How would you deal with T in a friendship group?

[FourSevenTwo]

How would you deal with T people around you? In general and in my situation?

The main question:
A male in a friendship group decided to go full TW, starting hormones and so on, changing name to the women's form and coming out with pronouns.

Unfortunately, our language is heavily gendered*. For example, instead of Hi Alex, you would say Hi Alexi for a man and Hi Alexo for a woman. If you want to say anything in past tense, like Where were you yesterday, you have to use men's or women's form for were.
This means it is not really possible to ignore it in direct interaction.

I'm not willing to pretend through language that I see him as a woman. I don't and won't. But I don't insist on calling him him. There are some not great alternatives (it, plural - with it's own verb forms, switching to English), but they are all very noticeable.

I'd like to find a solution for our coexistence in this friendship group. I'm not asking about a language solution here, more about an approach.

I'm considering

1. reaching him with a message, saying I've heard the news, and I can't affirm, but, I'd like to keep things civil, so is there some alternative we can agree on?

2. ingoring the issue and limiting communication on grammatically neutral constructions (which will be limiting and obvious after a time)

3. some other option?

To answer possible questions.

• I'm GC woman - in the adult human female sense, in the gender identity terminology I'd claim agender. I absolutely understand people are unhappy with gendered roles, I just don't believe that trying to become/pretend to be/claiming to be the other one is the solution. And I'm sure one can't change sex.

• It seems that majority of our shared friends are willing to be kind, some believe it, some just don't care, men with no skin in the game.

• *I'm elsewhere in EU, not a self-ID country. I don't ask about legal aspects, just personal approach. Discussing in my country's forums would be hard, as we are a small population.

• The group is about games, meeting at someone's home, so no issue with single sex spaces, and generally gender doesn't play a role in the group's activities.

• Yes, I'd like to try to keep the group if possible. I see it as a political topic and I don't need to discuss politics all the time.

• Edit to add : I've name changed for this one. Sorry it is long. And yay, I've managed to force the formatting to behave!

I don't think that some male people also understand the rampant misogyny that lies in any argument that they make that is along the lines of 'I have made all this investment to be considered a woman, so I am really a woman'.

If any male person has had to purchase being a woman in any way, even an investment in ideologic thinking or in 'time spent', it is a sure sign that they are not female.

I really don't think these things even cross their mind.

They don't see there can be any significant between "what I think a woman is" and what female people may think about ourselves.

Man's age old delusion that his external observation of women is (a)objective, and (b) perfectly complete

Pregnant people ffs. From a doctor
So called inclusive language for one group excludes a much larger group
Pregnant People is my bête-noire

Nicholas can bore off and take his fake breasts with him. Sounds like he was interviewed by a fawning, sympathetic hand maiden?? Maybe?
Honestly I've had enough of this bollocks, especially after reading about Hopper (oh the irony))

I don't owe you an answer. Do you ask this question to everyone you meet?

It makes sense, only in a thread started with the question "How would you deal with T in a friendship group?" The thread may as well have been started with the question "How you would you deal with gay in a friendship group?" Or, "How would you deal with friend dating muslim immigrant in a friendship group?"

Bronski Beat's "Smalltown Boy" was on the charts when I was kicked out by my father and I was forced to leave school for good. Anti-trans campaigning is the same story, only a later chapter. Thankfully my father apologised after a few years and our whole family have had many more decades together.

This encounter tells me I need to spend more time supporting and protecting trans people. There are thousands of us who have been your neighbours and coworkers for decades. We are the normal you are afraid to discuss. The "Gay Agenda" never existed. "Gender Ideology" is also a creation of antagonistic campaigns.

Of course, then there are the terms for sexual orientation that then get redefined.

https://x.com/Serena_Partrick/status/2018242954503033148?s=20

But... apparently.... it is kind and respectful to use the language male people demand (sorry.... 'request').

Gay people wanted to be accepted for who they are.

Trans people want to redefine who others are

These things are not the same.

HTH.

You missed the decades of gay people trying to redefine everyone else's marriages while loudly protesting the potential of being found attractive by the same sex.

No worries, mate.

I think that people by now probably see the issues rather clearly about how male people demand female language and the issues around it.

I support trans people. I have trans people in my home quite often. Your attempts to portray women who reject that male people are female in any way, including linguistically, as being a danger to people with transgender identities, as being ignorant and hateful doesn't work.

If 'gender ideology' doesn't exist, neither then do the 'gender identities' that you claim do exist.

And no. Being 'gay' is nothing like having an identity where people have to act as if they belief someone's subjective reality is materially real. You see, someone who is gay is claiming something that is materially real and was only ever about being treated as having the same rights as every other person.

Expecting to be treated as if you are the opposite sex to what you are, and that you can redefine words to suit you personally is not about equality. It is about having additional privileges not available to others.

Would you like me to post Article 8 complete with the restrictions for your information?

Marriage is a contract between two people to protect the relationship.

One a group of people who belong to particular religions had additional meanings for the word marriage to reflect heterosexual relationships for the purpose of reproduction.

This is not the gotcha you think it is.

The thread may as well have been started with the question "How you would you deal with gay in a friendship group?" Or, "How would you deal with friend dating muslim immigrant in a friendship group?"

I've lost count of the number of times I've posted about why this is false equivalency and force teaming.

Gay people don't affect my rights. They don't impose language on me. They don't impose sexism on me.

