Transgender people: do you know/have you met any?

Is a bit.

I thought this had been revived as the singer in The Jags ("I gotcha number, written on the back of my hand") was on 24 hours in A&E

More than anything, I'm just amazed how much the discourse has moved in 8 years (also I know hundreds, if not thousands of trans people)

I know two. Actually three now that I think about it, one of them is a child who was quite insistent on her gender switch from an extremely young age. Parents were at first startled and a little uncomfortable and by now are 100% comfortable with it.

The other two worked for me at my last job. They were both great guys, and oddly both of them worked on the same project, overlapping only slightly. One has transitioned very easily in the years since, and other has had an extremely rough time, as it's been compounded by some serious medical problems (MS) and what sounds to me like a really unsupportive family. To make matters worse she was fired by my shit former boss the week after I quit my job in an extremely clear case of wrongful termination on two counts (disability as well as gender identity; she was the best developer we had there). I've tried to convince her to sue them but she's been unwilling to do so.

This thread is a wiiiild ass time capsule.

JFC it really is.

one of my friends from high school transitioned in 2011. i had a lingering crush on him and we talked on facebook a lot and our conversations inevitably spilled over into trans stuff. he was struggling a lot, more than i ever have tbh, so when he disappeared briefly from facebook i was v worried. then he reappeared with a different name and had started transitioning and we talked a lot about his experiences on the other side of it. it was the first time i ever really learned that there was a language for the parallel experience i was having. (albeit mine was occurring at a much more delayed rate.) then he disappeared from facebook again and i haven't been able to find him online anywhere since but i hope he's doing well and living exactly the life he wants because i love him and i'm so glad i knew him

i have two trans students, accidentally misgendered one for the second time yesterday, still kicking myself abt it 24 hrs later

i was curious so i just looked in my old facebook messages and found all of our correspondence and started crying again xp

the messages we exchanged are SO LONG that they feel like they come from a different internet

sorry y'all lol

I wonder if, in the next few generations, something is going to come before the Supreme Court and/or surface nationally in a major way to direct people's attention towards this. But I don't know.

Bwa-ha-ha! It all did bubble up a lot faster than anybody anticipated.

I haven't met any new transgendered people irl since this thread was started, but my social circles are very small and suburban. A few online acquaintances (here and elsewhere) have transitioned in the interim, but not even like, any old high school friends on Facebook or whatever.

kind of a depressing thread for me because all the "wild ass time capsule" reactions are mostly the reactions i'm trying to deal with now :(

I am a college instructor and genuinely want to refer to people by their preferred pronouns, but I'm having a tough time remembering. I have 35 students and four who responded to my request to tell me about preference. That seems easy in retrospect but I've already slipped up. I find it's easier to just use their name even if it's a occasionally grammatically awkward.

It's much easier, effortless really, with the (few) trans ppl I know personally.

More than anything, I'm just amazed how much the discourse has moved in 8 years (also I know hundreds, if not thousands of trans people)

― Get Me Bodied (Extended Mix), Tuesday, February 12, 2019 4:54 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you are not kidding

xp i've found something similar to be the case. i've only recently started having trans or genderqueer students who cared enough about how they were identified that it was worth it for them to say anything about it (i suppose i might have had some genderqueer students in the past for whom it wasn't an issue, or it was but they didn't say anything, for whatever reason), and it seems obvious that they're encouraged by recent shifts in institutional practices (like pronoun preferences being included in the biographical data from the registrar for instructors). but some have cared but did not say anything about it, trusting to the institutional stuff (on my end) or leaving it to how they would be identified in context by their peers from their presentation and what they actually said about whatever - even to the point of talking about trans issues, obviously from personal experience and stakes, with classmates but leaving some less sophisticated classmates ignorant of how to refer properly to them. i was worried about making a mistake, mainly in front of a class when i would most normally have cause to refer to a student with a pronoun - i found that with students with gender presentations that were more ambiguous than their stated identifications, i would sometimes slip a little mentally toward choosing a pronoun depending on (the wrong gender aspect of) their presentation before thinking of their identification. my experience in the moment as a speaker was that it was not too different from the challenge of remembering everybody's name (and preferred nickname) in a group full of new people, but still a bit more prone to forgetfulness or lapsing, i guess because linguistic gender markers are something you usually manage more lazily from your perceptions in context. mostly i did like you said - used names (which i would say predominate over pronouns in a classroom context anyway - so only rarely did i deliberately avoid constructing sentences that i might have used pronouns in).

