AcidSmiley

"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.

The safe option if you're unsure about the pronouns is to ask about pronouns or to use the name. Most people consider it ok to use gender neutral pronouns if you don't know the person yet, i prefer to avoid pronouns entirely in such situations and use descriptors like "that person over there" or "the OP of that thread" or whatever fits in that case - it's a bit more stilted, pronouns are a useful tool in language, but sometimes it's just better to avoid them. The reason i'm not a fan of default they / them is partially because gender neutral pronouns are used for deniable misgendering by terfs, partially it's because my first language doesn't have widely accepted gender neutral pronouns and any usage of neopronouns like dey /dem is highly specific and individual, partially it's because even as a nonbinary transfem, it feels kinda shit to me personally to be adressed in a gender neutral way. You can't just assume everyone's fine with neutral terms. My gender isn't neutral just because it doesn't neatly fit into the box society has constructed for femininity. Being nonbinary doesn't make you androgynous by default, a sizeable number of trans people aren't nonbinary and a sizeable number of nonbinary people who do use other pronouns than he / him or she / her do not go with they / them, either.

ofc it's always ok to use they / them when you're talking about groups and use it as a plural, or when you're talking about unspecified people instead of certain individuals. But if you're talking about a distinct person and can't ask them their pronouns, pronoun avoidance works better than just using they / them as a hotfix.

I'm just saying it's a shit idea and a lot of trans people would rightfully be pissed at you, especially if you pull this debate pervert redditor lib shit you're doing right now and start arguing why you believe it's ok to not use people's pronouns.

Yeah, not using somebody's pronouns is always disrespectful and should get you punched. I don't get how that's up for discussion. Also, there's no such thing as "preferred" pronouns, there's only the actual pronouns people use and their unlockable secret pronouns you only get to use when you share a really wild sexual history with them.

enby endgame is to steal so much gender from other people that it causes a stack overflow in everybody who tries to tell if you're a mr. or ms.

paper impersonating bleach demons getting mad about the most harmless "slur" in the history of humankind again

More like "come for the amateur porn, stay for the fascism"

It's honestly frightening how much combined privilege you have to scrape together so that it overrides the marginalization from queerness at least most of the time in some situations. Like, i'm infinitely better off than a trans woman of color, hearing accounts from them is as if they're lving in a different country than me, but all my whiteness and all my other privileges that ease my situation, such as living in continental Europe, or my slowly increasing relative passing privilege and the educational privilege of being able to convincingly argue my case and the ableist privilege of being stable enough to have the amount of self confidence i enjoy, that means jack shit when push comes to shove. I could pretend that things are ok, that i get most costs of my transition covered by health insurance, that i can transition in the first place, that i can mostly enjoy the ability to move freely in public while being visibly trans at least at a second or third close glance, but i would be lying to myself. The fact that i am probably a hundred times less likely than a black trans woman to get beaten up does not mean i am safe, it just means i am not as absurdly marginalized as BIPoC trans people or as vilified as more visible trans people or in a much more comfortable legal situation than trans refugees. Doesn't change that i am still legally facing forms of state-endorsed discrimination no other group does, i am still at a massively increased risk of unemployment and homelessness, i am still subjected to humiliating gatekeeping procedures, i am still a major target in far right hate campaigns and any form of public exposure i encounter means i am at risk of being faced with forms of hate crimes most people do not even recognize as such.

Yeah, the timing seems to be key with this stuff. Some say you should wait until your breasts have completed Tanner stage 3, i played it extra safe and waited after i was on HRT for a whole year and had my estradiole and CPA dosages dialed in perfectly.

Only joined the settlers ten years ago and already engages in their tradition of desecrating native places of worship, he's really going for the model minority angle.

As a follow up to myself although it's a funny cope it's still kinda harmful

Denying that trans people are actually trans is textbook transphobia, but i wouldn't expect anything else from liberals after the whole federation disaster. These people cannot conceptualize that we exist as actual human beings they can have a conversation with, we're just a political wedge issue to them. We're something they can use to set themselves apart from Republikans, we do not exist to these solipsistic lanyard-wearing asses as distinct individuals with agency and the fact that we, by the very nature of our existence, know a million times more about queer issues than them, is completely unbearable to liberals. I don't think any of these cis shits has ever consciously talked to a trans person before, they're completely overwhelmed when they see that people here have other pronouns than "he/him". Any time i've argued with stupid fuckheads like that, they adamantly refused to say "you" when talking about trans people, it was always "they" as if i wasn't even there.