A large portion of people reading this won’t think about their pronouns at all; because it doesn’t affect you, sometimes it’s hard to understand its importance. For many people, being misgendered is a heartbreaking experience, and in order to ease that pain and suffering of those minorities it’s up to the wider society to be kind by offering tiny changes.
Tiny changes that really don’t impact your life, but make huge differences to other peoples lives.
Not Another Salon have launched ‘Pronoun Badges’.
By wearing a pronoun badge you are normalising expressing your pronouns, which even if it is not important to you, will be hugely instrumental in a global change making salons and business more inclusive.
So why is there a need for pronoun badges in a salon environment?Founder, Sophia Hilton, says:
“By wearing your badge you are signalling to other people that you respect them. For you, it’s such a small insignificant change, but to those that it is significant for they will be left with the feeling of acknowledgement and acceptance.
In an ideal world everybody would introduce themselves along with their pronoun which would normalise the conversation, but I do believe we’re a far cry from that. This is a small subtle change that can be implemented with little backlash from those that don’t understand.
A badge opens conversations and gets people talking which is how we move these conversations forward.”
Not Another Salon was the U.K.’s first official gender neutral salon. The story went viral across the world and slowly other salons started to catch up and implement it into salons worldwide. Sophia believes it’s their responsibility to look at what the next move is to keep salons as inclusive as possible.
DO’S AND DON’TS WHEN IT COMES TO PRONOUNS.
CALM DOWN THE DRAMA
When you accidentally misgender someone just softly apologise, take a little breath, correct yourself and continue to talk. What you need to avoid doing is making a big fuss and apologising over and over. It really adds too much drama to the situation and makes things worse. Make the error, apologise, correct and continue.
INTRODUCE YOURSELF
Remember it’s perfectly acceptable to ask someone’s pronouns, but you can also do this in a more subtle way. By simply introducing yourself and your own pronouns you create a safe environment and naturally invite the other person to share their pronouns too.
For example ‘Hey I’m Sophia, my pronouns are she/her’.
It really is that simple. By acknowledging these things we can make all the difference in salon environments worldwide!