(for a while through the early days or weeks of a course it's totally permissible in context to ask a student's name right before you refer to them by it, since being the one person responsible for knowing everyone's name gets you a pass. more so if you can come off as the addled/aloof/busy type of instructor. it would be very convenient if you could do the same with their preferred pronouns etc., but given current practice it kind of seems like you could not do so without substantial risk of giving offense.)

i have been tasked with giving a presentation about pronouns to my fellow faculty members because my school is very behind/ooooold school in that regard. i have known a number of trans people, including but not limited to students.

I find it's easier to just use their name even if it's a occasionally grammatically awkward.

It's much easier, effortless really, with the (few) trans ppl I know personally.

this is good thinking, i think

here is an excerpt from benjamin dreyer's interview with terry gross where he talks about his awokening wrt pronouns. i think it might be useful itt

DREYER: This ultimately was the intersection of my perspective as a copy editor and my perspective as a - simply as a human being. I remember reading a few years ago an article in The New York Times that was all about a person who did not identify as male or female. And I made my way through the article, which was extremely well-written, and toward the end of the article, there was a quotation.

There was a description of this person by this person's father or mother that referred to the person as they and then added - was added parenthetically using a pronoun that The Times does not use. And I then went back, and I read the entire article and realized that the writer of the article had managed to write the entire article about this person without ever resorting to a pronoun. And it was done seamlessly and eloquently.

And I was sort of - I mean, on the one hand, I was sort of impressed by the effort, while, at the same time, I was also beginning to contemplate the necessity of this avoidance. And then, what happened subsequently is that I gained a colleague whose pronoun of choice is they. And when I was first introduced to this colleague, I found myself for months doing anything I could in writing or even in speech to avoid applying a pronoun. I'd refer to the colleague as the colleague. I mean, can you hear how dreadfully stilted I'm becoming?

GROSS: (Laughter) Yes.

DREYER: And I would refer to the colleague by name. And at one point, even I began to realize how ridiculous I was. And the word they popped out of my mouth, and I thought, oh, be done with it already (laughter). You know, like, just honor your colleague, honor this person that you work with, honor this person you actually like a lot and and honor the pronoun choice.

And it shouldn't have to take something personal, you know, a one-on-one encounter with another human being. It shouldn't necessarily have to take that sort of thing to make you evolve properly. You should - you know, maybe you should be a better person, and you should be able to do it in the abstract. But sometimes it does take a personal encounter to get you to change how you see things.

GROSS: Well, I - you know, I think, like, if you're gender queer, if there's a lot of, like, rights that you're going to have trouble getting because of discrimination in our society, one of the things you should not be deprived of is, like, the right to have a pronoun (laughter).

DREYER: Right.

GROSS: Like, that shouldn't be something that you have to go to the Supreme Court for, to have a pronoun to use to describe yourself.

DREYER: Yeah. And the last thing that I want to do is to pass myself off as some sort of ferocious gatekeeper who, in some sort of argument about the purity and the wonder of the English language and how it must be preserved, is simply being unkind and cruel to other human beings. You know, if I've learned anything in my increasing years, it's that just being kind, you know, being respectful is more important than how I feel about pronouns.

that's interesting, but i'm not 100% clear how it's useful

because a fundamental change in the way we use language affects everyone differently and i thought dreyer's experience as a copy chief/arbiter of "taste" illustrates how people might approach the issue of respecting someone's pronouns in spite of resistance, even if that resistance is born of style and linguistic "elegance" (whatever that means). i guess i thought it was interesting and therefore useful?

i agree, it’s useful in reaffirming the moral principle behind respecting people’s pronoun choices

i’m just really uncomfortable w making pronoun mistakes

i think it's natural to make mistakes at first -- this is all very new. imho an indication that you are trying and doing your best still counts in the early stages. again, this is all very new! a language shift like this may happen once in a lifetime, if ever. function words don't change much even though we invent new words and usages all the time.

we are struggling with Latinx at my school, and we are like ~90% Spanish-speaking Latinx-identifying people, it's hard. give yourself a break for making an error. i know i have made some!

