How to deal with contractors when you’re a butch dyke?
Alas, no matter how hard you try, you might need a cis dude’s help!
My partner and I are extremely privileged to own a small house with a big garden in the San Francisco bay area. Her parents bought the house for us in 2017 but we’ve been struggling to even imagine doing any necessary major repairs until a year or so ago for lack of necessary funds. Hello queer tax! Lesbian couples have significantly less wealth than their straight or gay men counterparts. When we finally had a little extra money from selling the property I inherited from my own parents, we decided to get our 300ft fence redone. One of our older neighbors said that it’s been there for at least fifty or sixty years. That’s a long run. After the several “atmospheric rivers” we’ve had in the past few years, major parts of the fence were falling into some of our neighbors' yards, so we really had to do something. I got in touch with all of our neighbors to make sure they would be able to split the bill with us, which they did. I then went on the longest contractor man chase I’ve had to deal with in my life. It took me a year and a half to find someone who would do it for a price within our budget. If you own a home in the bay area, you’d know how expensive contractors can be. We got quotes that varied by three times as much for technically what seemed to be the same work and material. But that wasn’t the issue for us--we had some funds.
As a butch, I’m used to performing extra well to “pass” in traditionally masculine realms. My dad was a master carpenter and he never cared that I was a girl. He enrolled me to help him build my house as a kid and a teenager. I also took carpentry classes as an adult. I know my shit! But I still do extra research to reassure myself that I’m operating from a place of expertise.
Sadly, from the first contractor I spoke to, to the last, I was treated like a “girl” who doesn’t know anything about construction and doesn’t need to know anything about their process. It doesn’t matter that I am well informed and that I know what makes for structural integrity. They call me a “sweet little girl” but I can feel when men are passive aggressively trying to punish me by slotting me into this box because they can’t quite accept the way that I relate to them. Consequently, in an effort to make it work, I’ve had to gradually lower my butchness and assertiveness. I had to make myself small and ignorant even though I'm used to engaging with men like I believe I’m an equal. But I learned early on that I couldn’t treat those cis men the same way I treat women and gender nonconforming or non binary folks. I had to be extra careful of their fragile little boys’ feelings. Any questions I had about permitting, material quality, timeline or design were smoothly overlooked with a big smile and plenty of bullshit. I can tell when they're just trying to get me to agree and pay so that they can do the cheapest job possible. And that’s when they weren’t directly lying to my face or mansplaining things to me. I was disregarded and condescendingly called “sweet” more times in this past year and a half than I would ever want in my lifespan. It was painful, degrading, and awfully frustrating to the point that half way through my search, I had to take a break to get some perspective on the project and fill up my butch tank with energy to go back to dealing with this fence project.
I won’t even talk about the contractors who refused to update their quotes because they made mistakes, wouldn’t take responsibility, ignored me, and found easier clients they could bamboozle. I won’t talk about the contractors who made me flag and spray in white the entire 300ft to get the utilities marked and the construction project bureaucratically registered only to never show up, never even returning my voicemails. I interviewed SO MANY contractors (all cis men, to my great desperation).
The reality is that none of the contractors I managed to schedule to get them to take a look at my garden for a potential quote ended up being hired. I had to rely on two of my neighbors to find someone. I simply wasn’t able to get the project going on my own. It made me feel like I was going nuts!
We ended up going with a local community contractor that our cis straight woman neighbor knew. I’d seen some of his work and it looked good. I saw sturdy retaining walls and solid fences he built nearby. My neighbor’s big family is very involved and highly regarded in her community, of which the contractor is a part. This meant that her contractor was theoretically going to be accountable to her and their community, which was a big relief, even though he refused to give us a written detailed quote, and I wasn’t able to deal with him directly--he only answered to my neighbor. I agreed to meet with him on the date and time he offered, we agreed to a vague $50 per fence foot price, and they started the work a few days later on a bright Monday morning.
