I have a temporary job working at a Montessori School. Not in the classroom but in the office, where interaction with the children isn't really an expected part of my job. But we're understaffed. The other day, the teacher in the classroom for 3 to 6 year olds needed a bathroom break and there was no teacher's assistant to cover, so I was asked to step in. Except not quite exactly step in. "Just stand at the entrance to the classroom until she gets back", the administrator told me. "I don't want to send a man in with the children, some of the parents won't like that".
I fumed while I waited there, not liking this. (The children know me from the front office; they're alert and bright and know all the adults by name from early September on. They called to me from within the classroom and asked why I didn't come on in). So I stood there doing a slow burn, and rehearsed telling my boss I was unwilling to work there any more because of this.
This, by the way, is what dysphoria is for me. For other gender-variant people, misgendering may occur when people use the wrong pronoun, or when they are referred to as "male" when they identify as "female" or vice versa. In my case, I consider myself to have both a sex and a gender, and don't have a preferred pronoun; I don't mind being referred to as male because I am male, and most of the time being referred to as a man doesn't provoke my ire, either, because in most cases the person speaking isn't using it offensively, just ignorantly. But when I get lumped in with other men, with my attributes extrapolated from what is known or thought of men in general, and distinguished from women, that's misgendering and I hate it personally and viscerally and with shocking pain, personally affronted by it.
When the teacher returned, I stalked down to the administrator's office. "You told me to wait outside the classroom because the parents would not like a man being in the classroom with their children. So you would not have said the same thing to a female office worker if she was asked to cover?" I crossed my arms, already preparing my I-quit sentence within my head.
"I am not willing to expose any of the men who work for me to the horrible attitudes of some of these parents", she replied. "Let me tell you about Brian. He was a student here, honor student, really nice boy. I had him working in my office for awhile when he was a young adult. One day the police showed up and demanded to know if I had Brian Jones working here, because they needed to arrest him on suspicion of child molestation. He would never do such a thing, everyone who knew him agreed with that. What had happened was the children were playing flag football during gym class and one of the girls lost her flag from where they tuck it in, in the back of their shorts at the waistband, you know, and she had trouble reaching back there to get it back in, so he helped her. But her mother heard that there was a man working with the children and she asked the girl if he had ever touched her and she had no idea what her mother meant by that. Anyway, I'm not willing to put you or any other man in that kind of situation".
Hmmph.
That does put a different spin on things. If she had said "I am not willing to expose my children to any risk of sexual misconduct" or "I am not willing to expose my school to the risk of such accusations", I would have been so out of there. Because my maleness doesn't make me a threat to children and I'll be damned if I'll tolerate that kind of insinuation. But she'd couched it in terms of the risk to me of being targeted by that kind of bigotry.
Oh, it's still the wrong answer. There exists what I call "The Weather Approach" to social problems. Someone addresses all the incoming women students on campus and warns them not to dress revealingly or to be out unaccompanied by themselves, because there's a risk of rape, and in doing that they are treating the behavior of the men on campus as if they were the weather--no responsibility for their own behavior, so those who might get exposed to it have all the responsibility of dressing for it and carrying an umbrella. We don't expect the weather to develop a consciousness of how it treats the people it rains on, so it makes rational sense to tell people to take the weather into account and plan accordingly. But men are not the weather. Neither are bigoted parents with sexist attitudes. So it's the wrong answer. Ideally she should have spoken to me about what I might be exposing myself to, risk-wise, but not acted so as to protect me without my having chosen to be protected.
The "Weather Approach" always tends to be complicated and convoluted. Does a parent of an oppressed and vilified raise his children to be free and untrammeled and unimpeded by societal labels, or to be savvy and wary of racists and haters?
I listened and went back to my desk, still employed there at least for now.
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