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!

It could be very likely that it is not a fetish.

I guess I keep prodding here about the mental health aspect because you have rejected it so strongly. However, there seems to be a discordance there because surely, if your child did not have their identity affirmed they would likely suffer poor mental health again. So, it was not necessary that their 'mental health' resolved at all. More like those who love your child have worked to keep your child in a negotiated comfort zone based on their identity.

An identity that your child seems to genuinely believe. One that requires those who love your child to act as if your child's identity is based on material reality as far as language use goes. Albeit, one that allows your child to understand that they are not the sex that they want to believe they are, but at least linguistically are being treated as if they are that sex. Purely based on their identity.

It might not be a fetish. However, I really cannot see how it can be denied that if an identity is not affirmed it would lead to poor mental health being denied that there is mental illness involved.

It's avoidant behaviour.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

@Diverze so the body dysmorphia seems to be better now they have accepted they can be a "girl with a willy"? What do you think it would take for them to accept that their body is also fine for a boy to own?

When the demand gets so great that women must submit, that's when it becomes incelism and men's rights activism (which women can participate in and support).

You could just try being supportive. It's your friend, so I'd assume someone you like and trust, so no concerns that the transition is for nefarious reasons. Why not address your friend how they want to be addressed? Being your friend, I'm sure they wouldn't be offended by some accidental slip ups as long as they know that you support and respect them.

"The fear is actually about the fear of having to face up to reality and the extent to which the avoidant behaviour has been enabled and encouraged."

It think there is a lot of discussion about this in the next decade or so.

Avoidant behaviour can be about power and control (see anorexia) this is why it's problematic.

How respectful is it to expect others to act as if your personal reality is their, and actual, material reality when it is not?

I see this platitude about respect being stated on these threads every day. Yet, the respect only ever seems to be one day and it is not towards the person who wants to live a life that is not based on distorted perceptions about established science.

What I don't see often, except from a few of the people with transgender identities that post, is the respect from the person who has declared that they have a transgender identity. A few of them say that they understand that it is their personal identity and if their friends don't support them linguistically then they accept this.

Yet, so many people declare that people with transgender identities deserve 'respect' as if it was a mutually respectful interaction. However, it is not. It cannot be if a person is only performing that they believe that person's reality is based on material reality.

that would be 'one way' not one day

It's not clear cut. If you get angry when the shop assistant brings you some size 20s that she can see will fit you instead of size 16s that don't then you are getting near the crazy. And a good therapist would not encourage you to deny your size and limit yourself to the few brands which size more generously but help you face the reality of the size you are so that you can enjoy the full choice.

I'm sure they wouldn't be offended by some accidental slip ups

Meanwhile in the world of experience many of us have had...

Why not address your friend how they want to be addressed

Well in the case of my brother this actually relates to how I relate to other people. Identity isn't just about individuals. It's also a collective thing.

Thus if I address my brother as my sister this affects my own relational interactions. All those polite conversations about shared lived experience contained within the very innocent "do you have any brothers or sisters?" If you answer honestly, and say brother you are 'transphobic', if you lie and say sister it affects how you relate to others because they impose their experiences on you and you can't relate to having a sister growing up and if you say well it's complicated to people you don't know well you open up a minefield for what was supposed to be only a really shallow polite conversation.

So yes it bloody well matters.

And my example her applies to others in a lesser extent about all kinds of social situations and health related issues. If you can't talk about periods because it's offensive and excluded the transwoman OR because you avoid talking about those subjects around them and they get uppity because they are excluded.

My experience with NUMEROUS transpeople has unfortunately that no matter how much you bend over, it isn't enough because there's always a demand for more later down the line or there's a negative reaction to honesty even if you are respectful and nice to someone - because of this power and control element.

As long as I don't get unreasonable demands I am perfectly happy and will give time, effort and respect.

Cross that line and fuck that shit.

So if your child was anorexic would you have affirmed their belief they were fat and signed them up for weight loss classes? If not, why not?

More than that, why has the number of anorexic girls declined AT THE SAME TIME the number of trans identifying girls has increased? They are being identified as exactly the same cohort makeup with higher rates of autism.

Anorexia isn't actually about necessarily food and feeling fat - some acknowledge this, others don't. Many know it's about power and control and it being the other area of their life they can do these completely often against a background of other issues.

