Talk about imperfect timing
It’s on Facebook, too. Not faring well.
Many sharp comments.
I would find it rather creepy/threatening and definitely intrusive if I was being cared for by a health professional who was wearing badges, written in a faux childish script, announcing ‘I am straight’ and ‘I like women’.
As a doctor myself, I would be concerned that some patients might take it as a license to be inappropriate as well. Plus, given how little time I have as it is to see patients – regrettably – I just don’t have the time to get into chats about ‘music’ and ‘cats’ and I wouldn’t want to set up expectations that I couldn’t fulfil in the moment.
These badges are unprofessional and possibly dangerous. Sexual feelings are largely concealed in the workplace for a good reason! Who you want to sleep with shouldn’t be relevant to your day job in health and social care and this gimmick is potentially damaging to HCW/patient relations. Please put a stop to it. It’ll only lead to trouble.
Another experienced professional:
Is this meant to be serious?
I’m sure I’m not alone in finding it deeply disturbing.
I worked in the NHS for most of my working life. It was not considered professionally appropriate to bring your sexuality, your personal life and your political views into work.
Being at work is not All About You.
It’s rather like religion. We don’t want people in medical settings greeting us bedecked with religious symbols either. It’s not our concern, and we don’t care. That’s not what we’re there for.
Why have professional organizations forgotten this basic fact?
It seems that for genderism, all other fields of human endeavour become wallpaper or scenery for the all-important, primary mission of Validation and Affirmation. At least other, more conventional religious fanatics put on a bit of show that their concerns are about saving your soul, poor, lost, worthless sinner that you are.
Not particularly relevant to a medical setting (though maybe I’m wrong), but people working in safety-critical jobs are now encouraged to ‘open up’ and share personal information in order to bond more closely into teams that can work well with each other and have each others’ backs. This philosophy is based on this woman’s work:
http://learnaslead.com/about/claire-nuer/
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/06/17/482203447/invisibilia-how-learning-to-be-vulnerable-can-make-life-safer
Isn’t the purpose of the lanyard to make it easier to tell whether a person is entitled to be in a particular place, and is supposed to be clearly displayed rather than be obstructed by silly, non-work related ephemera?
As I was saying on Twitter, the last time I saw a GP, she had to examine me – male – rather intimately. We had only just met. It was awkward, probably rather more so for her, but of course she carried it out with perfect professionalism and good humour. 10/10 would be humiliatingly examined by this woman again.
I can assure you that the last thing on either of our minds was each other’s sexualities or fucking pronouns. It was “let’s get this over as soon as possible and go back to pretending it never happened.”
Well, the other thing on my mind was the fact that I could have requested a male doctor, but she couldn’t have requested a female patient, but I don’t think there’s a badge for that.
Anyway, my point is the sort of mirror image of those from the doctors above: I for one would not have felt more comfortable reading about her sexuality, hobbies and interests in badge form. I’d have found it weird and a little invasive.
I mean, I don’t even talk to my barber. And my wife cuts my hair.
And as for (over) sharing in general…. When I was an academic computer scientist, a lot of my research was about privacy. I’ve expanded on this work a little since for people with actual money and for the book I’m supposed to be finishing (I’ll do it in a minute, OK, stop nagging.)
Anyway, without going into detail, one of the things I talk about a lot is the idea of privacy as a community enterprise. We have a tendency to see secrets, for example, as things we own. But we don’t; most secrets are shared with other people and if they’re not, the mechanisms by which we keep secrets are shared. Think of codes of silence or village huts with very thin walls; we pretend not to hear or we give people space if we think they need it. We work at producing environments in which we can keep secrets or share them (either implicitly or explicitly) under some mutual understanding that if you blab, the tables could be turned.
It’s all a lot more complicated than that of course but hopefully you get the idea.
Anyway, it should be obvious that social media is not built according to this model. It encourages over-sharing and the custodians of our privacy are no longer people we kinda-sorta trust, working in mudily mutual self-interest. I hypothesise that this is one of the reasons that social media is so batshit insane. It’s not anonymity as such that’s the issue, it’s a mistuning of inhibition because the space we’re operating in is fundamentally different to how we think it is and the nature of our interactions is not what we believe it to be.
So, to badges announcing our pronouns, sexualities, love of the Klingon language and cycling proficiency test scores. There’s a technical term (really) in privacy research called “ick.” Ick is when something doesn’t feel comfortable. It feels like oversharing. Someone knows a bit too much about you or you know a bit too much about them. For instance, one night when he was drunk, my dad told me out of the blue that he was circumcised. I didn’t know what to do with that information and now neither do you. It’s icky. It didn’t fit the expectations of our interaction. There were no rules within that interaction that told me whether or not it was appropriate for me, for example, to share that information on a public blog. Ickiness muddies the rules. That unexpected item (or lack of it) in the baggage area (so to speak) ruins the reasonable expectation of privacy. It also creates a prompt to over-share; he told me something personal… am I supposed to tell him something personal to balance things out? Ick can feel like a debt even when you didn’t want the information you’ve learned in the first place.
You can see where I’m going with this. Interactions between a patient and a doctor are intimate but now the patient is being bombarded with whatever information the doctor has chosen to broadcast. It’s icky, it changes the balance of power and it creates an expectation to over-share. Am I supposed to tell my doctor about my sexuality? Is she expecting it, or just open to hearing it? Is she open to hearing about it? Just because she showed me hers, it doesn’t mean she wants to see mine. Or does it? Who the fuck knows any more?
OK, I’m quite aware that I’m having badges do quite a lot of heavy lifting here, but I hope you see my point: the reason they seem icky is because they violate our tacit expectations of how that kind of formal but intimate relationship is supposed to work and we have no idea how to react. As when we use social media, the environment is taken out of our hands and placed in those of people who do not have our best interests at heart for reasons we don’t fully understand.
And we don’t know how to react. And it’s icky.
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I’m glad I’m not the only one to find the performative childish hypercuteness creepy as fuck.
Also the thing about oversharing. That shit’s bugged me for years. Of course, pointing out the creepiness of literally wearing one’s sexual orientation on one’s sleeve (or lapel, or hat, or …) is usually grounds for being called a homophobe. Les sigh.
The whole thing reminds me of a Key & Peele sketch.
I’m one of those people for whom certain jokes have ‘heirloom’ status (ie I will always laugh no matter how often I hear them). One of them was one my boss used to make in the early days of mobile phones–he would always answer his with an outraged ‘how did you know I was here?’
guest:
Similarly, the old joke about “how do I get to X? Well, I wouldn’t start from here…” is a favourite among software developers because…. well, it tells you absolutely everything you need to know about software development.
@9 I have heard people say this in real life, in all seriousness, more than once. Mostly in Ireland. BTW your ‘ick’ post is fascinating, and I now would very much like to read your book.
State of California government employees now announce their preferred pronouns in their email signatures.
I found that risible and creepy, and this discussion amplifies that, :)