MechanizedPossum

Fair enough, but in the first example, it's perfectly understandable why people would be under the assumption that their pronouns would be visibly on display and somebody not using them would purposefully misgender the user. I still remember how in the first days of federation, some guy would accuse us of being Russian bots because his replies had people with he /him, she / her, they / them and comrade / them as pronouns and that amount of "gender diversity" already was so overwhelming to him that his assumption was that we had randomly assigned pronouns for our bot army. The early days of federation weren't exactly a relaxed time for trans people on this site, we had dunk threads about somebody accusing us all of being fake trans on a fairly regular basis. When your experience with the rest of lemmy are things like that, it's 100% reasonable to think that somebody using they / them instead of she / her is doing that on purpose and not due to simple technical difficulties. How much benefit of the doubt are you demanding from people in a situation like that? I'm not saying that this isn't something that causes avoidable confrontations and can be a bad look, but i am definitely arguing that it's unfair to blame trans people in that situation for lashing out. Hurt people act mean, it is how it is. When you want our community to act more agreeable, you first need to provide an environment that doesn't constantly shit on them, simple as.

And don't even get me started on the cesspool that's reddit. Being thin-skinned and prone to jump to conclusions is a state of mind that site just gets you into as a trans person, i doubt i have to tell you that. It's part of why i do not use it anymore, reddit had actual "i have to talk to my therapist about this" consequences on my mental health and i didn't even wade that far outside of the trans boards after coming out. I'm not kidding, back then i was forced to attend gender counceling as part of the medical gatekeeping for gender affirming care in my country and talking about reddit-induced detorioration of my mental health was one of the few actual uses i got out of that. Turns out i also wasn't alone with these problems, either (although my therapist had the most problem with trans 4chan users in her practice for fairly obvious reasons). Being too online in a chronically lowkey invalidating environment really, really fucks with people even before we account for the outright hostility, the targeted harassment, the chasers creeping into our DMs or the people falsely reporting us for suicide risks. And logging off is something a lot of us have to actively work on due to these sites being literally designed to habituate you and keep you permanently online. It's honestly kinda mean to call it "ridiculous" when trans people in an environment like that overreact to something that, while unintended, is still objectively very hurtful from that person's perspective. I mean, yes, i agree, it's an overreaction, it is uncalled for from the other person's perspective, but come on. We both know how people get into such a headspace, and honestly, it's not the trans person's fault.

The problem here is that they / them is only generic to people who speak English as a first language. In my first language, it's a neopronoun, one that you'll see being used if you know a lot of nonbinary people, but that's a good deal less common than several local neopronouns. And none of these neopronouns are so common that they would come off as gender neutral, all of them will come off as "i'm assuming that person has some heavy gender thing going on". Now, that's something that literally goes for almost everybody i hang out with, but still, none of all the genderdiverse people i know use a gender neutral default pronoun for others, not even the majority that at least sometimes uses neopronouns for themselves, not even the ones that are the most into gender abolition.

It's just not a thing we do around here, firstly because neopronouns are so personal and specific here, secondly because our neutral option is "none / use name". And when we don't know the name, we use neutral descriptors like "that person." And that option works just as well in English, so i seriously encourage making more use of it when we're still in a phase were all of this is in flux.

Yeah, that's definitely the impression i'd be getting in that situation, but that situation isn't exactly ideal to begin with. I know that there's edge cases like people who are questioning or closeted, which make practices like pronoun circles tricky for those people because that either forces a premature outing or a self-misgendering on someone. There's really no ideal solution that will cover all cases. But as a rule of thumb, i think we should just normalize stating your pronouns without making that something that feels coercive, and if that falls flat for some reason, i prefer pronoun avoidance over they / them, because that actually is a neutral option.

If you know somebody's pronouns, using these pronouns and nothing else isn't "better", it's the only correct option.

Anyone who says this practice is transphobic is just being ridiculous

Who is saying that, tho? From my experience, the issue is always brought up when people use they / them in a context where they know it's misgendering somebody. And when i see that or when i'm bringing this up myself, the initial complaint is never "you're being a transphobe here", the complaint is always just "this person is using she / her and not they / them, can you please correct your post?" Unintentional misgendering is still misgendering and should always be corrected, even if you know the misgendered person is never going to see it. And if the misgendering was a perfectly understandable accident or not doesn't matter, either. When i know somebody's pronouns and see that they're not being used, i will bring that up. But why would i call people transphobes at that point, like who even does that?

