That does sound easy. Like a normal interaction with a person you don’t know.
It gets trickier when it’s a friend who is an emotional train wreck at times. In my bigoted and transphobic opinion, there is just as much impetus on the trans person to be tolerant of people who mean no insult by speaking the way we’ve always spoken. After all, it must get silly after you’ve gotten the tenth apology in the last hour from someone slipping up. Typical night out for my bjj crew. And the slip ups keep coming as the drinks flow.
Then again, some people totally get off on having people be so apologetic and deferential, so many it’s not so silly to them. That’s how you get behavior like the “It’s ma’am” man, which doesn’t do the broader cause of trans acceptance any good.
It gets even trickier when you work with, teach or supervise someone in places where special language requirements are coded into law or policy. I hope I never have to deal with that.
We pretty much agree on this. We might disagree on minimal effort though. I think about positions like my wife holds at times, who may be in charge of up to 300 or so people in an official capacity. So then you have a solid hand full of pronouns that you may be required to call up at any random moment on top of everything else.
It seems like the minimal effort would best be exerted by the person with the specific requirement to extend the benefit of doubt to their surroundings rather than vice versa.
It goes back to an old axiom that I try to live by, which is “when you are in conflict with your surroundings, it is you that is in conflict, not your surroundings”.
Also, I guess it should be stated since it hasn’t been, I don’t go around just acting like a jagoff to get a rise out of people just for giggles, and typically would be considered rather kind and courteous.
It may have been unreasonable at first, but I can at least understand that my friend’s transition was a learning process for everyone. More recently he seems to have come to terms with the fact that preferred pronouns are not necessarily everyone else’s priority and, even if they are, mistakes happen all the time. I’d like to think my conversations helped with that, but it is nice to know that I don’t need to tiptoe around a person who used to be one of the guys, and a real “dude’s dude” at that, probably bordering on hyper-masculine. I can be myself and he can be it’s self or her self or whatever.
The most recent thoughts he’s shared with me amount to not making a big deal out of pronouns when dressed normally (for him, at least. Think 70’s gender-bending David Bowie-ish, or maybe Prince). Nights like these he is nearly indistinguishable from his old self and he still picks up women with ease. If it’s a dresses, heels and make-up kinda night, it should be “she” or my favorite pronoun, “it”.
“It” remains preferred, and my friend is well aware that I’m not comfortable calling any person “it”, and that’s fine too. We’re still friends.
Yeah, that’s more the “try to accommodate” approach I’d hope for. All parties meeting in the middle. People trying, in earnest, to apply the right pronoun while those on the other end not being upset at a mistake.
I have members of my family that grew up referring to all people with Asian heritage as “orientals”. That term has fallen out of favor. Some, now, make a concentrated effort to use a more accurate pronoun and will occasionally fall back on old habits, while others refuse to change how they talk because it’s how they’ve always talked. There’s a definite difference in approach.
Hey, look, someone who demands I think a certain way.
For the record, I would think the burly dude with the beard who asked to be called “Jenny” was an idiot, but I would be polite to that person, just like I am to anyone else with mental issues. I’d also think a burly dude with a beard who wanted to be called a “woman” to be a sicko that is just faking and latching on to trans bandwagon to sneak into the little girls’ bathroom. The two legit trans dudes I’ve known put a lot of effort into looking like women and wouldn’t be burly with a beard.
I’d call the dude “it” or “she” or even “he/she” if asked to so do and I remember.
“They” is grammatically incorrect, and I’d have no part in that.
I do this. Use names in place of pronouns. I still think of (and write about) my friend as a “he”, because, well, he is a man. In normal conversation I use the new name where I’d typically use a pronoun. It gets a little awkward, but I can talk to and about my friend without feeling like I’m lying and without feeling like I’m somehow rubbing anything in his face. I basically avoid pronouns altogether, but still slip into their usage if I’m not mentally vigilant about it. I just can’t bring myself to say “she” or “it”. I mean I probably could, but then I get to have that same crummy gut feeling I do whenever else I’ve lied about something.
I don’t like it so I’m not doing it.
Everyone loves being mentally vigilant about choosing the right words, right? Especially when up until this point you thought you had the notion of being polite down pat. And this isn’t like getting your dad to stop saying “nigger”, which is a purely derogatory term and has been since its inception. “She” and “he” are fine, have always been fine, and should always be fine in normal conversation.
Edit: “My friend” is another phrase I’ve come to use in place of inaccurate pronouns. Instead of saying “He could slam you on the ground, destroy your body and choke you unconscious in a matter of seconds”, I will say “My friend could slam you on the ground, destroy your body…”.
I am Chinese, have no clue as to why one is preferred over the other, and don’t care enough to google it.
I did google why “gook” was considered a racial insult though, but have forgotten as I write this…excuse me a moment…
edit to add: apparently, the only place where you can get answers wrt racial epithets is Urban Dictionary; zipperhead is actually pretty funny in a macabre sort of way
Speaking to your wife’s situation, I think we are vastly overstating the number of folks presenting this conundrum. IME it really is such a small minority that exceptions can be made without too much effort. YMMV though.
It is the exceptional nature of these individuals that can make dealing with them so challenging and, in some cases in some settings, very risky.
I think you are dramatically underestimating how dicey these things can be in the workplace. Throw some not-uncommon-in-trans people mental issues on top of an HR department that may be codifying these type of requirements into company policy and all of a sudden you’ve got a landmine you need to tiptoe around very, very carefully.
Even if it is not codified into company policy, you’ve potentially got a landmine. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to be a landmine in an organization that’s working together to accomplish a goal. I take pride in being easy to work with and focusing on results, which means putting up with some minor crap from time to time.
Being that person who makes things hard for everyone else, for whatever reason, means you’re the one acting like a jerk. I work closely with a woman who I believe has a fairly serious form of mental illness, and the amount of productivity and results lost by having to work around her special requirements is staggering, and not easy to measure. It manifests itself in subtle ways, like something falling behind because someone was dreading a conversation that needed to happen. Questions that should be asked but aren’t. People literally going out of their way to avoid interaction, and results are suffering because of it.
She’s not trans, but she is very much of a victim mindset and has a host of sensitivities that she expects everyone else to tiptoe around that I’ll just categorize as “The numerous and rare ailments of Allergy Annie”. Again, results suffer when someone else’s special requirements set the rules so far outside the bounds of how you normally interact with people in a professional setting.
That’s an organizational problem at it’s core, and luckily she is in a long process of being shown the door. I think we could speed things up and be fine, but that’s not my call.
Good God. This reminds me the movie Demolition Man . Use the wrong pronoun and a alarm goes off with a voice telling you that your fined for violation of the verbal morality code.
It’s interesting cos my some of my China friends prefer to refer to themselves as “Orientals” when speaking to Westerners to separate themselves from darker skinned Asians. I just think of cat breeds. Is calling a cat an “oriental” going to be offensive in the future?
