3

Show Respect

IN 2003, A JOURNALIST named Katherine Rosman went to a fancy New York publishing party. She ended up talking to one of the few Black men there—they both were outsiders at the party and didn’t know many other attendees.

The man turned out to be so charismatic and so interesting that she took down his information so she could pitch a story about him.

Not long after that conversation, another party guest, an established author, pulled her aside and asked who the man was. When she asked why, the author said something like, “I thought he was a waiter, and asked him to get me a drink from the bar.”

(The phrase she reports him using is actually “fetch a drink.” But the word fetch is so very loaded when it comes to Black Americans that I don’t want to claim that he said it without 100 percent certainty.)

As it turns out, that Black party guest in 2003 had not been a waiter.

He had, in fact, been a state senator. And when this anecdote was published in The Wall Street Journal in 2008, he was President Elect of the United States.¹

Barack Obama had been on the receiving end of an incredibly common expression of bias and disrespect that I have named an unconscious demotion. Unconscious demotions violate my second Principle of Inclusive Language.

AVOID UNCONSCIOUS DEMOTIONS

When someone is unconsciously demoted, a person has made a snap judgment about them and assumed that they hold a different job than they actually do. The job they have been demoted to seems to always have the same relationship to their actual job. It is lower status and lower in technical expertise. It requires less education, and that education is less prestigious. And it is usually lower paid.

Cameron Bailey is the creative director of the Toronto International Film Festival, one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. He reports that he gets mistaken for a parking valet or a security guard (and given how beautifully he dresses, I suspect this happens even when he’s wearing an expensive suit).²

Mellody Hobson is a prominent investor and business leader. She once organized a political fundraiser in her home city of Chicago. When she arrived to host it, all dressed up (and when I lived in Chicago, I only dreamed of shopping at the boutiques where she bought her clothes), she was mistaken for catering staff, and taken to a back room to change into her uniform.³

Carolina Huaranca is a venture capitalist. She went to a catered party in Silicon Valley, and at the end, someone handed her their used plate. They assumed she was there to clean up.⁴

Yen Ha is an architect. She said in the New York Times, “Every single day I have to remind someone that I am, in fact, an architect. Every new job site means a contractor who will assume I am the assistant, decorator, or intern. It usually isn’t until the third meeting that the project team looks to me for the answers to the architectural problems.”⁵

Bailey and Hobson are Black. Huaranca is Latine. And Ha is Chinese American. For the Black and Latine examples I just gave, each of the very high-status professionals was assumed to be a person who was there to serve white people—fetch their cars, bring them food, and clean up after them. This is not a coincidence.

I am not saying that it is bad to be waitstaff or cleaning staff or an admin. I have myself worked as a restaurant host and waitstaff, a receptionist, a temp secretary, and an administrative assistant. These are jobs that require real skill and competency! And I was constantly condescended to and underestimated when I worked those jobs.

But the fact is that workplaces and professions have hierarchies. And in unconscious demotions, people with professional degrees and high-prestige jobs are consistently assumed to work in lower-prestige jobs.

Who Gets Unconsciously Demoted?

In my research, I’ve found that in the US the recipients of unconscious demotions are most often

• women of color;

• other people of color;

• white women; and

• people with perceptible disabilities.

Every once in a while, a white man who looks really young will get unconsciously demoted. But it’s qualitatively different. For example, I’ve found that white female doctors are commonly demoted to nurse, but young-looking white male doctors get demoted to medical student. The prestige of the track is different; the young male doctor is assumed to be on the high-prestige track of eventually becoming a doctor, even if he isn’t there yet. Meanwhile, the young female doctor is assumed to be on the lower-prestige nursing track.

(I am not trying to say that doctors are better than nurses. I have great respect for the knowledge and competency of nurses! But the hierarchy of hospitals and medical offices has doctors at the top of the pyramid and nurses at a lower level. I’ve worked at a hospital and seen the difference in respect level in person.)

When you factor in race, the magnitude of the demotion becomes even more profound: many Black medical students and doctors report that they have been mistaken for cleaning staff. Even when in lab coats.

In addition, when people correct the demotion and say something like “No, I’m actually a doctor/game designer/mechanical engineer,” then they are often faced with what I call “the credential check.” The demoter will ask for proof that they are who they claim to be. Ask them to explain where they went to school, what programming languages they’ve learned, the last three companies where they’ve worked. I’ve heard about more than one Black doctor who keeps a laminated version of their medical license on them at all times because of the endless disbelief and credential checks they face.

