Ignore sticky posts' sticky status (but keep design)

hi guys, this may sound highly unusual, but I am looking for a way to ignore the sticky status of sticky posts, if possible site wide.

background: i am working with a really nice theme and love how it highlights sticky posts (in terms of design). I need to apply this highlighted design to one category of posts (which will be members only content), but the theme unfortunately doesn’t make full use of post_class, so i can’t style the category based on the class.

if i find a way to ignore the sticky status for posts marked sticky, that would solve my problem though, i would simply mark all member content sticky, they would be highlighted accordingly, but they would still be sorted in with the rest of the posts based on publication date.

So far I only found a way to globally switch off stickiness altogether, but that results in the sticky attributes also not being saved, so the styling is not applied either…

thanks for any hints here!