What’s absolutely amazing is that even though we had agreed to specific aspects of the project (retaining walls, post distance, fence height, etc), the more the fence was getting built, the more the contractor decided to omit or change some of the major parts we had agreed on. My neighbor and I ended up meeting with him first thing every morning so that she could tell him what to do, as he just wouldn’t listen to me, instead nonchalantly announcing here and there to me (when it was too late) that he didn’t do what we had planned. I don’t know if his patience for listening to a cis woman of his community wore thin, or whether he realized my neighbor was simply repeating to him what I had said, but he soon began disregarding her as well. So after a week knee-deep into this fence project, we had to enroll my other neighbor, a cis man, who luckily was open to helping. This was very welcome, because I was starting to notice that the more I made requests, the more the contractor seemed to passively aggressively go out of his way to disregard me.
How is it possible that I, a butch dyke, explained and showed to the contractor that he shouldn’t dig a post in a specific area because the water utilities marked a blue line on the sidewalk (which meant there was a pipe right there) and yet, at the last second, I had to stop him from pouring 3 bags of concrete over my lateral sewage pipe? How is it possible that the same thing happened again a few hours later with the gas pipe? Am I invisible?
It was pretty surreal when I realized that our contractor was talking to my cis dude neighbor and talking past me like I literally didn’t exist. Being completely invisible, I even witnessed a conversation between the contractor and my cis dude neighbor about how the contractor felt ganged up on that morning by me, my cis woman neighbor, and my partner, who were desperately and yet respectfully addressing the major problematic structural changes he had taken on without letting us know first. Like I said, I had to seriously lower my butchness on this project, and smile and congratulate my contractor and his team even though they were actively ignoring and dehumanizing me! After all, it wasn’t the first time I was being ignored by cis men. Normally, I find ways to move skillfully around them. The main issue though is that accommodating their sensitivity to requests made it impossible to get the fence I wanted. It didn’t matter that I had requests because I didn’t exist. Literally. It would have been so nice to be able to give some instructions, trust they would not be mostly ignored--I probably would have even been able to get some work done during the two weeks that the project lasted!
The good news is that after giving up work for two full weeks to carefully manage the contractor and his team from 9am to 5pm every weekday, we finally had a new fence. The bad news is that the contractor used the cheapest material (even though he told me he would get it from a higher quality place), one of our gates is completely unaligned and doesn’t close well, the fence is crooked everywhere, the overall wooden structure isn’t flush, the property line got pushed back a foot in some areas, we had to finish the retaining walls ourselves here and there, and we have a big pile of wood and concrete scraps they were supposed to haul away but never did. I’m glad my dad isn’t here anymore to see the final result. But guess what, one side of our fence is better than the rest. Of course it’s the side of my cis dude neighbor, and I am very grateful to him for his precious help, even though I had to seriously swallow my feelings and accept to let him lead the end of the project. I gifted him and his family a big basket of organic seasonal fruits like the good neighbor dyke I am!
The sad reality is that due to my struggles associated with toxic masculinity, sexism and butchphobia, as well as the daily overstimulation of this kind of loud chaotic construction work, I had to take another week off from work to recover from this rollercoaster. That’s three weeks off work total. I can tell you that I really don’t want to take on any new project in many years. The toll is too big on my life.
Until next time, take good care of yourselves!
A big thank you to my life partner for editorial support.
And as for trying to work as a contractor...my wife was a fully qualified electrician. Hardly did any work on sites and in mainstream contracting because the culture was so hostile. She ended up self employed as a single and specialising (by accident, via word of mouth recommendations) in domestic electricals, doing jobs for lots of elder women living alone who preferred female tradespeople in their homes. Back in the 80s, UK had a great organisation, WIM, aimed at training and encouraging women into manual trades. But it didn't know what those people would face once they tried to enter the blue collar workforce. Fuck all those stooooopid binaries and unfounded assumptions!