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!

The way you speak about trans people is dehumanising.

To call a man a man is dehumanising? Do you consider men to be subhuman? Please elaborate.

Would you also consider it “dehumanising” to fail to affirm an anorexic’s self-image of being too fat?

So if this white man started bandying-about the N-word (as having been reclaimed by black people), would you say anything, or would you keep the peace?

At some point the rubber always ends up meeting the road.

Fuck knows. Maybe I should ask him just to satisfy some random person on the internet with their apparent gotcha moment. If you are saying that human beings, especially teenagers, interact in exactly the same way with both their own sex and the opposite sex, then you inhabit a different world from me. As shocking as it is to admit, I don’t discuss menopause or knitting or cervical smears or M&S’s new range of big knickers with the men in my life. I discuss many many subjects with both men and women, but not those. Christ.

If it’s not a mental health issue, then why the hell should women give up their protected spaces and the terms required to describe their oppression in order to accommodate it?

More posters are effectively returning to the basic question what "going with the preferred pronoun" mean. Is it a personal act (like any other accepting of someone's preferred nickname), or a political act (confirming we see them as a woman and are willing to treat them as one wherever that leads, maybe even to the not really single sex spaces)?

For some the lack of clarity here allows to go with the flow, for some (including me) it makes going with the flow hard, because I would hate if someone would misunderstand me accepting the nickname as my consent with men entering into women's spaces.

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I see the work situation that Forgotmentioned as different enough - work come with many different weird things anyway, for example hierarchy - someone isn't more worthy just because they are someone's "boss".

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It is her beliefs and understanding clashing with his that are causing an issue.

Not really. The issue is that I understand there is a clash of beliefs and I'm looking for a compromise solution, and he doesn't see it as a clash of beliefs, but as a clash of truth and bigotry (potentially, I don't know his specific position, but my English doesn't stretch to write this in a conditional form).

But you would discuss menopause, cervical smears and M&S underwear with a man who identifies as a woman?

I work in a team of 6 people including the transwoman and quite like having a job so yes I do keep the peace by using the name 'Jill' rather than 'Jack'

Fuck knows. Maybe I should ask him just to satisfy some random person on the internet with their apparent gotcha moment.

The question is to you, not to him. You were making the claim, not reporting a claim he made. You really shouldn’t make claims if you don’t know what they mean.

So nothing to do with being polite and not being a dick, and everything to do with coercion, and the abuse power.

It is to do with being polite

If a trans person asks me to call them by their name and pronouns i will do so

If they ask to be in a same sex changing room with me that is the line i will not cross as sex matters

No. But that is absolutely a fair point. I was just trying to express how I believe we interact differently depending on whether the person is the same sex or the opposite sex. I just didn’t do it very well.

Being polite does not involve coercing other people to lie about reality.

You explicitly said that failure to play along risked your job.

Why don't you just go along with it? What are you trying to prove? You can still keep your own views on whether they are a woman or not.

I don't believe that trans women are 'women' , they are trans women. But I do believe that there is something inside them that makes them identify as another sex. If can't be helped and takes a lot of guts to admit this and live on peace. They should be respected. I'm not talking about toilets or women only spaces. But it's just common kindness to respect someone's pronouns. You can keep your views private. What's the point I making them feel not accepted? T

What worries me about pronouns is how it escalated. A lot of us shrugged and said "she" about friends and acquaintances so as not to hurt their feelings. But then that turned into:

Manipulative news stories about how the nasty mean TERFs don't want " her" in their changing room, or how sport was "her" life and all "she" wanted was to be allowed to play sport with " the other girls".

People being disciplined at work and hounded on social media for "misgendering".

Rape victims being told that they will be in contempt of court if they don't refer to their rapist as "she". And, since "she" must be a "her", said rapist being allowed to go to a woman's prison.

Courtesy pronouns are the inch. They took the mile. And then some.

I don't believe that trans women are 'women' , they are trans women

They are men. They are included, in the category of 'men'. There is no exclusion going on when we refer to men as men. What on earth does forcing everyone in the workplace to lie achieve?

yes
If 'Jill' asked me to do something and I said 'so just to confirm 'Jack' you would like me to do xyz then that would be a stupid thing to do at work don't you think?

There is no biological indication for being 'transgender'. Therefore the only commonality with all people with transgender identities is their philosophical belief that they have this transgender identity and it is not based on material reality.

If you choose to use the language demanded from a person or a group of people who have a particular belief that doesn't reflect material reality, that is your choice. And it should also be acknowledged that there are situations where that compliance with language is coerced. Either through emotional reasoning or policy.

However, there should be no expectation that other people should comply with the language demands originating from a philosophical belief. I don't believe that it is 'kind' of any person to expect another to act as if they believe their philosophical belief.

The kindness in that interaction seems to only go one way.

I agree that it was the thin end of the wedge. I don’t actively want to make anyone unhappy, but by the same token I do resent the fact that if I make a ‘mistake’ it’s not going to be politely brushed aside. The chances are that the offended person will take it further than it needs to go. I am fine with being respectful, whether the trans person is a biological male or female, but in return for my respect I would like it to be acknowledged that I might refer to them in a way they don’t like from time to time because my eyes are telling me what’s really there as opposed to the fantasy they have created.

Yes, because of the aforementioned coercive control and abuse of power, as @Tunnocksmilkchocolatemallow pointed out.
Would you consider it stupid to point out that a white co-worker who identifies as black is, in fact, not black? No, even though it might not be “polite”, because he has no coercive power in this matter.

You are not asking people to be kind, you are demanding they submit to a particular belief. Do you say the same of other beliefs? “Why don’t you just go along with it and wear a burkha?”.

Is it not possible to say… ‘just to confirm Jack you would like me to do xyz’.
There is absolutely no requirement to use their preferred name when speaking directly to them.

No. Claiming that all trans people are mentally ill or fetishists is dehumanising.

The only thing all trans people have in common is that their identity/sense of self doesn't match their sexed body. It is dehumanising to presume to know in a sweeping generalisation what is behind this mismatch in all cases. It is dehumanising to speak of an entire class of people in ways that dismiss their person good.

I would consider it dehumanising to say all Muslims are jihadis or to say all disabled people are scroungers, all autistic people lack empathy or all gay people are promiscuous. I consider it dehumanising to say all trans people are fetishists or sick.

"Would you also consider it “dehumanising” to fail to affirm an anorexic’s self-image of being too fat?" Well, I would consider it ill judged, counter productive and inappropriate to presume as a casual acquaintance to tell any anorexic person I may know that it's my role to tell them they are too skinny and need to eat more.

There is no biological indication for being 'transgender'. Therefore the only commonality with all people with transgender identities is their philosophical belief that they have this transgender identity and it is not based on material reality.

I am not sure you are right. I don't pretend to understand it all, but the preponderance of those with ASD who feel the need not to live as someone with their born gender does make me think that there may be something going on over and above a mere "philosophical belief."

Why do they need medical treatment then?

And do you not understand how dehumanising it is to women to be reduced to a male’s fantasy of what they think it is to be a woman, and to be expected to go along with that?