My parents raised me to always say “yes sir” and “no ma’am”, and I automatically say it to service workers and just about anyone with whom I’m not close that I interact with. I noticed recently that I had misgendered a cashier when saying something like “no thank you, ma’am” based on their appearing AFAB, but on a future visit to the store they had added their pronouns (they) to their name tag. I would feel bad if their interaction with me was something they will remember when feeling down. This particular person has a fairly androgynous haircut/look and wears a store uniform, so there’s no gender clue there.
I am thinking I need to just stop saying “sir” and “ma’am” altogether, but I like the politeness and I don’t know how I would replace it in a gender-neutral way. Is there anything better than just dropping it entirely?
For background I’m a millennial and more than happy to use people’s correct pronouns if I know them!
I wouldn’t say “deference” accurately describes my intent when using the terms, but my usage is probably a bit atypical.
I use them in much the same manner as a judge would use them when addressing a litigant, or a teacher might use them when addressing a student: to indicate a respectful and welcoming mentality, but without inviting familiarity. When I am happy you are here right now, but I don’t particularly want to be your friend.
I speak a language with a formal you and am constantly trying to use it to tell people to back off, but it doesn’t really work like that. That’s absolutely what I do in English with ma’am/sir though.
I used to work in a call center for an insurance company, so people would get upset and shitty with us. My default to “reset” politeness was to allow a couple beats of silence, then say “well sir/ma’am, xyz is what I can do to help you. Would you like my help?” It worked about 90% of the time, but drawing the silence out longer and adding more audibly sarcastic sugar on the sir/ma’am would generally work at either getting them in line or provoking them enough to cross the line so we could hang up on them.
I speak some German and Spanish with the formal You (Sie and Usted) and it’s handy but adds complication as a learner.