I didn’t know anyone trans or think about it at all.
I moved to California and hung out with some rationalists and met some trans people IRL and online. I understood that it was polite to try to use whatever pronouns they preferred, decoupled from their physical appearance, so I did my best to do so, and other than that I continued to not think about it at all.
After observing that it’s hard to reliably remember to use pronouns that conflict with people’s surface appearance to me, I adopted a “default to ‘they’, especially in case of ambiguous appearance” strategy that seemed to typically be doable by me, and satisfactory to most people I met.
Somehow last year I was talking to another cis person about whether different strategies for remembering to use the right pronouns were easier or harder, and this idea of “actually reconsider their gender” came up.
To be clear, you now understand that the content of the sentence “I am a transgender man” is more or less “contrary to popular opinion, I am in fact a man and not a woman”? And that pronouns only even come up because they are one of the many ways people convey assessments of gender?
Basically, my experience went like this:
I didn’t know anyone trans or think about it at all.
I moved to California and hung out with some rationalists and met some trans people IRL and online. I understood that it was polite to try to use whatever pronouns they preferred, decoupled from their physical appearance, so I did my best to do so, and other than that I continued to not think about it at all.
After observing that it’s hard to reliably remember to use pronouns that conflict with people’s surface appearance to me, I adopted a “default to ‘they’, especially in case of ambiguous appearance” strategy that seemed to typically be doable by me, and satisfactory to most people I met.
Somehow last year I was talking to another cis person about whether different strategies for remembering to use the right pronouns were easier or harder, and this idea of “actually reconsider their gender” came up.
Interesting. Thank you.
To be clear, you now understand that the content of the sentence “I am a transgender man” is more or less “contrary to popular opinion, I am in fact a man and not a woman”? And that pronouns only even come up because they are one of the many ways people convey assessments of gender?