Spreading the good news about Mx

[kaberett]

So this afternoon I phoned up to pay for some theatre tickets I'd previously reserved pending actually joining the theatre-in-question's access scheme (feminist... witches... modern dance... at Sadler's Wells, suggested by a friend who works there, we're going on Friday), and the staff member was all "... what is this Em Ex, I have never heard of it before, should it be Ms? or Mr?"

Whereupon I, naturally wishing to avoid this conversation, responded something to the tune of "no, Mx is correct" and breezed on to the next bit. My interlocutor, however, was not to be deterred, and a little while later revisited the theme of "I've never heard of it before!"

At this point I was, unsurprisingly, Bracing For A Fight, but I am also (albeit inconsistently) attempting to apply the maxim of Assume Good Faith mostly for the sake of watching people flounder around in being apparently misunderstood. So: I launched into "well, you know how Ms is for people who don't want to say whether they're married or not?"

"Yes!" said my interlocutor, "that's what I always put down."

"Well," I said, "Mx is like that, but for if you're even more, you know, and you don't want to say..."

"— there's a TITLE FOR THAT?"

"... yeah, the NHS and a bunch of banks and a bunch of charities use i--"

"CAN I USE IT."

"... ye-e-es, of course you can...?"

"I ALWAYS FEEL WEIRD PUTTING DOWN MS. YOU HAVE MADE MY DAY."

(I paraphrase slightly -- somewhere in there I made the joke about "you know, if you don't want to join the military or become a priest" -- but this is very much the sense of the thing.)

Comments

[alexseanchai]

:-D

[cosmolinguist]

Aw! <3

[redbird]

Bravo!

It's nice when the person justifies your assumption of good faith, isn't it?

[kaberett]

I'm trying to take a deep breath and remind myself that I do actually employ the title as an educational tool, and sometimes this means education! Which is to say: yes, it's brilliant for restoring faith in humanity.

[forthwritten]

Honestly, we don't even need to recruit :D

[cadenzamuse]

That is thoroughly delightful.

[evilsusan]

I love you. Did you know I love you? You're so good. Keep doing you.

[kaberett]

I love you too. <3

[child_of_the_air]

"Or get a PhD."

I am excited for you, and for this person!

Did I mention I have a student who calls me "Mx. [Surname]" now?

[kaberett]

Heh, yes, I mentioned "becoming a medic" but I'm pretty sure that getting a PhD makes up a TINY proportion of non-gendered title acquisitions in the UK so I decided to stick with the most popular :-p

[child_of_the_air]

Fair enough. (I'm just still bitter about not getting one.)

[niqaeli]

I have been feeling stupidly fragile and this story brightened my day. Thank you. <3

[kaberett]

♥ You are very welcome. It cheered me up all evening too.

[steorra]

Yay!

[white_hart]

Yay!

[shewhostaples]

That's lovely!

[wildeabandon]

Oh, that's delightful. Thank you for sharing this story.

[kaberett]

You are very welcome!

[ewt]

This makes me very happy :-)

[vass]

YES GOOD.

[shanaqui]

Awwww. ♥

(I love your "I think my gender might be dragons" tag.)

Question: is Mx relatively known in NHS contexts? I sort of want to use it, but I also don't want to fight people on it or educate people on it. I wanna be brave and start, and the NHS seems like a good starting place?

[kaberett]

Seems to vary by region BUT I haven't actually particularly had to fight or educate people -- often they look at me and look at the sheet and decide it's "Ms" and just use that instead of "Mx" but I don't recall getting much pushback or argument on it, so. Major risk seems to be people just ignoring it. So: yes, I think it's a pretty good starting place, not least because even if people ignore it you're one more person putting it in front of them and sooner or later it'll reach critical mass for them to realise it wasn't a typo... <3

[kihou]

Awesome!

[davidgillon]

<3

[ironed_orchid]

This is a good story.

A subscription database at work has title as a required field, but not everyone tells us which theirs, so it was a very good day when we discovered that it accepts Mx.

[kaberett]

EXCELLENT.

[lebannen]

As a female person with a name that people in this country seem to assume by default is male, ♥ thank you so much! ♥

[highlyeccentric]

NICE WORK

[ludy]

Shiny!

[haggis]

My mum has been supportive but not super interested in LGBT stuff. I have been talking to her about it a lot since I came out to her, especially after I came out as poly and talked about lot about my NB girlfriend. A few weeks ago, she spontaneously mentioned that she was sunpriced passports only had male and female! The world is slowly changing and the assholes are loud but outnumbered.

[ex_we935]

Yay!

~K.

[alexwlchan]

:-D

This is lovely. Mind if I share it?

[kaberett]

Feel free :-)

[nanila]

YAY. This is great. :)

[silveradept]

I'm so glad it turned out well instead of having someone grump at you about your choice of titles.

[khalinche]

Aw yay for you and yay for them!

[venta]

Nice. I'm only familiar with Mx as a written title - do you mind me asking what the usual pronunciation is?

[kaberett]

It's usually a schwa - think "mix" but with the same vowel as in Ms.

[venta]

Thanks - think I was expecting to pronounce it as two letters (no, I can't really justify why I expected that :-)