Categories and Prototypes

In 2016, sociology professor Tressie McMillan Cottom basically live-tweeted an unconscious demotion that took place in her own campus office.⁶ “There was a textbook rep at my door. She told me she was ‘waiting for the professor.’ I said, ‘okay!’ And let her wait. At my office door.”

She added in the comments: “I hope the professor eventually shows up. I am in my office. I am the professor.”

A few tweets later, the episode concluded this way: “After a while she knocked and said, ‘Sorry. I, uh, didn’t recognize you.’”

One commenter wrote, “Code for ‘I was not expecting you to be Black.’”

This “I didn’t recognize you” is the key to unconscious demotions: certain kinds of people are not being recognized.

• • •

The human brain is incredibly good at pattern recognition.

From our very first months of life, our brains are working to sort out patterns and categories that let us create meaning from the world around us.

We’re learning things like what we eat and what we don’t eat. What’s safe and what’s dangerous. What we wear, who we trust, who has authority, who we should ignore.

In addition, we sort our natural and cultural surroundings into categories where some things are more central than others. In other words, some things are more prototypical than others.

I’d like you to pause for a minute and reflect. What picture appears in your head when you read the following words? Bird. Furniture. Doctor.

If you’re reading this in North America, chances are good that for you a robin is a more prototypical bird than an ostrich. A chair or table is a more prototypical piece of furniture than a bookshelf. And a man is a more prototypical doctor than a woman (or any other gender).

Our categorizations for professions and jobs come from years of sorting and making sense of data from the world around us. They are based on what we see and hear on television and in movies, what we read in the paper and online, and what we encounter in person in our everyday lives.

The widespread categorization of only men as prototypical doctors is what makes this riddle still puzzling to many: A man and his son are in a car crash, and when the son is brought to the operating room, the surgeon says, “I can’t operate on this boy. He’s my son.”

How is this possible? the riddle concludes.

In a 2014 study done at Boston University, just 14 percent of college students presented with the riddle guessed that the surgeon was the boy’s mother.⁷ (And if you’re wondering, only 2 percent suggested that he had two dads.)

The category of doctors was so strongly male that for the remaining 84 percent of college-aged participants, it apparently didn’t even occur to them that the surgeon might be female.

This is where bias comes in and causes real issues.

A major problem is that our categories, and the snap judgments we make based on them, can be wrong when they don’t take into account the real diversity of the world. This is because the world hasn’t been represented accurately to us, so our pattern recognition is based on inaccurate data.

What’s more, our mental categories and the patterns that formed them can override the information that’s right in front of our eyes.

For example, one day a Black doctor named Jennifer Adaeze Okwerekwu was in her patient’s room in the hospital, wearing her white coat, wearing her doctor’s ID, holding a reflex hammer, examining the patient. The patient was also a Black woman.

In the middle of the exam, a white hospital employee walked up to her and asked about the patient’s meal. He had assumed she was a family member and was shocked to learn she was the doctor.⁸

It seems clear that his cultural programming, the way he had been taught to see and interpret the world, had had some pretty biased input. And this cultural programming resulted in a category of doctors in his head that did not include Black women.

His programming was so strong that it overrode all those incredibly obvious contextual clues: doctor’s coat, doctor ID, holding a doctor’s tool, performing a medical exam, talking like a doctor. This hospital employee even demoted Okwerekwu right out of the medical field or hospital staff entirely.

Although mistaking a doctor for a nurse or an investor for wait-staff may feel like just a small mistake, the negative effects on the person being unconsciously demoted can be real and long lasting. The unspoken messages of “it’s obvious you don’t really belong” and “you can’t possibly be competent enough to do this job” sink in. They contribute to impostor syndrome. They push people out of companies. They drive people out of entire fields.

The Most Dangerous Unconscious Demotions

Unconscious demotions aren’t limited to the workplace.

They’re also found in everyday interactions out in public spaces—for example, on the street, in cafes, and in apartment building hallways. Because this is where we find the most dangerous kind of unconscious demotion.

