Friend called TW 'man' and 'fella'

[Zombaes]

Just writing this to try and work through my feelings.

I'm very heavily GC. I always thought if I came face to face with this situation I wouldn't 'pretend' this person is a woman.

There was a TW at a drive through, friend driving. Middle aged man, caked with makeup. Very obviously a man.

Driver says 'You alright man' 'Cheers fella' 'nice one mate' sort of thing.

Very, very typical of him. He says those things to every man he talks to.

But it made me uncomfortable because I felt he might upset this person by not validating what they feel.

Which goes against everything I believe in principle.

No I do not believe that person was a woman. No I do not believe we should be forced to pretend he was and use female pronouns.
So why did it make me so uncomfortable that my friends didn't play along, when I always believed I wouldn't either?

Is it's just the years of woman guilt and being told to be 'nice?'

I’d hate for us to lose regional variation in dialects because everyone is scared of a telling off from a Gender Studies student (we just seem to end up with imported Americanisms instead, and I’m a conscientious objector to American Cultural Imperialism).

This. I've had some proper rows with libfems insisting that any use of flower/petal/chuck/dear is the deliberate misogyny, even when it goes both directions.

It's just a type of snobbery that regards anything working class as wrong.

When I was unexpectedly confronted with a TW on a quiet street in Brighton who wanted to know what I thought of his hair, I said what he wanted to hear. It went against my principles but he was twice my size & I didn’t want to get thumped.

It’s pretty apparent why women on Mumsnet are angry. There’s numerous threads about why in the Feminism: Sex and Gender section of the website.

Perhaps he was a transvestite. They like to be called "he" and are straight men. They used to be everywhere. There was an annual convention for them in Scarborough where hundreds came. I used to work at the hotel and greet them, I wonder where they went? I rarely see them now. Has it gone out of fashion?

If he's spoken the way he's always spoken, using language he's always used, he's done nothing wrong.

Putting on a skirt and blouse does not make you female, in the same way that having short hair and wearing trousers does not make you male.

So why did it make me so uncomfortable that my friends didn't play along, when I always believed I wouldn't either?

Is it's just the years of woman guilt and being told to be 'nice?'

It is, but also possibly some mild resentment that men can do it and get away with it when for women it often is as Empress describes.

In my local Post Office (scruffy part of South London) I once heard an old geezer thank the (much younger, male) assistant with a cheery "ta, dahlin!" It was friendly and natural.

If you'd gone to a drive through in the West Country, your friend could have greeted the bloke in make up with an "all right, moi luvver?"

My feeling is that you can hold both the idea that gender is nonsense and the idea that people should be allowed to live their lives as they wish in your head at the same time. So if a male person is claiming to need a gynecologist and using up an appointment you could have had, by all means complain. If they're just wearing a dress and serving you a big Mac surely they can just get on with it without causing you any difficulty. You don't have to approach them by their sex or their gender do you.

And down south “mate” is used a lot.

I really like being called pet names

I can't do it in my accent though, not a northerner or someone particularly homely so comes across as forced if I tried to

I'm very glad to see people saying this as I totally agree but hadn't found the words to describe my feelings as intelligently as you lot!

I love the pet names people have for each other in my part of the country.

Well maybe I'm old fashioned but my eyes work very well and I can see what's in front of me. If he doenst wnat to be presumed to be a transwoman maybe don't dress like one?

"Mate" is used everywhere in Britain among working-class men., for blatantly obvious reasons - Plumber's mate, fitter's mate, driver's mate. It is a MALE term that women and middle-class men have co-opted,

Social etiquette is the least of my worries. I’ll call a TW sister, love, and girl all the live long day.

Trans spaces separate from female spaces is what really matters and I’m not the sort of person to take out my ire regarding a larger political issue on the human being in front of me.

But it's very recent that we started assuming that men who cross-dress but don't try to pass want you to pretend they are women (9 years to be exact).

It's fine if you want to do that but your friend was not being unkind by treating this bloke like every other bloke he meets.

Your friend saw the physical reality and reacted in the way he would to anyone he perceived as a ‘fella’. He’s just not as bogged down in all this crap as some of us.
Perhaps he is one of the third of survey respondents who didn’t know ( or maybe care) how to sort out the gender identity of random strangers. Perhaps he thought the server was ‘ a bit strange’ , but decided to just behave as he would to any other person. Perhaps that was his way of ‘being kind’, you know, not excluding someone from the brotherhood of Men just because they had a dress on.

Did you ask him?

I don't understand why you're so upset. Your friend saw an obvious man and treated him like one. Just because you saw some niche rabbit-hole nuances that made you think he might be trans doesn't mean anyone else will know or care.

100% agree on this.

I have to come back to this.

It makes no sense to me.

They want us to see them as women, that's why they do it.
Apparently misgendering is literal violence.

So when we see a man dressed as a woman they tell us to be kind and treat him as one.

But them people like you say 'don't make assumotions' he might be a man (duh) and just like women's clothes.

So what we don't use any sex based language or pronouns around anyone now? Incase we assume wrong??

But I thought pronouns and respecting them is soooo important?

It's like people have tied themselves up in knots so much that you don't even know what you're saying or want anymore?

I've never called a fellow woman sister, love or girl in my entire life. Do people really do this? (apart from on the set of American RomComs)

But it wasn't you, it's not up to you what your friend does. You do you.

I think that if you really feel the way you describe, you should stop thinking of yourself as totally gender critical. Perhaps you could read Helen Joyce's book Trans as a reminder of what the Gender Ideology movement is really about: it's a men's rights movement. Or Abigail Shriver's Irreversible Damage, documenting the sterilisation and mutilation of (mainly) lesbian, gay and autistic young people. (Because the majority of children being referred to gender clinics are autistic, lesbian or gay, or children with MH issues or from troubled backgrounds. Looked-after children are particularly vulnerable to seeking gender reassignment as a solution to all t he shit they're dealing with.)
The man you encountered serving at the drive-through is just one aspect of this massive issue. I like your friend's way of dealing with it. Man-to-man is easier that woman-to-someone-pretending to be a woman.

I've used love for close friends occasionally but sister or girl - no. I don't even call my sister 'Sister'.

They didn’t go anywhere, it’s just that the use of the word ‘transvestite’, which accurately describes this type of sexualised cosplay, is now verboten under the new rainbow umbrella. Because men’s sexual fetishes must now be unquestioningly conflated with the medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria. So now anyone at all, no matter how nefarious their motives, based on nothing other than their own ‘feelings’, can just put on womanhood as easily as buying a new lipstick, and automatically have open access to every safe space we’ve fought for.

Not to mention every confused, sexually unsure or ND teen being offered the cure-all panacea of a trans label and encouraged towards medical sterilisation.

The manipulation of language and blacklisting of words that accurately describe and separate biological characteristics, sexual orientation and psychological states has led us here - to the benefit of those who wish to confuse such terminology for their own ends - and it’s still not clear where it’s going to stop.

Oh come on everyone. We all know that if the OP had addressed the server as ‘fella’ all hell would have broken out. Six hours in a police interview room wouldn’t have been the end of it.

But because it was a bloke doing the misgendering ( and I’m guessing not a wimp in a flowery tee shirt) , it was not an opportunity for outrage and protest. In the famous Mermaids coffee tantrum, do you think that if the husband had referred to the person behind the till as a ‘lady’ , ( when till person is apparently non binary, although no one has explained how you are supposed to gather this when you are just asking for two coffees) the manager would have stormed out and thrown his stuff on the ground and physically ejected him from the shop?

Well, perhaps. Paddy Power wouldn’t give you good odds on it, though.