I was working in a restaurant with a very rude and hollow manager. It was very word of mouth and incredibly micromanaging and definitely did not like me and the other baristas. One day, I heard a piece of drama from the servers that were friends with the baristas. I overheard that this manager, who will go unnamed, wanted to fire all of the baristas because of “political differences” and that we were all “soft and needy.” This was obvious to us that she meant that we were all various members of the LGBTQ+ community, and that we wanted her to use our respective pronouns. It made me feel incredibly hurt and also worried for my job as a manager and peer of mine directly wanted to fire not only me but my entire list of coworkers. I was not surprised by this comment but I was still unsettled as I did not expect to hear it first-hand. This incident was overtly about our GS/OCRE and it did not take too much to see that this was the cause of it.
