“Hi, my name is Logan, and I’m a girl.”
That was how I started every letter to a stranger when I was young.
I love my name. Yes, among friends I go by Lolo, but my name is Logan and I am (for the most part) proud of it. It’s a sturdy name, one you can’t tease.
But it is, for the most part, a gendered name. And that gender is, for the most part, male. I’ve lived my whole life correcting people who assume that I am in fact a boy. It’s lead me to have some very interesting feelings in regard to gender—especially my own.
Recently I was doing some email correspondence for work. To make a very long story short, I sent a compassionate email to a customer who was looking for something that had once been important to her and her father, who had died a few weeks before. She wrote back, ecstatic, but referring to me several times as a man.
Unsure how to respond, since she had said she would be coming into the store, I let the email sit unanswered. Today she wrote me again, worried that the lack of response was because she had in some way offended me.
Which of course she hadn’t—I generally don’t care what gender people see me as, though this one had given me pause because she was in such a volatile state (hence the reason for my extra care originally), and she still plans to eventually come in to pick up the items she was looking for.
But it got me to thinking—how important is it, in situations like that, to know the gender of the person you are speaking with? Is gender something that important to us?
My coworker, when I told him about the snafu, suggested I include my (feminine) middle name in my email’s signature.
That is a possibility, though frequently when I use it people believe my first name is Elaine, and my last name Logan. I also worry it is giving people who I may only email once too much information about me. (Though a quick google shows at least two or three other Logan Elaine’s in the US, which, I did not expect!)
So, I ask your advice. When in a business situation, even if it is something as simple as emailing a store to see if they have a product, is it important to know the gender of who you’re speaking with? When going back and forth, establishing a merchant-client relationship, would it be too strange to realize that the vision you had of someone’s gender was incorrect?
Do I need to be Logan Elaine?
