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!

Have you rejected your prostate? I sometimes think it would be better for me to be without it; it has served its function, and is now to me just a cancer risk. I don't intend to try to find a surgeon willing to remove it, because it would be an unnecessary major operation, and also my understanding is that it would be a particularly risky one. But logically if you reject noticeable parts of you because you reject male sex characteristics, one would expect you to reject your prostate.

... And every male cell in your body.

In this scenario I just refer to the person as they prefer. It really isn’t an issue. Sometimes a person asks for a nickname. This is no different.

if we have something in common and enjoy one another’s company, that is really all that matters.

So what? Really.

Why does this matter to you? The only people who seem to want to make this matter for whatever reason is gender critical people.

Spot the poster who hasn't read any of the thread.

Have you RTFT? Seen how this leads to men forcing themselves into women’s spaces thinking women don’t notice? Lying about their sex to medical professionals?

Spot the poster who has read the thread and just doesn't care what any other poster has said because women don't count as real people. They can merely be binned off as the 'wrong type of person' because they don't agree.

It matters to anyone concerned about reality, about science, about children being indoctrinated in a harmful ideology. Not just those critical of oppressive regressive construct that is gender.

You can be assured they asked why I didn't have a uterus and my further response was I didn't have one or ovaries and I'd been on HRT since I was a teenager. Thank you for your cynical concern about my health, though.

My blood tests have been within female norms since I was a teen. I've never had any issue receiving a HRT renewal.

I've read about the political barriers scattered throughout the NHS whenever the word 'trans' is uttered by a patent and you want me to out myself? Yeah, sure. It's not going to happen anytime soon.

My health is excellent. I have no chronic health issues. I am followed up regularly for screenings as needed.

My blood tests have been within female norms since I was a teen. I've never had any issue receiving a HRT renewal.

So your blood has XX chromosomes in it? That's normal for a female.

Fascinating.

And also yet another complete distortion and twisting of reality.

We call this a lie normally.

Why does it matter?

It matters when any male person demands that any person uses female language for him or supports him using female language for himself.

It matters because it impacts the ability to safeguard female people and to provide female single sex provisions. Particularly, for children to be able to trust their instincts to recognise and correctly identify a person's sex category.

It matters because it impacts how people communicate accurately and clearly.

It matters because it is misogynistic for any male person to attempt to destabilise the language that female people need to uniquely describe themselves.

"The only people who seem to want to make this matter for whatever reason is gender critical people."

No, this is another false generalisation. Because there is a huge population of people who recognise the importance of material and objective facts. There have been plenty of examples of situations where this is important all through this thread, did you miss reading these?

💯

Same. I knew the word transsexual and had started researching the process of sex change in the 1970s. Well before I knew i was attracted to men.

My gran used to say "I'm 80 you know". Funny never once did she tell me she was a woman

It is a strange coincidence but over the last 40-ish years I have met in person several people who told me that they were transwomen. For not a single one of them have I thought "well that's a total surprise, it didn't occur to me that you were not born female, I would never have guessed if you hadn't said."

So, given that several non-passing transwomen have come out to me without me asking questions about their sex, I'd have thought that if any totally passing transwomen existed then over the years surely at least one of them would have told me and I'd have been able to express genuine surprise.

And yet this hasn't happened to me. Only on the Internet these unicorns appear, certain that no-one has ever suspected they were male.

Most of this post of yours is irrelevant to the post you are replying to. It still remains a very significant issue if your health records do not accurately reflect your medical history and your sex. I am glad that you are in good health. Of course, the issue is far more important when you are requiring any medical treatment.

"My blood tests have been within female norms since I was a teen. I've never had any issue receiving a HRT renewal."

This is irrelevant to whether you, a male person, are a female person or not. This has been explained numerous time already on this thread. You can only accurately say that your male body is receiving exogenous estrogen that when tested is within the range that female people naturally produce at different stages of their life. You have again, inadvertently, shown how little you understand about female human bodies though.

"I've read about the political barriers scattered throughout the NHS whenever the word 'trans' is uttered by a patent and you want me to out myself?"

Having a gender identity and your decision to undertake extreme body modifications to change your body's appearance to suit your personal identity is your material reality. If you cannot be honest about this to your medical team, then that is a significant issue. What are those political barriers that you are talking about? Are you referring to your own personal language demands being rejected by others, even though those people might use neutral and factual language? Wouldn't that be a political barrier of your own making?

That poster would be me.

Gender critical efforts to define, gatekeep and police people's existence within 50% of humanity is bizarre.

No one cares about a person's sex configuration at conception in public, social and cultural situations but you.

"No one cares about a person's sex configuration at conception in public, social and cultural situations but you."

Again, I hate to keep repeating myself. However, this is simply another false generalisation. I recommend that you go back and read the thread more carefully because there are many many reasons understanding a person's sex category is important.

I think it this is also another example of just how little you understand female people's lives and their experiences though.

Gender critical beliefs are as feminist as old 'feminist belief' that lesbians are dangerous predatory women.

Many?

Sp you think expectations based on regressive sex stereotypes are feminist?

You clearly don’t know what ‘gender critical’ means.

Except it's not reversing. Countering erasure with examples of lived manifested reality and life experience is called fighting erasure.

I'm actually quite high acheiving when I'm not trying to warp my brain into trying to understand and argue against gender critical beliefs. But beliefs.

Lesbians are on the front line here. There are plenty of gender critical lesbians. Your logic makes no sense whatsoever.

It's not ALL about predation. I've observed this before. TRAs are DESPERATE to turn the conversation back to it being all about predation precisely to AVOID all the more difficult points to argue against.

It's also about women's legal rights to privacy and dignity away from men. It's about women's rights to gather and talk about their shared lived experience and to advocate for themselves about the issues that arise from this politically - like childbirth, treatment in the workplace, health issues etc without it being diluted or dismissed by gatekeeping males who decide it's not really an issue to them. It's about data integrity and scientific study which gets distorted by males who lie about their sex - this is stuff like census data collection, police data or research into healthcare. It's about safeguarding transwomen themselves in healthcare settings as well as protecting the staff who care for them from inadvertently from harm.

But males want to reduce it to a conversation about growing tits and loped off willies because this means they are now biologically female as they have 'female primary sexual features', women who can't get pregnant 'cos they don't have a uterus', think that being female is all in your head from being a toddler and return it to this predator issue

In the process basically dismissing and ignoring ALL the other points on this thread that don't suit their agenda and are inconvenient truths.

Women's invisibility couldn't be more apparent. Not one of the points mentioned had gone in or been upheld as 'valid'. Whilst all women are supposed to do is validate males all whilst abusing us and trying to smear us for talking for ourselves about ourselves.

We don't need your permission.

The answer is still no. No you are not women.

I was on synthetic hormones for longer than anyone should be on them. No one should ever be on them. Anyone receiving HRT is receiving man made hormones, though. You are the people claiming that we are saying trans experience is female experience.

There are innumerable trans experiences that occur at the personal level. None of these experiences are public. None of these subtract from public experience and how we move through the world.

Mate.

One word for you.

No.