I had like an interaction where I had some decent clues that a person only introduces their pronouns after they clocked me, e.g. other people didn't do pronoun intro before, the way the "ally in question" did it felt pretty artificial (I am willing to write that off on being paranoid).

The message is "I know you are trans, you are not passing, but I am graciously allowing you to exist in this group setting". Same goes for only doing pronoun checks in a group setting when you clock a trans person. I find it worse than assuming wrong pronouns and switching after being gently corrected. Maybe because I have higher standards of would-be allies than the average person. After all, allies are supposed to have my back, not just not having a hitler-detector moment when I pass by. On the other hand, I have it easy for being okay with being a semi-binary trans woman, so obv enby struggles are another thing, but clocking still stings like a bitch.

Pronoun checks should be normalized to a point cis people do it intuitively, but idk if we will ever get there. If you wanna chime in, when and how did you call that behaviour out or point it out, if you saw it? Did your response work?

  • happyandhappy [she/her]
    ·
    11 months ago

    honestly with how prevalent transphobia is in society i just take every single opportunity to always give and stretch the benefit of the doubt. not much i can do about what another person is choosing to do and the stress of even having it ambiguous is honestly not even worth it imo.

      • happyandhappy [she/her]
        ·
        edit-2
        11 months ago

        yea i definitely empathize with that. i do have different standards for left/queer spaces for sure as well, and i think that separation makes it easier for me to deal with otherwise

  • tagen
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    edit-2
    10 months ago

    deleted by creator

      • Iraglassceiling [she/her]
        ·
        11 months ago

        Getting mad at someone for, by your own admission, trying to be nice sounds self defeating to me, but I hear what you are saying about it feeling patronizing.

        To me it sounds like what you’re really upset about is being clocked. Being clocked is shitty. Clocking someone is awkward.

        If you start the pronoun discussion yourself, does that help? Theoretically cis people should be doing that automatically, so if you don’t get clocked then great you’re normalizing pronouns. If you did get clocked then it changes nothing and it saves you feeling like someone is white knighting on your behalf?