BINTEL BRIEFHer name is Rivke. She hates it when people on the phone call her ‘sir’
Bintel says there are ways to manage being misgendered — and the anxiety that comes with it

A woman is flustered when people on the phone get her gender wrong. Illustration by iStock/Canva
A Bintel Brief, Yiddish for a bundle of letters, has been solving reader dilemmas since 1906. Send yours via email, social media or this anonymous form.
Dear Bintel,
I have a distinctively Jewish first name: Rivke. Outside Jewish circles, no one knows that name, nor what gender it’s associated with.
When I meet people in person, they use feminine pronouns, which matches my driver’s license and appearance. But when there’s only my voice on the other end of a call, customer support staff call me “sir.” It bothers and annoys me.
I’d prefer people ignore my gender unless we’re, say, negotiating “under the covers” consent, where for most folks it actually matters. It’s irrelevant when scheduling a plumber or calling about a product problem. But the support person is in a tricky position in a difficult job. So I don’t react in anger or sarcasm.
OK, actually, that’s a lie: Once I started calling the masculine-voiced operator “ma’am.” They responded sounding hurt, and I regretted it immediately. Support staff take lots of abuse from irate customers. Their bosses expect them to be unctuous, calling the customer “sir” or “ma’am.” Not doing so could cost their job — despite the irrelevance of gender. So I let it slide these days, saving any rant of frustration for after the call — I talk to the wall.
But I also resist making calls that I need to make because I don’t want to hear it. I am stumped for a kind way to make the correction. They’re doing their job in the expected “appropriate” way. Have you any ideas on kindly and gently correcting their misgendering without making them feel awful? Phone support is already a high-stress job. I don’t want to make them feel chastened or stupid or anything.
Signed,
Confounded Caller
Dear Confounded Caller,
I’m sure you know that Jews are not uniquely afflicted by this phenomenon. It happens to lots of folks with uncommon or unisex names, as well as to those whose voices sound lower or higher than what’s associated with their gender.
I asked a few friends with unusual names how they respond to being misgendered, and they shrugged it off, saying it’s not a big deal.
“I’m a Ms., not a Mr.,” is how one acquaintance responds when a 1-800 agent uses the wrong honorific. Another person I know, a man, casually interrupts the conversation to say, “Excuse me, just FYI: Please don’t call me ma’am. I’m a man, not a woman.”
Don’t worry about hurting the call representatives’ feelings. Unless you’re being abusive, I doubt they “feel awful” about their errors. People who talk to strangers for a living get corrected on various assumptions all the time. It’s part of the job. Neither they nor most people who are accidentally misgendered on the phone should take it personally.
Sure, it would be nice if those tasked with speaking to strangers were more careful or more sensitive about gender assumptions, but we can’t control how they’re trained to interact with the public. All you can do is correct them in a straightforward fashion, try not to let it get to you, and maybe rationalize a bit: If you really need a plumber, who cares if they think you’re a man instead of a woman. Your assertion that your gender only really matters in bed is, of course, correct.
Using Jewish rituals to affirm gender
You say you’re “annoyed” when you’re mistaken for a man on the phone, but being misgendered can also be deeply upsetting, especially for people who are nonbinary or transitioning. In a 2019 essay, Ze’evi Berman wrote of feeling “overwhelmed” and wanting to cry in response to being misgendered. “Every day, I weigh the option of correcting the well-meaning stranger who called me ‘ma’am’ or the new acquaintance who used the wrong pronouns simply because they didn’t think to ask,” said Berman, at the time a Hebrew Union College cantorial student.
Going to a mikvah — the Jewish ritual bath — helped Berman affirm “the beauty and validity of my gender” and placed them “in the living history of trans and nonbinary people in Jewish communities.” Others have used renaming ceremonies and adult b’nai mitzvah to publicly and Jewishly proclaim their gender identities.
It’s worth noting, as Rabbi Elliot Kukla explained in a New York Times op-ed, that ancient Judaism recognized a range of genders in newborns: boy, girl, tumtum (neither clearly male nor female), and androgynos (with both male and female attributes). For the record, Conservative Judaism’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards in 2017 said transgender individuals should “be recognized as their publicly declared gender and addressed by their publicly declared name and pronouns.”
Learning to quell anxiety
Rabbi Ari Lev Fornari, in a Kol Nidre sermon a few years ago, said Jews and queer people share “agency over when and how we choose to disclose our identities.” No one is “obligated to reveal the whole truth about ourselves if it does not feel safe,” Fornari said, adding: “Jews actually have a long history of this kind of lying as a survival strategy.”
I hope you can learn to quell your insecurities around being misgendered to the point where you can nonchalantly correct whoever’s on the other end of the phone. Consider writing up a simple script, memorize it, or keep it handy for when you’re ordering a pizza or talking to the cable company.
Either that, or forget about it. Like you say, it matters to those with whom you are intimate. But it truly doesn’t matter to the person on the phone who’s scheduling the plumber.
Do you have any additional thoughts for this advice-seeker? Send them to [email protected] or send in a question of your own. And don’t miss a Bintel: Sign up for our Bintel Brief newsletter.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism so that we can be prepared for whatever news 2025 brings.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO