Tinkerbell syndrome, pronoun badges and trans existence

[Alltheprettyseahorses]

Inspired by some posts in a now-full thread:

Someone in the workplace who is trans is literally existing as trans in public. Yet we are told that disagreeing with accessories like pronoun badges means we don't want transpeople to exist in public.

So - must trans necessarily involve others and is it so fragile an identity that it will disappear like Tinkerbell if not constantly affirmed by everyone around the transperson? Is not noticing the badge transphobic? As most people, including those with specific protected characteristics and including most transpeople to be honest, don't wear badges announcing their identity, does this mean they don't exist in public?

I would argue the sole purpose of pronoun badges is to involve others in the validation of a specific type of trans identity whether they consent to this or not and even if they don't understand they have been allocated as having a supporting role in someone else's main-character life. But speaking on a personal level, I have my own priorities and interests - I find it an imposition to be subjected to the macroaggression of being expected to change my natural language processes for someone who will never be part of my concerns.

(I don't normally start threads so if I don't come back I'm not shaving my hairy feet, I've probably forgotten or something)

I wouldn't find the badge helpful in that situation, because the assumption on seeing it is that it's a lie and an implicit demand that others comply with that lie.

As a non-binary person, there's a few questions I may as well answer from an "insider" perspective. I know I'm only one person, but the majority of other trans and non-binary people I know have expressed similar sentiments over the ten years I've been in the trans community.

1. I, and the trans friends of mine who on occasion wear pronoun badges, do not intend it as a demand. It's a polite courtesy for those who want to use it. I'm sure some people do treat it as a demand, though, and I believe that's wrong. That said, I don't wear pronoun badges outside of Pride events because I find it mostly irrelevant.

2. Would I care if someone politely declined? Not at all. Nor would I care if you ignored it entirely, as I said, it's there for those who want to use it and I'm not expecting anyone to notice it. It's just nice when they do. I'm not going to bring it up unless someone else brings it up first, and I don't correct people on my preferred pronouns.

3. I guess it probably does signal a belief in "genderism," or what I'm assuming people here define as genderism since I can't find a clear answer on Google. My beliefs with regard to gender are that I know I am most comfortable thinking of myself as non-binary. I also believe that my trans friends are most comfortable thinking of themselves as their varying gender identities. That's the extent of it. I don't expect others to believe the same as I do.

4. My identity, nor the identities of any other trans people I know, are not dependent on external validation. If it was, I'd be up shit's creek because I don't routinely come out to people and therefore in most situations I'm referred to by my biological sex. Despite ten years of identifying as non-binary and very few people validating that, my identity hasn't changed in that time.

That's your inference, not implication on my part. When I say I, im talking about me.

The minimising of other women's feelings was perfectly clear @TooBigForMyBoots, but nice try.

I was last "sirred" buying door furniture. The time before that, buying plumbing components. The time before that, by a barman. The time before that, when playing at a concert. The time before that, wearing a riding mac and a Seattle Rain Hat. The time before that, I wouldn't say "sirred" so much as "grabbed by the lapels and threatened by a drunk for daring to look like a goth until his mate said 'that's a bird you wazzock' and he let me go". Prior to that incident, I wasn't keeping track. The earliest incident I remember, I was still at school.

Bar the assault, I'd say that the other person misjudging my sex caused exactly zero harm to me and therefore a pronoun badge wouldn't have helped me nor anyone else. I doubt that the drunk would have read a pronoun badge, and if he had, he'd have probably been motivated to attack me through transphobia as well as anti-goth sentiment.

I struggle to understand why people are so invested in avoiding a trivial mistake of saying "sir" instead of "ma'am". The world isn't going to end because someone thinks I'm a bloke. The person is still being polite, they're just mistaken. It's not like the barman said "what can I get you, shithead?"

4) My identity, nor the identities of any other trans people I know, are not dependent on external validation. If it was, I'd be up shit's creek because I don't routinely come out to people and therefore in most situations I'm referred to by my biological sex. Despite ten years of identifying as non-binary and very few people validating that, my identity hasn't changed in that time.

I can believe that you are not desperate for validation in that way and I'm sure not all people under the trans umbrella are. But the seeking of validation doesn't necessarily need to mean that people don't believe in their own identity unless everyone plays along. I think that plenty in the trans community don't care what others think about their "identity". Good for them.

It seems more common to me that some of the very obviously male people who identify as "women" want to compel women and girls to validate them as "women" for a range of reasons, none of them very nice. That is what "external validation" can potentially involve.

Thank you for your insider view. I'd like to pick up and expand on something:

If it was, I'd be up shit's creek because I don't routinely come out to people

One of the reasons why pronoun rounds and pressure from managers to wear pronoun badges and add pronouns to email footers are harmful is because some trans people are not out at work and it's not acceptable to force people to choose between coming out when not ready to (or not safe to) and telling a direct lie. Pronoun declaration is not just a gesture of allegiance to genderism (the belief that gender identity is experienced by most or all people and should trump sex in law, policy, sports, etc) that gender critical people cannot make without lying, but also harms some of the very trans people it purports to support. The most vulnerable being the people I work with on Tier Four visas who have come from places like Saudi Arabia and work alongside others from their own country who might rat them out to the religious police back home. Work is not a "safe space" for these people to be out about being gay or trans or even atheist. Whoever it was who cooked up the slogan "bring your whole self to work" had absolutely no clue about this reality for immigrant workers.

My beliefs with regard to gender are that I know I am most comfortable thinking of myself as non-binary.

I'm not comfortable thinking of myself as "a woman" either. Apparently this feeling is common amongst autistic people. However, I live:

1. in a world that fails to properly accommodate my reproductive biology,
2. amongst people who think of me as a woman and judge me as such, and
3. amongst men who seek to exploit my reproductive biology

and those three things are where my sex-based oppression comes from. As long as my sex-based oppression exists, I don't get the luxury of forgetting that I'm a woman.

Lastly, you may be reasonable about pronouns, but "It's MA'AM" guy and the they/them earrings waiter aren't, and I have no way of knowing who wearing a pronoun badge is is going to suggest that we "take it outside" (code for a punch-up) if I get it "wrong".

@MaidOfAle

Bar the assault, I'd say that the other person misjudging my sex caused exactly zero harm to me and therefore a pronoun badge wouldn't have helped me nor anyone else. I doubt that the drunk would have read a pronoun badge, and if he had, he'd have probably been motivated to attack me through transphobia as well as anti-goth sentiment.

I struggle to understand why people are so invested in avoiding a trivial mistake of saying "sir" instead of "ma'am". The world isn't going to end because someone thinks I'm a bloke. The person is still being polite, they're just mistaken. It's not like the barman said "what can I get you, shithead?"

I glad those incidents weren't an issue for you. I can see, though, for people living through identity/gender dysphoria, it may not be as trivial. When others are polite or any mistake is clearly not meant to cause harm, that's fine, but I'd think when misidentification - as in your last example - is purposefully vindictive, that's wrong.

I can understand this.

In the field I work in, there is a major product that changed its name recently. I have to refer to this product when talking to customers. Each time I have to refer to it, I am still thinking of it by its old name, or even seeing its old name on written material, so I have to mentally convert the old name to the new name. And I notice the cognitive load it causes me.

I can well understand that the extra cognitive load would be difficult for someone suffering from fatigue, especially in a stressful situation like a medical one. And especially when getting it wrong can be perceived in today’s climate as being intentionally hostile.

Words to live by.

Referring to someone by intuitive sex-based pronouns isn't remotely comparable to calling someone a "shithead", even when you've been asked to use different pronouns. There is no circumstance on earth in which calling someone "shithead" would be polite or professional. To almost all people most of the time, calling someone female "ma'am" would be polite and professional and completely unremarkable.

"To almost all people most of the time, calling someone female "ma'am" would be polite and professional and completely unremarkable."

In the US maybe, I quite enjoy being ma'am'd when on holiday. Rarely hear it in the UK though.

In circumstances at work where I've had to choose between lying and avoiding pronouns when referring to an absent third-party, I've really felt the cognitive friction. It is, for me, as difficult as the time I hired a car on holiday and drove on the right. I kept reaching for the gear stick and finding the door.

Thank you for acknowledging my (and many others) struggles.

It's particularly galling when healthcare providers, who should know better, don't.

One of the points that the supporters of pronounery always miss is that pronouns are the most ancient form of language - the first words that early homo sapiens developed to be able to say "That over there!" "Him in the distance."

they are the first building blocks of sentence construction in infants and the last thing to go in elderly sufferers of dementia.

In brain injured aphasic patients they are the least likely words to be lost or confused.

People who tyrannically demand that we change these deeply ingrained speech patterns are asking us to massively increase our neurological activity to go against deeply ingrained language abilities. This creates stress, confusion and inhibits clear understanding and clear logical thinking.

Pronounery is discriminatory against people whose first language is not English; people with disabilities; the elderly; people with speech impediments; people with learning disabilities and children.

I'm not partaking in it. No one can force me too. The idea that anyone can compel me to ruin my own speech and thought patterns literally makes me lol.

Pronounery cultists are pathetic and funny. We ain't doin it fellas. It's over.

MessinaBloom

We're not talking about vindictiveness, though, are we? We're talking about not playing along with a lie. If a person genuinely has gender dysphoria, that's their issue, not mine. They need to cope with being correctly sexed. (Misgendering is a meaningless term unless you believe in gender identity). It may be painful but it's going to happen because others can nearly always tell.

Like a pp, I have also been missexed several times. People got my sex wrong a lot when I was younger. I was hurt by it every time.