I’ve read story after story where a person is just going about their day but for some reason, they are perceived as threatening. And often, they are demoted from innocent, everyday person to presumed criminal.

You may remember hearing about Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, Black men in a Philadelphia Starbucks who were just waiting for a business meeting when an employee called the cops on them for trespassing.

How long do you think they were there before she made the call?

Less than five minutes. And they ended up arrested.

In 2018, two Native American teenagers were taking a college tour at Colorado State University, their dream school. While they were on the tour, the mother of another prospective student called the cops on them, saying that they were creepy, that they stood out, that it made her feel sick to have them there. They ended up interrogated by campus police and pulled off the tour. They had saved up for months to take that trip and see if CSU was a place they could attend and feel comfortable.⁹

In 2021, comedian Eric André, who was at the time starring in two hit movies on Netflix, was boarding a plane in Atlanta with the other business-class passengers. County police detained him on the jetway that leads to the plane and started interrogating him about drugs he might be carrying and asked to search his luggage. They did not detain anyone else in business class. André is Black and Jewish. Everyone else in business class appeared to be white.¹⁰

These kinds of unconscious demotion, where someone is seen as a threat, can end up with innocent people in jail or dead. It happens all the time. Even if someone isn’t taken to jail, interactions with the police can be humiliating and traumatizing.

And as has become even clearer since I started educating about unconscious demotions in 2015, in the US, people of color, especially Black, Latine, and Native American people, are shot and killed by police at much higher rates than anyone else in this country.¹¹ In some respects, this is the ultimate unconscious demotion. From a person just going around and living life—like playing with a toy gun, eating chicken in the backyard, carrying a cell phone, sleeping in bed, eating a burrito in the park, driving a car—to a person who is so dangerous that it is okay to shoot, choke, or beat them to death.

How to Avoid Giving Unconscious Demotions

Even though unconscious demotions can range from unpleasant to life-threatening, it isn’t that hard to stop yourself from unconsciously demoting someone. For example, in a work scenario, when you’re meeting someone new:

1. Be mindful. Are you assuming something about the position of the person you’ve just started talking to?

2. Start with an open-ended question. For example, “So what do you do?” Or “what brings you here?” This will help you avoid potentially problematic questions like “Oh, are you a personal assistant?” Even if you’ve made an assumption in your head, you’ve avoided letting the other person know—and you’ve avoided the harm that comes from making that demotion explicit.

3. Avoid expressions of surprise. “No, wait, you’re a professor? You don’t look like a professor.”

4. Avoid the credential check. Believe what they tell you about their position.

And that’s it! Demotion avoided. You may have thought biased things in your head, but you avoided transmitting them to other people. And that’s a real accomplishment. What’s more, you’ve gotten great new data that helps you create more realistic mental models.

Out in public spaces, such as cafes or parks or the halls of an apartment building, if you find yourself perceiving someone as threatening or criminal, ask yourself:

1. Is this person really a threat?

2. Would I be thinking of them as a threat or calling the cops if they were white?

3. What are the contextual clues? Is the person bringing boxes into an apartment? Are they standing quietly and listening to the tour guide? Are they sitting with notepads and talking about their upcoming meeting? These are all important contextual clues that have been ignored when someone decided to call the police on Black, Native, and Latine people.

By avoiding unconscious demotions, you’re not just being more respectful of people—you may be saving a life.

TREAT NAMES WITH RESPECT

The barista held the marker to the cup and looked at me. “Name?” they asked.

“Valerie,” I replied firmly.

My new colleague turned to me in surprise. “Valerie? What now?”

“Oh yeah, Valerie is my coffee shop name. Because it was my nickname for like a month in high school. And sometimes I feel like if I get called Susan one more time instead of Suzanne, I might get stabby.”¹²

Here in the US, Suzanne is a low-frequency name. And Susan, a closely related name, is much more common. So I understand why people say and write my name as Susan, even though it bothers me.

A common type of problematic language is being careless or disrespectful of names. Sometimes it’s by not putting in the time and energy to say or spell the name correctly. And sometimes it’s by using nicknames or pet names without checking to see if it’s okay.

Low-frequency names seem to be the biggest stumbling blocks. Sometimes, like with my name, these are names in your language that are just less common. And other times, they are names in a language you didn’t grow up speaking. For those of you who speak oral languages (as opposed to sign languages), these “foreign” names may have sounds that your tongue isn’t used to producing, or sounds or tones that are hard for your ears to hear and then replicate.

