Virgin Atlantic has announced that it is relaxing its gender identity policies. This means that women and men don’t have to wear red and burgundy respectively anymore and can also either wear skirts or trousers – it is up to them.
We wondered what people felt about it, especially the LGBTQ+ community who were the inspiration for the change. You can hear the answers of those we spoke to in the video.
Not everybody is happy about the changes. The Daily Mail found social media users who thought that staff would prefer a pay rise. Meanwhile in the same paper Janet Street Porter appeared to dismiss the changes as less important than avoiding the kind of “tortuous summer” that travellers endured in 2021 when the airline was under fire for lost luggage, cancelled flights and problems with passports.
Given Virgin’s bad press, the intention behind the gender identity policy changes could even be interpreted as a deliberate distraction.
Gender-neutral uniforms in schools have been around for a while. In 2019 one of the UK’s largest independent uniform providers, Stevensons, began marketing a uniform with no specific gender, and many schools have adopted gender-neutral uniforms since then.
Meanwhile back up in the air, British Airways have announced that they too are reviewing their uniform policy. But as for Virgin, in fact Alaska Airlines actually beat them to it, if only by a mere five months.
Edited by Nadrine Narku
