twisted http context has byte method names, spyne wants unicode

[pacanukeha]

I'm running spyne 2.13.16 with twisted 21.7.0 on python 3.8 (ubuntu 18.04)
using Postman to test, I hit line 194 in soap11.py and the value of http_verb coming from the twisted http method context is b'POST' which fails http_verb == "POST"
twisted really seems to like ascii, it's all over their documentation - any suggestions as to how I can resolve this incompatibility? do I need to move away from twisted?