Title. I am kinda wary of this because i don't want to misgender anyone but I am not sure how to refer to those who you don't know the preferred pronouns of? TIA, comrades!
Title. I am kinda wary of this because i don't want to misgender anyone but I am not sure how to refer to those who you don't know the preferred pronouns of? TIA, comrades!
"Clearly going for one or the other" doesn't always work that well. The default should be to always ask for pronouns, and that should be normalized a lot more. I know from personal experience how validating it feels to be gendered correctly on a guess, i love when that happens, but i know so many people where appearance and pronouns do not match, especially when it comes to neopronouns. How do you guess a transmasc person is using en / en instead of he/him or they / them? Or that somebody uses plural they because they have DID? Or that the person in front of you who "looks like using he / him" pronouns is a boymoding early transition trans woman already going by she / her in the circle you're in? Or if the lesbian over there uses she / her, xier / xiem or is one of the elusive he / him lesbians? Or if that high femme that you've automatically assumed to 100% be a cis woman is actually a nonbinary transfem who prefers dey / dem over she / her?
These aren't hypotheticals either, these are all people you'd run into at any trans meetup in my local queer community. That's a normal saturday night for me. Sure, we also have a ton of femme presenting she / her catgirls and masc presenting he / him skater boys, but not all of them have perfect passing, either.
Yeah I definitely have some reservations about it, and mostly included that since it's a perspective I've heard from other people, but you're probably right that normalizing asking for pronouns is the much better way forward. But some small number of people do take that as a slight as well which sucks. I hate discourse
Well there's closeted trans people for whom stating their pronouns either means misgendering themselves or doing a forced outing and both of these are horrible choices, so there's that. That's a concern i struggle with in that regard and that i still need a good solution for. That's a legitimate case of people having reservations about mandatorily stating your pronouns. That's also the only case i can think of that i think is a valid concern.
When we're instead talking transmeds who object to pronoun circles bc they want to lord over other trans people how cislike they are and how much better they pass, i honestly dgaf. I know that type and they're just toxic shits you can't build a community with bc they'll almost immediately go out of their way to actively harm community members that rub them the wrong way - be it because they do not fit their narrow view of cis-sanctioned transness, or that they perceive as threatening and as rivals because they believe them to be prettier than themselves or because they're too openly queer or w/e. I have friends who carry trauma from interacting with that kind of person that means they need my emotional support every time we go to a community meetup together and that has left them with lasting aggravation of their dysphoria. Transmedicalism is a threat to trans communities, i've seen way too often how much damage it causes. Not only that, they will always place demands by dominant society above queer liberation when there's even the tiniest conflict between the two. When i can't work with these people without hurting my friends, when they are useless in achieving political goals because they constantly and reliably fold to transphobes, i view it as a feature when they find more NB-inclusive social routines alienating.