Dear Sirs.
Since September of 2019, I have documented on my personal Twitter account every time my institutional reference queue has been sent a message starting “dear sirs.”
The count as of today (almost eleven months in) is sixteen.
Recently, I’ve started attaching gifs of Jim from the sitcom The Office to my tweets. Jim a lovable, good looking white man, deadpans at the camera or raises his eyebrows or shrugs casually in response to “‘Dear. Sirs.’ Never. Fails. To. Enrage. Me” — as if every time this happens it isn’t anything more than a minor annoyance worthy of an eye roll.
Some days, I tell myself that is all that it is. But that’s a lie.
The truth is, some days (most days), what I actually do is skillfully bury and suppress my strong feelings of frustration, anger and impatience. I am very good at this. I have a lot of practice. The patriarchy is a great teacher, isn’t it?
Despite appearances, this persistent thoughtlessness is more than just a minor annoyance. And today, Dear Sirs, I’m going to tell you why.
[First, however, let me clarify that I do not consider this salutation choice and its impact “misgendering”. For more information on how misgendering is a particular act of violence against the trans and non-gender binary community, this video explanation by Riley J. Dennis is a good place to start.]
Dear Sirs,
Thank you for contacting Special Collections regarding whatever it is that you want my help with.
We’ll get to that, but first, why in this day and age do you assume that all folks who work in this Special Collections library are men?
Since most of you do not seem to be first time users, I find it truly remarkable that you have failed to notice or internalize that as of 2018, 77.7% of those of us who work in Libraries and Archives and 83.5% of those of use who identify themselves as “Librarians” are women per DataUSA. I have a hard time believing that all of you are aware of not only how “pink collar” this profession is, but also the fact that as of 1999 43% of library directors are still men. Do you think that answering reference questions is a task so important that it is only worthy of a library director and therefore you are (more) likely to be reaching a man (or, more puzzlingly, a team of men, because it’s always Dear Sirs)?
Or, do you do it because the world of Archives and Special Collections has a history of being an old boys club? A tradition whose disgusting tendrils still manage to cling to this profession with an unfortunate amount of fortitude (hello and screw you, Club of Odd Volumes).
Or, if this isn’t an assumption about library work or Special Collections as a field, is it an assumption about Princeton? Do you assume that only a certain kind of person — a person who MUST have a penis, because, and this is my own assumption here, when you say “Dear Sirs,” I don’t think the image you have of you recipient includes trans men — would be allowed to work at such a venerable institution (I regret to inform you that somehow many people who are not men have duped Princeton Special Collections into hiring us)?
Unfortunately, none of the above excuses are proper explanations, so we’re left where we began. Why do you address your messages “Dear Sirs”?
Because the fact is there is no good reason to address your email “Dear Sirs”. Or “Dear Ladies” (this does not give you permission nor encouragement to start addressing your emails “Dear Ladies” instead. Please, please, do not do that). There is no good reason to gender your greeting at all. There are only bad reasons.
And most likely reason must be that you just aren’t thinking about it. You may mean to convey respect, I see that, but instead, every time I read your email and am confronted with this “greeting”, the words on the screen may read “Dir Sirs” but, in a whisper almost too soft to hear, the message is “you, woman, do not belong here. I did not expect to find you here.”
You, woman, do not belong in this profession standardized by a man hailed as “a pioneer in the creation of career opportunities for women” but also sexually assaulted the women he pretended to empower.
You, woman, do not belong in this field, where some people still believe that it is acceptable in professional forums to make jokes at the expense of women’s bodies and the voices of women and LGBTQIA people are obscured in our finding aids and catalogs.
You, woman, do not belong at this institution that did not accept women as students until 1969 and the majority of management positions are held by men.
You, woman. You do not belong here.
(Where do I belong, then, if not here in this overly feminized, overly white, profession? Where is it, exactly, that you expect to find me?)
Is this, Dear Sirs, what you actually mean by “Dear Sirs”?
I, actually, hope not. I actually hope that you’re just not thinking about it. Because as much as I know and loathe the unconscious reflexes of the patriarchy, I also know and fear the conscious resolutions it breeds. I know that there are people in this world who believe that I do not deserve to even answer their emails because of my gender. I have known this truth since I was eight years old and a male classmate told me very sincerely that I could not be president because I was a girl. I know because women (white women like me, yes, but more-so Black women, Latinx women, Trans women…) have been and still are excluded and marginalized so purposefully in so many spaces for so long by so many different kinds of people. Including, very much so, in this profession that I love.
So, I guess what it really boils down to is this: did you mean to negate and demean me and my colleagues? or were you just being careless?
Now, with that out of the way, how is is that I can help you with your research today?
cheers,
Emma M. Sarconi