Rejoice, flight attendants! British airline Virgin Atlantic announced last week that they are switching to a gender-neutral uniform policy.
Previously, female flight crew members donned the airline’s iconic bright red skirt suit, while male crew wore burgundy three-piece suits. Now they may choose which uniform best matches their gender identity and pop on an accompanying pin informing customers of their chosen pronouns.
The YouTube video announcing the new policy features several “non-binary” crew members who express pleasure at the change. Curiously, Virgin Atlantic opted to disable comments on the video and hide the number of dislikes.
Cockburn used to think any man who opted to serve him a drink while wearing a skirt simply had a humiliation fetish. But Virgin Atlantic claims the practice is actually empowering.
“People feel empowered when they are wearing what best represents them, and this gender identity policy allows people to embrace who they are and bring their full selves to work,” Michelle Visage, a judge for Ru Paul’s Drag Race, said in a statement.
Nothing is more terrifying than an “empowered” flight attendant. The world saw the disastrous results of such nonsense during the Covid-19 pandemic. Crew members spent most of their flights henpecking customers about having their masks below their noses in between sips of Clamato or, worse, kicked off families because a toddler couldn’t abide by the mask mandate.
It’s one thing to watch a grown man strut down the aisle in patent red pumps because Cockburn “accidentally” flipped his hotel room’s television to Logo TV. But even Cockburn, progressive as he may be, would start praying for a safe landing if a Rachel Levine lookalike popped out of the cockpit to provide the cabin with a weather update.
Wouldn’t any airline be better served by focusing on crew retention through higher pay and better working hours? Maybe then passengers wouldn’t be constantly facing delays and cancelled flights despite the cost of airline tickets outpacing inflation.
Instead, Virgin Atlantic wants to cater to the small minority of staff who are suffering from main character syndrome. They may think they’re the star of an HBO series about a hot mess flight attendant who bags a rich passenger before solving his murder. In truth, they are the annoying tertiary character who interrupts Spiderman 2 so they can force us all watch the same safety presentation over and over again.
The good news is that if any passengers are scared of misgendering a crew member, Cockburn has a foolproof method for gender-neutrally capturing a flight attendant’s attention. It’s simple: just jam your call button a few times and then alternate between snapping your fingers and waving wildly while yelling “attendant!” He tried this on his last flight, and received his whiskey coke well before any of the other passengers. It was surely an accident that xe/xir spilled half of it down Cockburn’s tweed blazer.