Many gay people are the people most negatively affected by the force teaming and are those who have the biggest issues with the behaviour and demands of transpeople.

Don't try this shit on with us here. It doesn't work.

Weirdly, I don't think I have a gender identity. I am gendered and identified based on the real body I have, the relationships I share and what the world feels I must experience from moment to moment.

You have spent a lot of time redirecting my words and throwing straw men into the mix so you can attack those with your gender critical beliefs. I feel more concerned that non gender critical people may accept what you are promoting as fact.

"The thread may as well have been started with the question "How you would you deal with gay in a friendship group?" Or, "How would you deal with friend dating muslim immigrant in a friendship group?""

There really is no equivalence with those points and the topic of this thread. One could point out though that it is offensive to falsely leverage those groups to try to score political points the way that paragraph I have highlighted has been structured though.

Apparently... there is no forced teaming happening.

History would predict the original question will be understood to be equally as offensive as the other two.

I see. So you are saying that as a male person you are a 'wife' or a 'mother' or a 'woman' then? You did not have a 'female puberty' when you started taking exogenous estrogen then?

Because you don't have a gender identity?

I think declaring that you are 'gendered' is the very core of having a 'gender identity' though. Your point lacks coherency and any logic.

"I feel more concerned that non gender critical people may accept what you are promoting as fact."

fact?

I suspect that unlike you, I can provide evidence sources that back up my statements.

Care to tell us how any male person had a 'female puberty' or how a male person on estrogen can go through 'menopause'?

Care to tell us how a male person's skeleton is completely reconfigured to be a female person's skeleton when a male person takes estrogen?

only because you are circling around to again misuse those situations as political leverage when they are false comparisons.

Nope.

Gay people didn't redefine anyone else's marriages. They just wanted marriages that allowed for the two people in a specific marriage to be the same sex.

Trans people, by contrast, require that every other human being in the world reassesses their own identity to align to the neo-sexist genderist beliefs that that "real" differences between women and men are mental not physical, simply so that they can inhabit some sexist fantasy of being the opposite sex.

And yet, female people do exist. And whether you allow that these people are the real bearers or the name "women" or not, nevertheless being female is still real and still has consequences.

We are the half of humanity born female. And we live with that, the physical reality and the social consequences, the good and the bad, from the day we are born until the day we die.

Our knowledge of ourself is formed within the knowledge of what society constructs around our bodies. It informs how we are treated and so how we understand ourselves.

In other places and other times, we have been property. We have been banned from education, from economic freedom, from cultural and political power. From telling our own stories in our own voices.

The shadows of that, of the history of people with bodies like ours and not yours, of the stories society constructs around our bodies and not yours, affect our freedom and our status even today.

There is a clear line of descent that can be drawn between the history of female people and women's rights, protections and challenges today.

This is not the story and reality of whatever it is that trans "women" think is womanhood. It is the story and reality of us. Of Female people.

And I think that matters. Regardless of what trans people may or may not suffer, I think the reality of female existence matters enough that we should be allowed to keep our own name and our own identity as the female half of humanity.

I do not think that whatever it is that trans people feel to be true about themselves is so important that it justifies un-naming and de-historying the most consistently marginalised and exploited group of humans there is. It does not justify redefining our lives and our history as something else that you find more accommodating to your needs.

If redefining other people wasn't at the heart of it, you would not be so desperate to stop female people having our own identity and our own name and our own voice and our own history.

You know it and and I know it. The fact you cannot bear us to exist without you says everything.

Find new words to describe this thing that is not physical sex, because physical sex still matters enough to enough people to bear its own name too.

"You have spent a lot of time redirecting my words and throwing straw men into the mix so you can attack those with your gender critical beliefs."

No. I have spend time explaining to you and to those reading why your points don't work and how male people who demand people use female language for them cause harm to female people. I have also pointed out the misinformation in the posts based on a poor knowledge of biological differences between male people and female people.

I do think you need to stop framing established science as 'gender critical beliefs' though. That is really not working and it seems you are trying to use that as ad hominem attacks when you cannot provide scientific evidence to back up your misinformed claims.

I think history will come to show the original question has a lot in common with "How do you deal with a racist uncle?" or "How do I stay polite with my husband's sexist best mate?"

I am a wife and a mother. I am a woman. Estrogen was the primary influence on my pubescent and adult development.

Ugh, I pressed the wrong button.

To continue: My skeleton wasn't reconfigured. It configured.

I guess I had a gender identity when I was young and it became stronger as I was trying to figure out who I wanted to be as an adult. But once that identity became my life, all that was left is my life.

I disagree, strongly. But I disagree strongly with racists, sexists and homophobes.

Please link the evidence that supports your claim that male skeletons ‘configure’ to being female with estrogen.

Because you are posting misinformation now.

And no… sorry your points about you not having a gender identity remain incoherent and are definitely in the ideological category. If you are male, you remain male.

I look forward to the evidence about how estrogen ‘configures’ male skeletons to make them in any way female.

"Menopause" wasn't the word I used, it was the word used by the GP who said I had been on HRT long enough and it was time I stop as I was 'of the age.' I found a new GP.

Those are your beliefs. You are entitled to your beliefs.

So you are a female person born with a body formed around the production of large gametes?

You have never had testes and the surgery you told us you had was nothing to do with removing a penis and creating a cavity in your groin or facial surgery ? So, you mentioned it because ….

Again, thanks for the live demonstration on how important accurate and factual information really is to the world.