I am neuro-divergent. I struggle with remembering minutia that aren’t, coincidentally, just luckily the minutia that I glimpse, once, and never forget. I state this not as an excuse but as a statement of fact and I am terrible at remembering people’s pronouns. I cannot even remember people’s names. When I see people I know, I can remember who they are, what we have done together, where we have been, what we have seen and even the tone of voice they might use to exclaim at an occurrence or upon some eventuality but – yet – I often cannot remember their names. Pronouns are like parts of their names.
And, so, I tend to address everyone with “they” / “them”.
In my limited experience, this only tends to annoy the anti-woke conservative types who renounce the very concept of pronouns and believe that one should only ever be addressed as “he” / “him” – assuming that a penis hangs between their thighs – or “she” / “her” otherwise. (A musing: How do they know? Also, what if it’s cold? Or they’re upside down? Quandaries within quandaries!)
BUT… I am open minded and I can believe that others, too, might be offended by my cop-out, including open-minded, non-mysoginist, non-bigots who do understand why people elect to be addressed under non-Victorian pronouns.
I have recently had reason to pause and wonder about this. I struggle with pronouns but I do try my best and so, I’m asking: for which reasons might someone object? Tell me, LGBTQ+ community.
I’m sure that dead-naming is far worse but would I be wrong to think that this lies in the same vein as dead-naming?
This is fascinating to me. I’ve never changed my name so I cannot have been dead-named but I do know how I feel when my family treats me in a way that denies the facets of my identity that I have accepted in my more recent adulthood – concretely: my neuro-diversity, because they don’t know that I don’t think of myself as binary.
Of course, these are not the same thing but people understand differences by bridging gaps based on common ground and all of this discussion builds common ground, in my mind. That’s why I’m asking.
Not the origonal commenter, but “analogous to deadnaming” is certainly how it can feel sometimes.
Obviously there’s innocent mistakes/forgetfulness, but when someone had no problem calling a (passing) trans person by the correct binary pronoun but suddenly “can’t remember” or reverts to “they/them” once they learn you’re trans - there’s clearly something else going on there. It’s additionally upsetting because the slight is subtle enough, and the excuse believable enough, that you can’t easily explain why it’s a problem to people who don’t already understand it.