AIBU to refuse to use 'preferred pronouns'?

[BonBonns]

If someone presents themselves as transgender and says they want to be known as 'she' do I have to do that?

Do I have no freedom of speech?

I do not believe people can change sex.

I do not believe that a man can become a woman. With pronoun use. With hormones. With dresses or lipstick. With surgery.

It is just NOT my personal belief.

Is it a hate crime to refer to someone born male as a man against their will?

Even if it is against mine?

Where would that end?

I am atheist. Do I have to say I believe in God to appease a Catholic? Am I forced to refer to a priest as 'Father' even though I don't follow that religion?

If someone is called David but wants to be called Dave am I to be investigated if I choose to continue using David?

Isn't this madness?

How can my own beliefs come 2nd to someone else's delusions?

It is biology. It is science. It is common sense.

A man cannot become a woman any more than I can become 23 again or an antelope.

Isn't the issue that if the GRA proposals go through, it wouldn't be a matter of AIBU.

It would be a matter of 'am I breaking the law'

So I might not have the firmest grasp of it myself, but I ca acknowledge that others do, and that the existence of trans people is being validated through science

So do you think that a gender recongitition certificate should only be given if a brain scan shows that that person is transgender? Because that goes against the current trans agenda which says that people should be able to 'self identify' as whatever they want, and if they say they are female they should have access to all female spaces and female rights.

but ultimately that being kind is more important than being right.

Really? Why don't you go and tell that to the women who were sexually assaulted in prison by Karen White.

For fucks sake.

I sincerely hope you do not have children, for their own sake, but I also doubt you will find anyone willing to partake in that kind of activity with you so is not a great concern

Brilliant ‘that kind of activity’

Um you’re neither being kind nor right now!

www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/evil-paedophile-jailed-22-years-15059929

You can't force the public to use female pronouns for David (Father of Green/LibDem politician and Stonewall/girl guides advisory committee member) also known as trans age /trans species /transwoman Lucy.

I sincerely hope you do not have children, for their own sake, but I also doubt you will find anyone willing to partake in that kind of activity with you so is not a great concern.
My husband of 12 years will be so sad to find that he and my two children don't exist.
Sorry, ellastellabella, but most men aren't bothered at all by the fact that humans can't change sex, and a bloke can't become a woman. You'd be more hardpressed to find one who did swallow that nonsense.

Also, my point, ellastellabella is that when you try to use intersex people and their conditions as a gotcha to prove how little others know, perhaps you should bother to actually know what the fuck the conditions ARE. Because otherwise you look like someone who's ignorant, hypocritical, and incapable of giving intersex people the dignity and humanity of not mischaracterising them and their condition to an offensive degree

I always thought the people who resisted saying ‘heil hitler’ were so unkind. Rude.

Helmetbymidnight

As Challenor Junior stated recently on Newsnight in that authoritarian way TWAW get over it, here is my advice:

Challenor Junior, you aren't over it (your childhood) stay out of public life and politics.

The response to 'show me some peer-reviewed studies' is always 'look at this non-peer-reviewed theory' or 'stop being mean!' It's hard to take that seriously when the stakes are so high.

I sincerely hope you do not have children You know that an actual penis has to be inserted into an actual vagina in order for the ACTUAL WOMAN to get pregnant, don’t you? Or is sex between an real man and an real woman and pregnancy transphobic?

I'll call people whatever they want if they insist but it doesn't make it true. My DS has been a cat for a couple of days, I'm not about to book him in for a flea jab and worming.

Either transgender people are constantly facing discrimination for being transgender, therefore everyone can tell and identify them as such by sight, or they’re passing as the sex they feel and don’t then suffer discrimination. It can’t be both

Well yes, it can. Because some people (perhaps because they are just ‘lucky’, perhaps because their build/height/features align themselves more with the gender they identify as, I don’t know) find it much easier to ‘pass’ than others. I have met or seen transgender people where I would have had literally no idea that they were born any different to how they appear now (the model Andreja Pejić for example) and likewise I have met and seen those where yes, in all honestly I would have probably guessed that they had gone through that process. But that doesn’t make them any less worthy of their chosen pronoun!

