My Story Part 80 – Harassment

I have eating in hundreds of restaurants, from Maine to North Carolina, in all the New England states and in only three have I been harassed by the staff. All the restaurants that I have gone to have treated my excellently, the service has been friendly and the food good, including those three restaurants. However, the kitchen staff in those three restaurants is another story, the staff snuck out to catch a glimpse of me. Sunday when I glance over to look at the boat that was leaving, the bartender was staring at me (the bar was down at the other end of the restaurant) and a little while later when I looked over that way, there was a kid with an apron, I don’t if he was the cook or a dishwasher) was also staring at me. A few years ago, at a restaurant in New Haven, I was with a couple of trans-friends and the same thing happened, the kitchen staff kept on peeking out of the kitchen door. Once at a fast food restaurant the staff came out from the food preparation area and walking by me with their wrist limp and laughing.

As I said, the service and the food were all good, but it was their kitchen staff that was a problem. Would management have tolerated it if they knew what their staff was doing?

Back in my college days (two months ago) one of the papers that I had to write a term paper about was a book that we read by Elliot Aronson called “The Social Animal” and from the book we had to pick one chapter to write about. I picked “Conforming”. I wrote about the chapter,

I believe that Aronson had several theories in mind when he wrote the chapters on Conformity, some of the factors are; wanting to belong, wanting to be accepted, the need to be part of the social group and the need to be wanted. All of these factors interplay on one another to produce a strong desire to conform to what we believe that our family, friends, and organizations or groups that are a part of our daily lives. Some of our worst fears are not being loved or not being liked or to be left out in the cold to fend for ourselves.

That is the lesson that the staff was teaching, you do not belong, you do not conform to societies standards. Society uses a two by four to drive individuals to conform, sometime it just subtle hints and other times it can be brutal death to teach others to conform.

I went on to write,

Compare and contrast it to any other theory discussed in class
There are several theories which may apply to conformity. The first of which relates to the class lecture on Behavior Modification where the method to modify the behavior is based on rewards and punishments and the same can be said for conformity. Aronson said in “The Social Animal” (2004) that “People have a powerful need to belong. Acceptance and rejection are among the most potent rewards and punishments for social animals, because in our evolutionary history, social exclusion could have disastrous consequences…” (p. 27). In the case of conformity it is the acceptance of the family or community that is our reward or punishment whichever the case maybe. I know of trans-persons that when they came out to the family they were thrown out of the family, never to speak to any family member ever again just because they did not conform to the gender norms.

Do you remember what I wrote last week about Anderson Cooper AC360 show and Reparative Therapy how the mother was told to withhold her love if her son acted feminine. You will conform or your mother will not love you, is a very powerful way to teach a social lesson; I leaned it when I was young, you behave like a boy or else.

A third area that pertains to conformity is also mentioned by Schriver (1998) when he list the stages of Kohlberg model; stages 3 and 4. Where stage 3 focuses on good relations and the approval of others and stage 4 is about our desire to conform to social norms. This is a good example of how both Aronson and Kohlberg both agree that a part of growing up is learning how to conform…

Society is putting thumbscrews on us, you will behave as a little boy or girl should… or else!

One of the questions that we had to answer for the paper is why we chose the chapter that we picked. My answers was,

However conformity is something that all of us in the trans-community have in common, the desire to conform is what we have to overcome in ourselves in order to be whole. It is the fear of what will our family say or what will the neighbors say or what will…. the list just keeps going on and on, every time we walk out of the house we face the results of non-conforming. The social pressures to conform builds up in us until we reach a point where we say, “Screw You World” and are able to break the hold that the desire to conform has on us.