But it’s important to be careful with a person’s name. Because this care is a sign of respect, an important component of inclusion. And the lack of care can be genuinely problematic, causing both emotional damage and real harm to relationships.

Say and Spell Names Correctly

When you have a “difficult” or “unusual” name, you learn to expect that people will not say and spell your name correctly. (For Deaf speakers, the focus in this section is only on spelling and not on oral pronunciation.)

“Yesterday, I was in a meeting . . . and I knew it was time for them to say my name because they started the sentence with ‘I might butcher this . . . ’ and then proceeded to do exactly that, ‘butcher’ my name,” posted Damneet Kaur.¹³

What is the flavor of butchering someone’s name? It’s of something bloody and unpleasant. Looking at the semantic framing, the name maps onto something raw and unclean and a bit dangerous to touch.

This isn’t a great way to conceptualize someone’s name.

I’ve talked to multiple people with foreign names who have told me that their coworkers not only avoid saying their names, but that they also seem to avoid talking to them or sometimes even making eye contact. Their coworkers’ discomfort with an unusual name leads to their being left out and marginalized.

This aversion to low-frequency or “difficult” names can lead to negative outcomes in the workplace. A 2012 study in Australia showed that having an unusual name that pointed to a non-European ethnicity meant you’d have to apply for way more jobs than your “regularly” named fellow applicants. For example, in order to get the same number of interviews, fictional candidates with ethnically Chinese names like Ping Chang or ethnically Middle Eastern names like Fatima Baghdadi had to submit 64 percent or 68 percent more applications than a fictional candidate named something like Sarah Johnson.¹⁴

Computer scientist Arvind Narayanan laid out some of the professional consequences of having an unusual name in a series of 2019 tweets.¹⁵ Toward the end of his PhD, Narayanan ran into a colleague, and they started talking about his work. The colleague was shocked to realize that Narayanan was first author of three different articles he had read and admired. (First author is the most prestigious position when articles are coauthored.)

Narayanan wrote, “I knew that my name tends to register as ‘generic Indian name with too many A’s.’ I was used to jokes and many, many misspelled name tags.” But he was surprised and unhappy to learn that this colleague’s failure to process his name had probably cost him a job offer.

Not putting in the effort to correctly pronounce or fully process a name can have negative consequences. A person can feel so frustrated that they’d rather use a fake name than hear their name mispronounced yet again—or even disrespected to the point where they feel butchered. Or, they might be denied recognition or credit for their work—or even a job offer—simply because their name is “too hard,” and people have just given up.

• • •

You’re pretty much guaranteed to encounter at least one unfamiliar name in your lifetime—and if you’ve got a job such as teacher or recruiter, a whole lot more.

So what can you do?

For people who will pronounce names orally, if you’ve got some time to prepare, you can take a few minutes to do some research. A few years ago, I had to interview someone in London named Ciaran. I’d never seen this name before, but I knew enough about the spelling of Irish names to realize I would need help pronouncing it correctly.

So, I searched “how to pronounce Ciaran” and compared a few videos and baby name entries. Because I’m a linguist, I could use the International Phonetic Alphabet to write his name phonetically, but otherwise I would have written “KEE-rin.”

When he hopped on Zoom, I said, “Hi, you’re [KEE-rin], right? I’m Suzanne, nice to meet you.”

He broke out into a huge smile. And then the next five minutes were spent with him asking me how I knew how to say his name right, thanking me for taking the time, and telling me horror stories involving his name. Only after this outpouring of emotion and stories could I get to my interview questions.

If you encounter a new name in the moment, you can ask how to pronounce and spell that name. And remember, even if you think you know the pronunciation, you might not. For example, the name Maurice is pronounced one way in the US (maw-REES) and another way in the UK (MAW-rihs).

If you’ll be encountering that person again, you can make a note of the pronunciation so you’ll get it right the next time. For example, the name Andrea is pronounced two ways, so if you meet an Andrea with the less frequent pronunciation (in the US), you might write “an-DRAY-uh.” And for the more frequent version, you could write “ANN-dree-uh.”

(If you’ve got time and energy and are both hearing and sighted, consider learning the International Phonetic Alphabet! There are lots of good tutorials and guides out there on the internet. And it’s a super handy tool.)