I had a hard time with 'they' (actually i know no one who insists on this but mentally I have a hard time with it) until I realized that in some circumstances I've always said 'they' for a singular person anyway.

xp i appreciate that

it’s hard for me because i have gotten to be good friends with the advisor for our school’s TRUTH program (chapter?) and i hear a lot about these students’ private social traumas. i think some of my colleagues are sort of oblivious about it ... nobody (adult wise) is resistant to using preferred pronouns at our school but i think some people have a simple “oops my bad” reaction w/r/t social awkwardness and don’t give it much of a second thought

i think what is frustrating for me is that my classroom is the one social space where i can exercise (extremely limited, possibly illusory) control over how people socialize ... so i want to make it as safe a space as possible ... and it’s upsetting to be the person that undermines that sense of safety

i'm not too worried about being disrespectful, it's more that i have no job security and don't expect to be given the benefit of the doubt should i ever inadvertently give any offense

i suspect that establishing pronouns as a discretionary rather than compulsory linguistic item in a way that people can master (i.e. become able to use routinely without any risk of giving offense or losing face) really calls for a change in the ways that people introduce themselves and one another, sociologically/ritually speaking - which would be a lot more marked a change than just swapping in a singular 'they'. which is why schools have been a vanguard for the change; they are places where authorities can exercise control over how people socialize, and places where there can be a certain formality to linguistic practices of introduction and address and reference, without it seeming like an absurdity or a nicety or an optional convenience.

there's a countercultural type restaurant around here that had lots of staff with (declared—i think on their nametags?) non-standard pronoun preferences, some of whom became increasingly uncomfortable when they found that they were nevertheless being misgendered by customers who did not know how to call for them where they would normally say 'sir' or 'miss'. at the time their idea was that they might conduct more detailed introductions where they supplied not just pronouns but preferred forms of address, as well as names ('i'm conor, and i'll be your server'). i don't know how that went over.

ideally i would like to manage this dimension of my classroom without talking about it, so that it can't become a thing for students who have any problems with it, and students who care can see it work without a lot of overt ritual showing of respect (or heavy-handed intervention from the person who can exercise control over how people socialize).

More than anything, I'm just amazed how much the discourse has moved in 8 years

It's amazing and wonderful because one of the biggest things Santorum types were crying about in the fight for marriage equality has come true and every normal person is just like "oh, cool, good for them."

remember back in the mid-90s in my first co-worker is trans experience. there was a lot of pushback on bathroom issues
weirdly unaware of individuals in current large corp, although there was a recent internal intranet discussion about neutral bathrooms and lack thereof

the interesting thing to me about pronoun anxiety is the way it fundamentally represents a linguistic failure - the inability of users of the english language to agree on a consensus set of gender-neutral pronouns - and the way we're working through the effects of that failure. we may wind up just abandoning third-person pronouns entirely, at least for a time. it's also interesting to compare it to a successful attempt to address an inadequacy of the english language some decades earlier, namely the way women's honorifics were predicated on marital status.

i wonder if any larger conclusions can be drawn by comparing and contrasting these cases. probably not.

spending time w/ younger ppl via activisty things over the last couple years has been tremendously helpful in meeting more trans and nb ppl. it's amazing the gap btwn even older and younger millenials, let alone gen-zers or whatever we're calling them

it's also interesting to compare it to a successful attempt to address an inadequacy of the english language some decades earlier, namely the way women's honorifics were predicated on marital status.

I don’t think it has been entirely successful. Yes, there’s another choice in the drop-down but I feel uncomfortable about assumptions being made about me whenever I use Ms. I still prefer it to the alternatives though. And sometimes I *still* haven’t had a choice - I had a run in with The Palace who insisted a member of the royal household would call me Miss when they met me. In the event, I was introduced to them with my first and surname only, and it wasn’t an issue. But purlease!

(Sorry to derail, this conversation is not about me ect ect)

tbf they have an individual they refer to as *the* Queen which seems disrespectful in many ways but it's nice they're into queens

i dunno madchen, i think there's a similar potential with pronouns.

i was surprised to read in the nyt that amy klobuchar was a 'ms'. i don't know why, i guess i was familiar with their practice, which officially is to default to ms for married women like political figures/political figures' wives unless that person chooses to be known as 'mrs'. i realized that the usage made me feel more uncertain who or why the title was being used, who chose it, whether it had to do with her last name (being retained after starting a career despite a marital name, etc.), or what.

a pronoun practice that paralleled the use of ms as a social title might settle on a default to be used before one knows a stated preference. i wonder if married women, or unmarried women, had any tendency to bristle at being called 'ms' when that usage started making what headway it did.

i've always been all in for Ms -- didn't realize people still felt weird about it today?

