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

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!