For speakers of oral languages, some names may be so far away from the sound system of the language(s) you grew up speaking that you simply won’t be able to pronounce them perfectly. They may have sounds your vocal tract can’t quite make because you haven’t had years of practice. You also might not be able to hear the unusual sounds very well. For example, monolingual speakers of English usually have problems with the different sounds represented by the letter r in other languages, along with tones in languages like Mandarin, Shona, and Thai. In these cases, the best thing to do is practice and get as close as you can to the original pronunciation. Even if you don’t make it all the way to the fully correct pronunciation, people will appreciate the effort.

When you put in effort to pronounce and spell someone’s low-frequency name correctly, they feel seen, valued, and respected. The implied message is—you’re worth my time and effort. You and your name matter.

Nicknames and Pet Names

When I was a kid, I used to watch a TV show called MASH. One of the very few female characters was an army nurse named Margaret Houlihan who was called Hot Lips by most of her male coworkers. I was too young to understand how inappropriate this was for a workplace, but I could see her frustration with the nickname. Some nicknames and most pet names at work violate the principles of inclusive language. In particular, they do not show respect.

In a survey put out by the Florida Bar, female lawyers reported that in the courtroom they are called things like dear, honey, sweetie, little lady, and darling. They were called these pet names not only by men who were opposing counsel, but sometimes even by the judges themselves. One lawyer even reported that a federal magistrate called her Blondie in front of the entire courtroom.¹⁶

These are disrespectful ways to address and refer to a colleague. They are demeaning. And in the case of these lawyers, they’re probably being used as a subtle form of domination.

Pet names like honey and sweetie suggest that the female colleague isn’t there in a professional capacity. These names marginalize her and her work. They suggest that she isn’t competent, and that she maybe should return to the domestic domains where she “belongs.”

(If sweetie and darlin’ are used to add flavor to your workplace because it’s a diner or a restaurant in the American South, then that’s a different story.)

What’s more, pet names for women like Hot Lips can also be inappropriately sexualizing. Being called things like kitten and hot stuff at work is well down the path to sexual harassment. One woman reported on a situation at her ad agency:

(Note that calling the author of the post “fembot” is an example of inflating language—presenting her reasonable behavior calling out sexual harassment as unacceptable.)

Less charged but still problematic is jumping right to a nickname when that is not how someone has been introduced. For example, I have never once said, “My name is Suzanne, but you can call me Sue (or Suzie),” because I do not use either of those nicknames. And yet, plenty of people have started calling me Sue or Suzie right after being introduced to me. And it can be awkward and uncomfortable to correct them. I can feel like a killjoy, or any of the other unpleasant names for women who shut down seemingly harmless fun.

(Note that there are four people on the planet who are allowed to call me Suzie. They know who they are. But no one will ever be added to their ranks.)

The indexicality of nickname use is something like closeness, friendliness, and informality. But that’s only when someone is licensed to use that nickname—when they are a person who is actually close and friendly and informal with you. And, most importantly, when they have your consent. Otherwise, the flavor of an unwanted nickname is more like disrespect and disregard for your feelings and wishes. It’s a verbal version of forcing a long hug or shoulder rub on someone who didn’t ask for or consent to it.

People with complex or “foreign” names also often find themselves nicknamed against their will. For example, when actor Quvenzhané Wallis was on tour promoting the Annie reboot in which she was starring, she was called things like “Little Q” and “Annie” by entertainment reporters. She is an Oscar nominee. But people in the business couldn’t be bothered to say her name right. Care and attention were being paid to difficult European names (for example, Arnold Schwarzenegger), but not to low-frequency names of darker-skinned people. Uzo Adubo was asked in a 2014 interview if she had considered changing her name when she became an actor. She replied that she had not, because in grade school, when she came home asking if she could go by Zoe, her mother had said, “If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and Michelangelo and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka.”¹⁸

A Mexican woman named Xóchitl told me about an interview for a job where the recruiter said, “Your name is too hard. I’m just going to call you Chita.” She chose to not work for that company.