In either case I would use the pronoun of the gender that I saw, or if in any doubt I would use ‘they’.

Insisting people go against their own perception and policing their language is gaslighting and coercive control.

Insisting people go against their own perception and policing their language is gaslighting and coercive control

^this, this, this

I’m also intrigued as to what the people who are saying they wouldn’t use preferred pronouns would do if they were introduced to someone that they suspected was transgender. Especially if they had what one would assume to be a very gender specific name? For example “Hi soandso, have you met my neighbour Isabelle?”

Would you just avoid using pronouns? Would you ask them if they were transgender? What would you do if they (quite rightly) refused to answer that question?

Why is Phillip Bunce's personal peccadillo my problem?

Bellatrix, I think it depends on the person. I wouldn't ask, or assume that the person is transgender, and would probably just avoid pronouns until I knew them better. It is difficult not to slip into correctly-sexed pronouns by accident though.

For me, it's not about never ever calling somebody by their preferred pronouns. Miranda Y uses male pronouns but I would actually be fine calling him by female ones as a courtesy. Because he does not seek to erase women and acknowledges that he is male.

I would find it very difficult to call a male person by female pronouns if they appropriatively and offensively insisted that they were literally female. In this case, I would avoid pronouns altogether, probably with a few slip ups.

"I’m also intrigued as to what the people who are saying they wouldn’t use preferred pronouns would do if they were introduced to someone that they suspected was transgender. Especially if they had what one would assume to be a very gender specific name? For example “Hi soandso, have you met my neighbour Isabelle?”

Would you just avoid using pronouns? Would you ask them if they were transgender? What would you do if they (quite rightly) refused to answer that question?"

How often do you say "she" or "he" when the person is right in front of you?

I'd just say "hi Isabelle, nice to meet you, I'm ". And then use "they" or "them" or "Isabelle", it's not hard.

You don’t use pronouns when a person is present anyway, you simply use their name and the gender neutral ‘you’.

Thus it is perfectly possible to both be respectful to a trans person and not use forced pronouns.

That answers my question then, you would use they/them. It is very rare to have to use pronouns in front of someone, you are quite right, but it does happen on occasion. It was a genuine question I was interested to know the answer to.

Dragon3, thank you for your interesting answer!

It would be downright rude to use a pronoun in front of someone, actually.

Remember the old fashioned phrase ‘who is ‘she’? The cat’s mother?’

It’s commenting on the impoliteness of using a pronoun when the person is present.

(I don’t personally use they/them because I think it is grammatically ugly when referring to a singular person. My informed choice.)

I would use their name and avoid pronouns altogether; purely because many transgender people consider misgendering to be violence, and some might respond to it with (threats of) actual violence.

I have been in that situation. I was chatting with a transwoman, when another couple of people joined the conversation. During the laughter and general silliness, I said something like "Next time he'll give me - beg pardon, she'll give me the [etc]" and the conversation continued without any awkwardness. I have no idea how J felt about my slip-up. It seemed to make no difference.

For all that J is mid-way through physical transition and does their best to fit in, for all that they're relatively young (early-mid 20s) and can pass at first glance, they are still male. I will not lie, I will not try to see them as a woman, I will not submit to gaslighting and coercive policing of language.

I can, however, treat J with the same respect and courtesy that J treats me. Which is why I would never deliberately refer to them using male pronouns. But the cognitive dissonance is very difficult to handle.

Has there ever been another group who insist that everyone else refer to them as something that they are categorically not, out of politeness, and this is just totally accepted?

I don't come down on the side of refusing to acknowledge pronouns at all. I have met a few trans people (all of the 'old school transsexual type who all seemed like nice people and didn't look at me like they would call me a cunt if I got their pronoun wrong) and have used.' she' and their chosen female name.

But like I said, I do find this idea of misgendering as 'violence' or even 'unkindness' quite interesting. As is this sliding moral scale of when someone 'deserves' or doesn't 'deserve' their chosen pronoun.

Being intentionally hurtful to someone is unreasonable, yes.

You're completely within your rights to be a knob though.