusive Care" class. In it, they were explaining how we need to respect the needs and lifestyles of potential LGBTQIA2S+ residents that we may end up coming to live in our facility. When it was first announced, the management were incredibly dismissive referring to it as "The LGBT blah blah blah" class with staff members snickering and making alphabet jokes. Personally, I found the class incredibly useful (that may be a given, but i wasn't expecting much.) and it gave me the thought that I needed to go ahead and do this.

Fast forward a month or two, and we're finally at an all staff where the floor is opened up for anyone who wants to speak 'cause management didn't have time to prepare notes this week. Our most recent all staff prior, management wanted to use me as an example in front of everyone and misgendered me, and at this point I'm just done with it. So, I took my shot, and each time I mentioned one of the line items from the first paragraph it was a different excuse of "oh, i didn't know", "oh I don't pay attention to what people are wearing" and eventually I just said " My wife has informed me she's had a direct discussion with you and other management. I'm aware you're aware."

She ended up leaving the room and the other manager took control of the meeting and just asked me to politely correct people if they got it wrong.

God, I was shaking, but I'm so relieved to finally have that out of the way. On top of all the other reasons I'm obviously frustrated, there's a part of me that's realizing I'm about to need to advocate for myself A LOT more fiercely over the next 4 years and if I can't start now then when the fuck am I, yknow?

Keep Fighting y'all. I'll fight with you. ????

EDIT: OH!!! I FORGOT TO MENTION!!! After I walked out of the meeting, one of our new employees rushed after me to have a conversation about it and told me he had a trans daughter going through similar at her workplace down the road and he's been trying so hard to hype her up to stand up for herself and her rights and so he just really wanted to make sure he got it right with me.