Accusations of transphobia only enter the picture when people are being dicks about this. Which, unfortunately, happens a lot. Some people just prefer to enter full debate dingdong mode until they get banned instead of just hitting the edit button, correcting a mistake that can and does happen to everyody and saying sorry. Unfortunately, i've been part of such discussions on a fairly regular basis. And honestly, when people place their insistence that they cannot make a mistake towards a trans person over treating that person with respect, yeah, that reeks of transphobia to me, there's no way around that. That's just a cis person telling us when we're allowed to be offended and when we're supposed to stay quiet and remember where our place is.

That's all there is to this and i've literally not once seen somebody say that they / them for unspecified people, for groups, for people you can't know the pronouns of would be transphobic. And i'm saying this as somebody who is a hardliner on this question and thinks it's reasonable to either avoid pronouns entirely or to have people look up pronouns before writing about somebody. But that's just my highly subjective opinion about which ways to adress somebody we perceive to be the most inclusive. Gender neutral language by necessity is a part of that, but so is gender affirming language.

Autism is when hats.

I haven't looked at the original poll data, but the article claims that the shift is mostly due to women moving left compared to older generations and men staying politically in the same place as older dudes.

So if gendered media consumption is an issue, there's either highly effective feminist propaganda that blows Andrew Tate out of the water, or the onslaught of reactionary garbage merely manages to prevent that men make the same leftward move as women. Which would honestly make sense, if you ask me the entire rightwing rabbit hole stuff is ultimately built around capital trying to violently maintain the status quo, especially with issues like climate change threatening the old order of wealth distribution. That kind of stuff is always at the core of outlets like Daily Wire, with the anti-feminist, racist, queerphobic stuff being used to reel people in after they've bitten the most surface level "SJWs are ruining your favorite movie franchises" bait.

This means that rightwing agitation aimed at women, such as tradwife discourse or terfism, is particularly concerning, because it attacks the left's most promising avenue for growth. It also means that we need more "feminism is for everyone" kinds of attacks on patriarchy to expand the leftward shift to young men, explaining to them how toxic masculinity sets them up for a life of drudgery, a failed marriage or a life of inceldom and an early grave in the service of capital. I mean, if you look at manosphere discourse, none of that is making men live happy and fulfilled lives, it means not only that they get stuck in a constant doom loop of having to prove how alpha they are, it also means that a lot of them become permanently undateable to an increasing number of women. Like, seriously, the amount of being fed up with dating men i see among young women is completely off the charts. Granted, all of the young women i know are queer and already involved in leftist spaces, straight women do not have the same freedom in just not dating guys that the bi/pan women i run into enjoy, but feminist climate protest pansexuals seem to be much more representative of where women in general are headed than the Tate crowd, and the data seems to back it up. It honeslty makes sense, too, "You shouldn't date dudes that do not care about your consent" is a much more believable and easier to follow advice than "pay 5000$ for my online class and you, too, can drive 30 sports cars before you end up in a Romanian jail."

The article claims that this shift is mostly (although not exclusively) driven by young women moving leftwards. The article also claims this was originally sparked by things like the metoo debate and stances on consent and SA and then has spread to other issues like immigration (the article doesn't go into economic policies, working conditions etc and how these may differ between young men and young women). The trend is also a lot more pronounced in occupied Korea and in China than in Western countries.

Places like Germany also see some rightward radicalization of men, but not to the same degree as women are moving leftwards. Men's attitudes mostly remain the same as among dudes over 30 years of age.

Edit: Forgot to add what this means for capitalist social reproduction. The article cites occupied Korea as the main example:

Its marriage rate has plummeted, and birth rate has fallen precipitously, dropping to 0.78 births per woman in 2022, the lowest of any country in the world.

I'm really, really glad to hear this! It means a lot that i could help.

Free orchi

Also, I refuse to detransition. I'd rather die. Hands down.

I feel you, i wasn't suggesting that, either. Just saying that constantly pushing forward isn't something that should be expected of trans people.

I also get the doubt and how that fucks with you pre-surgery. Like, i know i need to get something done every time i have sex, and 90% of the time when i look at my junk it's "wtf even is that stuff", but i still worry if it's the right decision from time to time even though it's super fucking obvious that yes, yes it is the right decision. I think that's normal, just as it's definitely normal to feel like a fake trans person even though you're very obviously not fake, i hear that all the time from people who are very clearly super mega trans 3000.