"Don't call me a lady, although God knows my mother keeps hoping"

[resonant]

Since the kidlet identified themself as agender a while back, I've been noticing gendered language even more than I did before. And one thing I've noticed is how often customer-service politeness seems to call for identifying the genders of your customers and then calling them by it.

"How are you ladies doing?" "If you'll step right this way, ladies ..." "Would you ladies prefer a table or a booth?" "Did you ladies find everything all right?" Before, I had never had reason to notice this, but it happens nearly every day.

Why go to the small but nonzero risk of really offending someone by calling them the wrong gender, when it's so easy to address a group as "folks" (or "y'all" if you're in the right part of the country), or simply not to name the group at all?

I doubt anyone is thinking, "I'll give 'em a case of stereotype threat -- when I remind 'em that they're just females, they'll remember their place." But it wouldn't surprise me if at least some of these folks are thinking, "Treat 'em like ladies and they'll behave like ladies," which amounts to much the same thing.

Comments

[rydra_wong]

I saw a comment somewhere (from someone trans, in fact) that she got hammered by her boss if she didn't address people as "sir", "ma'am", etc..

I'm in fervent agreement with your feelings about this, but I try to bear in mind that the people using the terms to me are very often not the ones making the decisions about the standards for customer-service politeness.

[indywind]

I had a great experience with customer-service staff recently, while out with my spouse (an approximately lady-type person).

The waiter gave us excellent service: attentive, accommodating, good-tempered and polite, even though the restaurant was quite full and the few staff were all kept busy and would have been within rights to be a little inattentive or brusque. The waiter only trotted out the gendered address toward the end, asking "Is there anything else I can get for you ladies?" while giving me the check.
I said, "I'm not a lady, but I'd like to thank you for your excellent service so far."
Waiter: "Oh! I'm sorry, um, sir?"
Me:"No problem. 'Folks' is fine for us."
Waiter: "Oh! Thank you. Is there anything else I can get for you folks?"
...
We left that waiter a 30% tip, cash.

[gnomad]

Yeah, sir or ma'am is a hard one to get away from because service employees have been drilled that it's how you indicate casual politeness. I get a lot of 'sir...sorry! ma'am' and the occasional 'sweetheart' (which seems gender neutral except they don't sweetheart the dudes, blegh).

I've gotten good at using it as a casual barometer of how well I'm passing (which is sometimes not that much, sadly) and therefore which toilet it's safe to use, but that's about all it's good for.