A colleague once told me how bad he felt for his mother-in-law. She grew up in Korea as Eun-Joo. But once she moved to the US, she found that so many people had so much trouble with her name, butchered it so often, that she gave up on it. For the last five decades, she’s been Paula instead. He felt so much sympathy for her—she had already given up so much in her move from Korea, and he could see how sad she felt that she hadn’t even been able to keep her name. I hear stories like this all the time about people who grew up in East or Southeast Asia and then moved to the US.

So it’s best to only use nicknames if they’re freely offered to you. For example, if somebody tells you, “My name is Xóchitl, but you can call me Xoch,” then go for it. Otherwise, take the time to learn and use their real name. It’s respectful and it takes into account both their identity and their wishes. Using someone’s real name—and pronouncing it correctly—is one of the most fundamental ways of showing respect for that person. And it’s well worth whatever effort it might take you to do so.

Address People Respectfully

“It was literally beaten into me that I should always use sir and ma’am with adults,” Dani said. “But I’m nonbinary. And I really don’t want to misgender people. Lord knows, I get how upsetting that is. So, what do I do?”

Dani is in a bind, and chances are good that you are too.

In English, gender makes it complicated to address people respectfully. The English language has developed so that gender almost always plays a role when you decide which words of respect to use.

One way this shows up is with honorifics. Honorific is the term for a word or word part that signals respect and politeness. You might have heard of san being added after Japanese names, or in K-dramas, seen people addressed with the polite nim after their name or job title.

Think about the standard honorifics that until recently were the only English options to use before someone’s name to show respect.

If someone appeared to be male, you chose Mr. Here, gender was the only factor.

But it was more complicated if someone appeared to be female. Until recently, to be polite you needed to know not only their gender but also their marital status. Female and not married? Miss. Female and married? Mrs.

In the 1950s, people got frustrated that marital status came into play only when addressing women. And they came up with a new honorific that was equivalent to Mr.—Ms. The honorific Ms. removes marital status from the politeness equation.

But now that we are finally taking into account the realities of gender, Mr. and Ms. aren’t enough. Because some people are nonbinary and don’t feel comfortable with a male honorific or a female honorific. And some other people fit in the gender binary but feel that gender, like marital status, should be irrelevant to politeness.

So now there is also Mx., which is pronounced like the word mix by some people and like the word mucks by others. Mx. is a way to remove both marital status and gender identity from politeness. (There are also other, less frequently used gender-neutral honorifics in English. They include M, Misc, Mre, Msr, Myr, Pr, Sai, and Ser.)¹⁹

It’s best to ask what honorific people prefer, and then use it. On my company’s website, when someone fills out the contact form, we have them choose an honorific from a drop-down list. They can also choose “go right to my first name” or put a different honorific in the notes field. Then, when we email them back, we know how to address them in a way that respects their wishes. This is especially helpful for names where the gender isn’t clear—like Italian men named Michele, Americans named Cameron or Lindsey, or Koreans named Ji-ho or See-hee.

In the US, there has been a move over the last few decades away from honorifics and toward first names only. So you might be someone who almost never says Mr. or Ms. Being aware of people’s preferences—for more or less formality, and which honorific to use when being formal—is an important way of showing respect. For example, if someone doesn’t want to be called Mr. Lastname but instead Firstname only, then the respectful thing to do is call him by his first name only.

It’s also good to be on the alert for the common “respect gap” when it comes to gender and honorifics. People seen as female are often presented or referred to using their first name only, while people seen as male are presented with their title and last name. “Please meet Kate, one of our most popular professors. And this is Dr. Smith, who just got that big grant I was telling you about.” The same is true for disabled people, who are also frequently presented without their titles. To close the respect gap, use Title Lastname for all genders and for both abled and disabled people.

• • •

When it comes to honorifics such as sir and ma’am, the English language doesn’t currently have a widely used option that’s gender neutral. I wish I had an easy solution that I could present with a flourish right here. But I don’t.

But even so, we always want to avoid misgendering people.

So what do you do if you’re on the street and want to politely get someone’s attention to ask for directions? You could try skipping address terms like sir and ma’am altogether and showing your politeness with your tone and other words. Or you might say something like “Excuse me, friend.” Or “Excuse me, kind person.” Or something else you feel comfortable with.

If you’re in retail or hospitality, you might say “Can I help the next guest?” Or, “I believe the person in the green shirt was next.”

Because when we are trying to be polite with someone and show them respect, we want to make sure that we are also respecting their gender identity, no matter what it might be.