(XP) For me it was the second time somebody assumed I was divorced — after I’d adopted Ms precisely because I don’t want to be judged in terms of my relationship to somebody else. Is Ms =
Divorced a particularly British assumption?

But yeah, I agree that in time there will probably be a transition wrt pronouns, whether or not that means everyone using ‘they/them’ by default. And it’ll be interesting to see what other languages do wrt m/f nouns, matching adjectives etc.

i think ms = divorced is not an american thing, i have never even thought about it!

I just wanna know if Jaq did great in her new job and left her husband

Also, my answer to the poll question now is "I have had trans friends for decades but in 2011 I would have said I had never met a trans person"

Yeah, to echo what everyone says, I thought more acceptance was coming but had no idea it would be this fast - it's pretty awesome.

I didn't know Ms was the way forwards, my angry feminist friends tend to use Mx for the reasons sketched above.

I know a married couple who are both trans (one is m2f, one f2m) and I feel stupid that their specific union makes me so happy because they're just two (really lovely) people making it work but part of me can't help but project hope for the future onto them.

sorry for the digression but hello Madchen, I haven't seen your name on ILX in many many years; but maybe it's just the threads I've been on.

Hello! I’ve never gone away but tend to stick to threads I’ve bookmarked. Which it seems I did with this one back in 2011 :)

I use Ms and never intend to change but a lot of women I know who aren’t married prefer Miss?

Wrt they, I always use singular ‘they’ when I don’t know the person I’m referring to (like if I’m waiting for someone I’ve never spoken to to get in touch) and I also agree that English lacks in this regard. Personally singular “they” feels a lot more natural/everyday to me than using the same word for second person singular and plural.

I’ve seen Mx on a lot more official forms and places recently.

I knew one M -> F trans who was a good friend growing up. One thing I always noticed - we played a lot of D&D in middle school and he would always choose to play a female character. And always Peach in Mario Kart & Smash Bros. I never thought much of it, all us dorks had quirks like that, but after a particularly lengthy Facebook post about making radical life changes and fear of being accepted I figured it out. We had some really good conversations about it, I never knew anything about how inaccessible hormone therapy is to a retail worker nor about the apparent hell that is gender dysphoria.

I wound up seeing her a couple times after that, presenting publicly as a woman (something she was terrified to do, especially around people who had known her as male for 15+ years), she seemed comfortable at a glance but I didn't know what to say. On one hand I wanted to say I was proud of her for having the courage to go through with it but on the other I figured she just wanted to be a regular woman for once so I just didn't say anything, probably making her feel awkward as well.

Unfortunately the election of Trump had a pretty big effect on her psyche and she wound up deleting all her social media. I don't know where she is or what she's doing...I don't really hang out in that circle anymore and she never really showed up to any social events so I guess I'll be left wondering forever.

Several when I think about it

1) family friend who i also used to work with later transitioned to female. Never remotely saw it coming, maybe in part because as a man he was completely bald on top and had a relatively deep voice.

2) Family friend’s daughter who I haven’t seen since the transition to female.

3) kid I went to middle school with who already presented borderline female. We kind of all *knew* before we actually knew what that was.

4) friends stepchild is non-binary - not sure if that counts

5) my wife’s friend is f to m. She only knew the friend post transition.

It is remarkable how much has changed—for good and bad—in eight years. OTOH, In 2011 I knew one trans girl (AFAIK) and most of the trans people I was even aware of were performers of some kind. Eight years later, I know/have known a half dozen or more trans people who are friendly drinking acquaintances, people in my local scene, etc., and the dozens or more that I stay aware of are novelists, game designers, scientists, journalists, musicians, artists ... OTOH, I'm much more frightened for my trans friends now than I could've imagined being in 2011.

(Also, in 2011 I thought of Linehan as a mildly amusing TV writer, not a manically obsessive spittle-flecked transphobe.)

(also I know hundreds, if not thousands of trans people)

wow, you know a lot of people!