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!

This sounds a bit like a panto now!

Oh yes I am in the woman category.

No, you have no reference point for believing that you are a woman. You have mistaken not wanting to be a man with being a woman.

My brains pretty insistent on what it knows. I feel pretty normal living as a woman. Don't even know what living life as a man would even look like! Never tried. Although that it the benefit of transitioning young.

This is such an apt comparison that I have also bought up in previous threads where trans identified men were mansplaining what it actually means to be a woman, as they are wont to do.

I pointed out that a man cannot become a woman in much the same way that Dolezal cannot become a Black/African woman like me because she put on a curly wig, darker makeup and changed her name to Nkechi Diallo. This is despite race, unlike sex, being a surface-level, social construct.

The parallels are very interesting and I can't help but regard men who say they're women as exactly the same as minstrels like Dolezal, who for whatever reason, choose to appropriate an identity which has never, nor will ever belong to them. And then go a step further, by having the balls to speak down members that group, who refuse to kowtow to their harmful beliefs.

Is there a living as a woman checklist?? A load of things to tick off? I mean I want to make sure I'm womanimg correctly

You are living life as a man right now

https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/51545-where-does-the-british-public-stand-on-transgender-rights-in-202425

YouGov polling for those who have not seen it. The table at then end gives more details.

No one gets to tell you how to live as a woman. It's what makes women so special is our diversity. Live your life how you choose! No one gets to tell you what being a woman means to you.

I’m beginning to feel sympathy for you. The ‘outside’ is irrelevant as you’ve altered how it looks but you’ve no ‘inside’ that matches being female. You may feel as if it does but you’ve can’t ever know because you’re male through and through.

That is a really good question, one that gets to the heart of why being a "woman" is not simply measured be-all and end-all about how one thinks of oneself as if one had perfect insight and self awareness.

The short answer is "Because society is sexist and women are part of society as well."

And in all societies where one group holds power over another, for the majority of the powerless group, their best bet is to align with the powerful, to play the game, to internalise the game until their values are your values too. The best slavemasters are slaves themselves because by god they know how precarious they are, and they are going to do everything in their power to maintain their precious bit of extra safety, extra security.

So it is for women. We have internalised the chains - what you call gender - very deeply. They are below our consciousness (hence the old feminist term conscious-raising). So we police each other in society's expectations for us so well in the day to day that men can laugh at our silly ways and only really get involved and angry when enough of us say "hang on WTF?", or maybe when one very rich woman who can't be cancelled says "hang on WTF?" . And only then we see the rage and the rape threats and the angry angry rage that so many women consciously or unconsciously are trying to divert by the constant policing of women.

So that's one part of it - women (female people) are reaching for relative power or relative safety within the system even though the overall system ultimately harms women (and for the matter, ultimately harms men as well, though in different ways). Some by aligning with patriachal values for women, some by rejecting "womanhood" altogether as delineating a type of person they cannot be.

And the other part is denial. It is hard to face the reality that even in this society, and god knows far worse in some others, our bodies still dictate so much of our opportunities and how people see us. It is hard to recognise that, for all the policies and hashtags and empowering role models, we are still physically weaker than men, we are still seen as lesser by many men, our time is seen as best spent on men, our own desires and ambitions for our lives are a joke or nuisance, our bodies still seen by far too many men as wank-fodder or worse.

So when women say "of course you must come into this space, of course you can be a woman" on some level they are trying to make the reality of the difference in body go away because that means they can believe that they themselves will no longer have to face the consequences of the female body in patriarchy. They can be the person with power offering safety and sanctuary instead of the powerless person who needs it.

absolute twaddle

the only way to live as a woman is to be born a juvenile human female and grow into an adult human female

there is no "our" here, you are a man performing female stereotypes

Great post @FlirtsWithRhinos

It's impossible to take this drivel seriously. Especially because it's coming from a man.

Presumably you do think there is some differece between women and men though, otherwise you'd have no use for the words at all, you would just be describing the diversity of humanity.

And you very very clearly do have strong feelings about the need for some people to be "women" and some to be "men", so those words clearly do have meeing to you such that some element of the wonderful diversity of humanity can only go into one box or the other.

So under your belief system, can you explain the difference between a women and a man, and then explain what it is about this difference that results in a need for gendered spaces, and makes it such that I, a female bodied person, should feel more comfortable in single sex spaces or in intimate care situations with a male bodied person who identifies as a "woman" than with someone who has the same body type as me but who identifies as a "man"?

I'm a woman through and through, and I always will be. Idrc what anyone else says, I know what I am.

But how do you know what you are is the same as what we are?

A woman is an adult human someone who aligns with female sex characteristics, a man is an adult human who aligns with male sex characteristics.

I've been around women long enough to know that it is.

I’m afraid you’re only convincing yourself.

What does "aligns with" mean? How does it differ from being of a biological sex?

And most importantly, how does this differince in what someone of either sex "aligns with" result in a need for gendered spaces, and makes it such that I, a female bodied person, should feel more comfortable in single sex spaces or in intimate care situations with a male bodied person who identifies as a "woman" than with someone who has the same body type as me but who identifies as a "man"?

What is it?

Idrc what anyone else says, I know what I am.

I think you do care, a great deal, what other people say. You're here.

I’ve been around men all my life, doesn’t make me feel that I’m a man.

If that