I'd do option 2.
I wouldn't make any confrontational statement about my own feelings to him, but I would go along with it as little as possible.
You won't be the only one who feels that way

The pile on to@Diverze here is horrible. She has admitted to having GC views and being floored by unbidden personal experience over which she has no control. Some of the questions are quite intrusive and the undercurrent of judgement as to how she has chosen to handle things, is pretty shabby. I genuinely believe none of us knows how we would react in a similar situation. We only think we do. It’s always much easier to be the oracle on everything when you’re sitting on your sofa theorising.

This analogy has been done to death and I have answered it already on this thread.

But I do know how it is to have a child with severe debilitating anxiety which leads them to lash out, and to still insist they become accustomed to the type of situation that causes anxiety.
My daughter's spider fear is probably something she could avoid and be happy, but my son can't avoid being around people, even though he seemed at the time to be happier in the house all the time with nobody else even allowed to walk in the room.
We didn't say "OK, we'll insist that everyone leaves you alone and never talks to you", we said "right, this needs to change. Nobody can live like this. We are revolving our lives round you and you are still anxious".

We are speaking from experience. Why aren't we allowed to say these experiences? It's not a 'pile on' to join in a discussion.

I'm sorry but we don't have to centre a poster because her experiences somehow have 'more validity'.

There's an intrinsic problem with getting anyone else to uphold something we all know to be a lie. It doesn't solve the problem. It only creates more problems down the road.

I would like to wave a magic wand and pretend differently. Frankly I think that's not only irresponsible but dangerous.

My trans DC is not interested in having children and I have never thought they would, even before the trans revelation. They aren't able to sustain that kind of intimacy or have bodily contact with anyone else. So I highly doubt their fertility matters much to them.

Redtoothbrush - I respect your experience, but I do think a sibling relationship is very different and probably less unconditional than a parent/child one. And I do think a lot of other posters are not speaking from experience at all. Having said that, I don't mind discussing and whilst I appreciate the support, Methuselah, I don't feel especially attacked or expect to be centered. I wouldn't post about my circumstances if I didn't want to talk about it.

It was all a lot simpler when it was theoretical for me - and it's a lot more nuanced than the anorexia analogy, trust me.

The control thing overlaps massively with autism. Did you ever see the documentary about the Jackson family, the family where all the kids - at the time all the boys but eventually the girls too - have ASC diagnoses? There's a party scene with a very telling shot where one of the boys who is pretty much non-verbal has managed to appropriate the whole bowl of his favourite snacks and is carrying it round with him.

He was insistent, persistent, and consistent about those snacks, and contented as long as he got his way and - more importantly - as long as his world was presented to him the way he thought it should be. He knew those snacks were for him because they were the ones he wanted. Contradict him and all bets were off. His family and friends gave way to him to make him happy and he didn't even need to say anything.

Girls often exert control through self-harm and misery (passive aggression) rather than violent rage attacks but it works just as well. As a parent it's Hobson's choice and doing what it takes to get through the day. Parents may take any improvements and just hope for the best in the long run because what else can a parent do? Gender identity might not even be the biggest/scariest problem their child has. It may be painful but it's not unreasonable for parents to take the hit to their own reality especially if they don't have to worry about the effect on siblings.

What troubles me is when professionals sacrifice their own objectivity to satisfy a very controlling patient. Ray Blanchard has been accused of doing that, of focussing on his adult patients' preferences to the exclusion of their dependents' needs. And therapists are espeically vulnerable, they need to build trust by entering into the patient's world with the risk that a very single-minded self-oriented patient can erode the boundaries of an empathic therapist.

Which (to my mind) includes using unusual pronouns to refer to an autistic patient outside of their therapy. I noticed a supposedly neutral therapist doing that in a recent presentation so it's in my thoughts (though maybe off the topic of the thread). She was otherwise speaking objectively. I don't think she really believed her patient was not male or that he was somehow less masculine than the people she naturally calls "he", nevertheless she diligently they/themmed him. He was still controlling her speech from a distance. I was impressed.

Silly comparison

and

you don’t say 👋 black person

How do you know?

Pertinent comparison

and...

Yes I 👋 do

Yes it is because they haven’t been assigned a a gender identity at birth that matches their sex

these threads always seem to try to dehumanise and says it’s a fetish or mental health issue and be aggressive about it - so demeaning to people struggles

What you say “hello black person”

I doubt that very much