So I like my job (of approx. 3 weeks), except for one thing. The store manager (let's call him Sean) shit-talks as much as he exhales. Some examples:
- From the moment I sat down for the interview, Sean regaled me with tales of e.g. high-schoolers who dipped after a week because they had a math test. (I saw the red flag, but I took the job because I had been unemployed for a while.)
- On line with me, Sean shit-talked one of the employees that's maybe a week newer than me, for a mistake I had made frequently when I was as new as them.
- And the part that makes me seethe: On the makeline, Sean referenced a trans former employee, and was met with the sentiment that "[she] was weird" and "[she] was kind of an asshole" (to be clear, the inclusion of "she was weird" makes my autistic ass completely disbelieve the rest of that sentence). Sean said she had changed her name "to some other weird feminine name" since then, and remarked that one should pick a name and stick with it. And they deadnamed her, because of course they fucking did.
To be completely clear, the shit-talking tends to be true it's just that there's no reason to vent to the makeline. I know the social dynamic happening here: By alternating between painting employees as bad employees and wrongheaded individuals, there is an implication that if you try hard enough you can be part of the in-group that shit-talks rather than the out-group that is shit-talked. I get it and am not falling for it.
But my question for trans autistics: What do? The traditional advice for dealing with a recreational shit-talker is to run and not make yourself a target, so that excludes talking directly to Sean (for all I know, he hates my tgirl autism swag anyway). Some of the managers below Sean are I think queer, but to my knowledge all are cis, and as a whole I'd guess they have a sub-20% accuracy with pronouns and are annoyed by my autistic habits like echolalia and needing things repeated. I dunno whether we have a dedicated HR, but if they're cis I know they won't understand the root of the problem. I imagine at best they'll make a proclamation that deadnaming is bad actually... but then we aren't taking the "don't make yourself a target advice", really.
And again, I like my job, other than the fact that my coworkers are such cis people-- in particular, I think the environment is one of the few good foodservice environments for the ol' tism, in terms of acoustics.
Any suggestions?
