It’s December first and that means a new monthly train ticket and a new opportunity for the conductor to play “Guess my gender” wherein they decide whether to punch my ticket as either male or female. I have discussed this here in the past – how I have been read as a man or (more often) a woman, but today was a first for me.
I hand the conductor my ticket today and he asks me “How would you like me to punch this? I’m not trying to be rude or disrespectful, I just don’t want to offend you.” It takes me a moment to reply: “Female is fine, thanks.” He punches my ticket and hands it back to me. “Just trying to be respectful. Have a good one.” – and he moves on the the next seat.
All totaled it was about twenty seconds of interaction – but it was an important twenty seconds to me. One of only a handful of times anyone has ever asked – as opposed to assuming – how I want to be gendered.
A rather nice start to the day.
One Comment
I think it’s nice he asked. That’s awesome.
However I do feel that I should say that it seems complete insanity to have gendered tickets. I clicked on the link to the previous post to see if that explained it , but nope, while I see the reasoning behind it it’s not really logical. You could still lend it to someone of the same (perceived) gender.