When people who reject the concept of someone like me being transgender want to demonstrate their displeasure, they often deliberately “misgender” us. They call trans-women, “sir,” “mister,” or, “dude,” and female to male transgender individuals, “miss,” “lady,” or, “baby,” or the like. Let me emphasize that I’m not including in that category people who do it by mistake or without malice. Usually those folks are honestly chagrined when they misspeak, and they make a real effort not to repeat the faux pas. (And I don’t fault them at all. Wrapping one’s mind, let alone one’s mouth, around gender complexity is not an intellectual calisthenic that one usually masters without some practice.) But it’s the people who continue to misgender us, purposefully, even after being corrected, that I want to discuss.
First, let me explain why deliberately misgendering us can be one of the most soul-rending things you can do to a transperson. For most of us, particularly those of us who don’t “pass” perfectly as a member of the gender with which we identify (and a goodly portion of us don’t pass, no matter how hard we try), pointing that fact out is an unsubtle, belittling acknowledgement of not only our failure to do so, but an invalidation of our reason for trying in the first place. It is irrelevant whether we have permanently transitioned to living as the woman (or man) we see ourselves as being, or whether we are only currently presenting as our correct gender, there is nothing in our lives in which we have invested - or will invest, as long as we draw breath - so much of our time, treasure, energy, emotional wellbeing, intellectual effort and personal self-esteem, as we do in crafting the man or woman who stands in front of you at the moment you’ve chosen to misgender us.
This makes your deliberate gender barb much more than just a harmless insult or a thoughtless jibe. It is a stiletto thrust into a fragile heart. The odyssey toward true self-acceptance and an authentic equipoise in gender expression is one of the most emotionally freighted and psychologically fraught life journeys a person can undertake. And because trans-men and women are pretty much the only people who ever seriously contemplate it, there is no direct analogy in the non-trans psyche. (Try thinking of a trans-person’s mindset this way. Gender is one of the foundational pillars of human existence. It is one of the very first things we learn about ourselves. Now imagine, from nearly your first moments of self-awareness, never being at peace with one of the postulates upon which your whole life is built. That’s where our awareness of the world begins.)
Whether because of social pressures, family ties, economic burdens, professional priorities or other real or imagined obstacles, the majority of us never actually get to the place where we intend that journey to end. We settle for whatever measures of fulfillment we can find or create within the confines of our own reality. And many of us never even get that far. Nearly half of all transgender individuals, about 43%, attempt suicide. When you callously reject our gender presentation, you are attempting to wrench even the fraction of joy we have found from our lives.
I understand that, for many of you who don’t believe in the legitimacy of being transgender, you don’t think your intentional insult is personal. Your animus towards us is, often, rooted in your understanding of how Man was made by God as you learned in the Bible. To you, He created men and He created women, and however a person is born is how He intended them to be. Attempting to change that truth is denying His will. Still others feel that the need or desire to shift genders is a mental disorder, and they feel no obligation to indulge our “delusion” by acknowledging that we are something we are not, or ever will be.
And then there are simply a malevolent, thankfully shrinking, coterie of individuals who mindlessly default to derision and anger when confronted with something, or someone, they don’t easily understand.
I don’t presume to question the sincerity or validity of anyone’s religious beliefs. I only ask that, irrespective of what you believe is God’s will, or whether you accept the validity of our gender expression, you remember that the only conduit for harmony among a diverse and rapidly diversifying humanity, is to extend the same measures of common civility and fundamental tolerance to others that you want afforded to you. Try to remember that the multitude of individuals who impact your life – the doctors you visit, the teachers who taught your children and you, the people who serve you, the police, fire fighters and first responders who protect you, the men and women who have hired you and will do so in the future, the people who are your neighbors and coworkers – are not required to respect or accept your religious beliefs, your social customs, the choices you make in life – or even just you, in general. If they do so, even with the universe of differences that exist between you and them, it’s because they are trying – one benign courtesy, one gesture of respect, one small act of kindness at a time – to build a world in which they would like us all to live. You don’t have to surrender your values to respect those of others, no matter whether those values comport with your own, or not.
It’s also within the universe of possibilities that there are members of the trans-community who are overly sensitive to every real and perceived slight that may arise during the course of their days, as well. But that’s usually emotional tenderness born of unpleasant experience. In some cases, those trans-people have been the objects of more than their parcel of derision and, in some cases, far worse, since the first moment they stepped out into the public world from the sanctums where they began their exploration of their own gender reality.
In short, you don’t have to fawn over individuals who are transgender when you encounter them. You don’t have to treat them like long-lost kin in whose will you are featured prominently. All you have to do is have enough consideration for their humanity – and for your own – to address them as they wish to be addressed. One pronoun costs you no more than any other, but it may mean more than you realize to the person it’s offered.