Other people got my sex wrong. "Misgendering" is getting someone's sex right. No offence is intended. Only those who accept that gender identity is more important than sex, and that the words man or woman mean "person with masculine/feminine gender identity" can see correctly sexing someone using sex-based words as an insult. To pronouns-havers (you will note that I am not referring to all people with identities) the insult is in not accepting the genderist meaning of man and woman. The pronouns-havers could just understand that others are referring to their sex, not GI, and shrug it off. They don't. It's unacceptable to them for others to give these words their usual, accepted meaning - but apparently, the rest of us must accept the imposed language change and therefore that we have offended against courtesy. GII adherents could have come up with new words but they choose to try to repurpose existing ones which reflect sex (and claim that the new meanings have always been in place).

That's why I say that demanding or requesting preferred pronouns is a demand or request to other people to profess belief in an ideology or at least in a phenomenon (gender identity) which is not real. It's not about courtesy or not hurting people's feelings. It's authoritarianism at worst and emotional manipulation at best.

Final thought from me: what I love about the current collapse of the TRA edifice is how they can't police our thoughts, nor our perception.

We all know what non-binary doesn't exist and that no one can change sex. If I'm presented at work with a bloke wearing she/her badge, I'll be perfectly polite to him, extra polite in fact because the fact that he's wearing a badge relaibly lets me know that he's a narc and a bit of a nutter.

Inside, I'm laughing. Me and my receptionist will side-eye each other knowing that we've got plenty to gossip and giggle about later about the bloke with his badge and his silly demands.

And he can't stop us. He can't police our thoughts, our perceptions, our language. This makes him mad as hell and there's eff all he can do about it.

Bwa ha ha ha haaaa.

This isn't the 'gotcha' that you seem to think it is. Not wearing them is the default. Choosing to wear one is doing something deliberately different.

The thread is not about 'policing', it's about exploring the ramifications of this choice, both for the wearer and for everyone they encounter.

I think people need to take responsibility for their choices, including the parts their appearance that they choose.

Every time we choose to wear a certain item of clothing, or jewellery, or dye our hair a certain colour, we are making a choice (even if that choice is simply 'fuck it, I'm too tired to care what I look like').

To an extent, we are accepting that by making this choice, we are accepting the way others will react to us (not including outright abuse, obviously). For example, if i go to a work meeting with people who don't know me, and Im dressed in scruffy jeans because I can't be arsed to dress up, i probably won't get taken as seriously as if I'd dressed up and i could and should predict that. Similarly, if my big, long haired husband goes out in a heavy metal t shirt and leather jacket, people tend to avoid him on the bus, because he looks scary despite actually being quiet and kind! Again, if he is bothered by this, he can choose to present himself differently.

Choosing to wear a pronoun badge, like anything else, comes with its own set of signals to the world. These will be interpreted by others and shape their reaction to the badge wearer. As we've seen on this thread, symbols can mean different things to different people (are pronoun badges a demand? Do they signal political affiliation? People disagree about these things).

But crucially, we don't get to choose how others perceive/ react to us. Everyone needs to take responsibility for the reactions that may be elicited by their appearance choices.

It might not be right or fair, but people will judge other people on how they choose to present, and that especially includes things like badges which are a deliberate symbol, usually of something you believe in or want to happen.

And that is why wearing a badge is not an equivalent choice to not wearing one.

Because TWAW, despite a very long, arduous journey to become a woman, please don't say "they have gone to get paperwork" as this is virtual genocide

Agree with both of you. My health issues make it hard for me to cognitively understand the messaging of pronoun labels which adds to the worry that if I go wrong, will I be judged badly and have my care compromised. Its frustrating that healthcare providers are not seeing this from the patient perspective.

And having your care or consent compromised isn't an unreasonable fear (as some have suggested) because there have been cases of it happening!

Eh?

I did exactly that when I hired cars in the US and Germany!

I have to go along with it at work. Luckily it hasn’t really come up much. I removed myself from the company-wide DEI discussion group because I didn’t want to get wound by some of what was being posted there or be tempted to respond. And I managed to stop myself from responding when a Pride month book club asked for suggestions for a book to read and specifically said books by “transphobes” like JKR would not be allowed. Someone innocently asked why not, and the organiser gave the usual TRA spiel about her and her views. I was very tempted to post a link to the essay she posted on her website when all this started and say “Here, you can read for yourself what her views on this are.”

I think people’s reasons for wearing pronoun badges vary.

A couple of years ago I had dealings with a social worker on behalf of an elderly relative. She was lovely, caring person, and very good at her job. But I noticed she had pronouns in her email signature and when I finally met her she was wearing a pronoun badge on her coat.

I’ve since found out that the council she works for is very captured. I suspect she was required to declare her pronouns, and perhaps thought it was a kind thing to do.

I wonder if this council has any trans social workers, and if so, what happens if an elderly client with dementia or even just mild cognitive impairment gets their pronouns wrong, or openly mocks them. My elderly relative would probably have been rude or dismissive if she’d seen a she/her badge being worn by someone who was obviously male. People with those conditions lose their social inhibitions and tell it like it is.

Shaky foundations too, surely if they have courage in their convictions, being misgendered wouldn't be an issue.

Perfect summation 👏👏👏