Mandated to give my ten year old's pronouns - how to respond

If you teach students and have new classes coming and going regularly with multiple people with alternative pronouns, I can imagine it is a lot to keep up with, far more than most people ever have to.

In those circumstances I think I would just take the view that I would do my best and if I made mistakes (which occurs in all situations where you are remembering personal information about people, eg names - which tbh I sometimes have to be told more than once, and people quite often get my name wrong too) I would not be hard on myself at all about it, particularly if they were people I was going to deal with for a year and then probably never see again.

If someone was aggressive about me making a mistake in their pronouns, I would apologise for getting it wrong but privately think they were rather rude, the same as if I got someone's name wrong and they were aggressive about it.

Just to add I do actually try to use preferred pronouns but my point was that it is NOT easy and I don't think anyone should be penalised for not doing it.

Funnily enough I have had quite a few male students who wear make up and necklaces over the last few years but they are not the ones changing pronouns! Often the ones who are most militant about pronouns have not changed anything particular in their appearance and yes, it is difficult to remember who they are! I am also fluent in several languages. As I am sure you are aware, in many languages you have to use the correct male or female form when speaking directly to someone. Often I find that those who claim it is so easy to switch have only ever thought about what it is like to speak in English. It is ironic that you say it is easy when there are plenty of examples of people getting it wrong even when desperately trying to prove how easy it is!

First I’d want to look into what categories the sex offending covered (eg are prostitution services included), and I’d be interested to know the sex offense conviction rate for transgender women vs men. Ie do cis men simply get away with sex offenses more often than transgender women do.

Maybe Cheeky would like to comment on HMPS figures RE sexual offending?

Oh brilliant so you can tell just by looking which TW are the likes of Karen white & Katie dowalski and which are harmless?

I don’t think you can necessarily tell the Jeffrey Dahmers and Fred and Rose Wests of the world just by looking at them either.

I agree. I'm trying to make my arguments more factual than personal

As far as 'manface' goes, I know 2 mid teen girls who are cosplaying manface , this only started when they hit puberty.
I hope that they grow out of it before they harm currently healthy bodies, affirmation is strong in this age group and they have no idea of the long term health issues they are signing up to. (Elaine Miller is very informative on this).

As the Cass report says, affirmation is not a neutral act. A mind that is rejecting the body it lives in needs psychological help as a first resort, not surgery.

Okay I’m going to tap out as it’s clear people here want to think that transgender people are mostly male predators who are trying to oppress and harm women and that’s completely counter to my own first-hand experience.

There are shitty people of all kinds. I am not going to judge all males by the standards of the worst males I have ever heard of, I am not going to judge all females by the standards of the worst females I have ever heard of, and I am not going to judge all transgender people by the worst transgender people (or worst transgender imitators) I have ever heard of.

Some areas, like sports, prisons and working with children need careful safeguarding to ensure the protection of women and children. Showing courtesy towards my colleague’s female-born child’s preferred pronoun is an entirely different matter and scale and I’m not going to be shamed into conflating the two by hyperbolic slippery-slope arguments.

Absolutely quantum

and? It’s not women’s job to be support humans

what if the women in the rape survivors group colonised by a TW really didn’t want a man there? Oh wait they didn’t but no one cared because you know women

why is it always on women to be kind and make room?

'And what if that man is clearly making an effort to present gender markers associated with femininity, eg wearing a dress, makeup, long hair, nail polish etc. is this not a fairly obvious set of clues that this person wants to be treated as something other than their birth sex?'

Oh brilliant so you can tell just by looking which TW are the likes of Karen white & Katie dowalski and which are harmless? And for the women raped and assaulted I don’t think “sorry” cuts it. Best we keep all men no matter how long their hair or how glittery their nail varnish out of our spaces

Most TW are definitely not gay hence their insistence that they are lesbians (ie straight men who like to fuck women)

how on Earth does it benefit women to play along with men who perform what they believe are female gender stereotypes

today the IOC said that it’s fine for men to be punching women because their passport says female and no doubt their pronouns are she/her. Playing along with this nonsense is the thin end of the flipping wedge and how we’ve got to where we are

Eh? I didn't say people owned them or carried them about with them.
Everyone has them in the sense of how we refer to them, unless we want to sound ridiculous and use their name repeatedly. 🫡🫡🫡

Or manface or no-sexface I guess as most transgender people I have encountered in real life are female-born lesbians, or male-born homosexuals.

No-one "has" pronouns. It's grammar. Not a possession.

Such a non issue.

Well if the transgender people who I apply this courtesy to turn out to be predators attempting to enter female spaces for nefarious purposes, I will apologise wholeheartedly.

Seems unlikely as they are mostly female-born and/or gay but you never know I guess.

I also am happy to extend you the courtesy of not referring to you as cis if you don’t like it. So there, the favoritism is now going both ways :-)

They're cosplaying womanhood, womanface if you like.

At first I thought it was harmless and now I've peaked and I find it offensive.

And what if that man is clearly making an effort to present gender markers associated with femininity, eg wearing a dress, makeup, long hair, nail polish etc. is this not a fairly obvious set of clues that this person wants to be treated as something other than their birth sex?

When I say “real effort” what I mean is a genuine intention to try to respect people’s preferred pronouns in the rare situations it arises. Most people who say “it’s too hard to remember” are also quite clear that they have no intention of using preferred pronouns if they can possibly avoid it because of their philosophical perspective. So I don’t think it’s genuinely terribly difficult for them to do, they just don’t want to even try.

So lie and pretend for social reasons?
A social reason could be a predator's plan to access girls and ladies spaces....

Basic courtesy?
Where's the basic courtesy towards me?
I've often been dubbed "cis" despite repeatedly saying I am offended by this.

Unfortunately all this handmaidening, being #kind, favouritism all goes one way.

I am trying to imagine what positive purpose it would serve for me to bloody-mindly insist on referring to my colleague’s late teen child who is transitioning by their birth sex, or insist on referring to a lovely professional contact who uses them/them pronouns as he/him when I write about them.

When I think about these people, their transgender nature is an inherent part of the overall mental picture I have of them. In that regard it doesn’t seem to me that I am “lying and pretending” by using pronouns “transgenderly”. That aligns with the fact that they are a) fairly obviously transgender at first glance and b) I know them personally so know with a certainty the way they like to be referred to.

You can call this “lying and pretending” if you like but I call it basic courtesy in regard to them being transgender rather than simply male or female (no I don’t need a lecture about how their chromosomes and probably genitals have not changed, transgender is a social role, not a biological one).

Everyone has pronouns OP.

So lie and pretend??

No, I don’t have a system to explain, just like I don’t have a system for remembering people’s names, and I didn’t have a system for remembering when some of my friends changed their surnames after marriage. I just learned over time, and self-corrected when I made mistakes. Eventually I had to stop and think a moment to remember my friends’ maiden names.

I’m sorry you struggle to learn people’s names but I’m certainly not “gifted” in this regard. Out of interest, what industry do you work in that you have to remember so many changed pronouns and how many are we talking about? I work in the communications field and counting up, there are five people that I use “alternative” pronouns for on any kind of regular basis. There may be others who I’m not thinking of right now but I don’t refer to them regularly.