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The problem is that they don’t even slightly pass and you know you’re going to slip up eventually. If you’re interacting closely with them in public you’ve got that hanging over your head constantly.
Plus all the usual issues with compelled speech, of course.
Eh, this really depends on the person. About ten years ago one of my co-workers announced they were trans and asked us to use new pronouns and names for them, but acknowledged that we'd been working together for years and we'd slip up occasionally. So we did our best, but we slipped up occasionally, and she corrected us when we did, and we said "shucks, sorry", and she laughed and said "don't worry about it", and we gradually got better at it.
There's definitely people who are dicks about this but there's also people who are not dicks about this.
This was in a university context. Even if the person in question had been more accommodating than she in fact was, the fact is that a bystander would very likely have reported it to HR.
In short, in that context there was no way of making it a request rather than an order even if she’d wanted to. I was forced to lie every single day. I hated it then and I still resent it now.
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This sorta rubs me the wrong way, but I find it difficult to articulate why. I've had similar encounters with a trans worker in my office, and my occasional slip-up with their pronouns never raised to the level of being harangued about it or being threatened with HR. I did indeed "get better at it", and we continued to work together as well as anybody else until one of us transitioned to other projects.
But what precisely did I get better at? Being polite about something that I think is frankly ridiculous. And while there are many beliefs or opinions I find ridiculous wether religious or political, they never come up in a professional context or require an update to my language model. I have a lot of negative things to say about Islam, but that's neither here nor there when I'm working shoulder to shoulder with a Muslim peer. It just doesn't come up, and neither of us can make any demands of each other.
No matter how much it was prettied up, a falsehood (IMO) was being imposed on me, and there is no escaping or ignoring the sword hanging over my head if I were to continue to misstep, or politely respond that this preferred pronoun business is not my bag, but I still fully respect you as a fellow coworker. Basically, I reject the idea that I am 'slipping up' at all when I refer to them with the pronouns that historically correspond with their birth sex. Even a well-intentioned "No foul! You'll get the hang of it in time" gets my hackles up, as if there is a deficiency on my end requiring shoring up.
I wouldn't say they were being dicks - that's far too strong a word. But I don't think "not being a dick about it" lets them off the hook for what they're doing, because it still boils down "do it or else" in the end. No amount of smiles or soft chuckles about my faux pas changes that.
My coworker seemed fine in all other respects. We could crack jokes about other topics, talk vidya, bitch about work. But I never stopped being on the backfoot about their pronouns, because continued absentmindedness or deliberate refusal would be a road to catastrophe. I could say I used their pronouns because I respected them, but it was also inseparable from the motive of self-preservation. And when the motives are mixed up like that, I don't know if I'm being fully honest with myself regarding my intentions.
Thinking it over, I think part of the reason I don't have an issue with it is, ironically, because of the close working relationship. If there's someone I'm interacting with in a professional capacity every day or two, yeah, I don't have any problem making a little room in my brain for pronoun and name; hell, I'm already making some room in my brain for their name, I've just got to change which name is stored in there. (And for what it's worth, they passed reasonably well, so the pronoun wasn't a big deal either aside from the transition period.)
Whereas if it's someone I only intereacted with every few months and every time I talked to them they had a new pronoun/name, my answer would be "dude, pick one and stick with it, or at least stop bugging me about it". And I can kinda understand if someone who hadn't worked with her more closely had more trouble with the transition.
I think nicknames work the same way. There's a few people I've worked with who, quite frankly, I never found out the "real" name of, because they kept using a nickname. But that's okay! As far as I'm concerned, that was their name, so, hey, no sweat.
It's all a lot less fraught in personal relationships. "Am I willing to sacrifice a friendship over this issue" is a lot more clean precisely because it doesnt have the spectre of having my career derailed by a professional superstructure hovering around it. I wouldn't be anywhere near as bugged by a pronoun request from a friend, in the same way it doesn't bug me to abstain from certain topics or off-color jokes in some people's presence. Of course, this all gets more complicated since most people do form personal relationships with professional peers to some extent. How could one not?
I guess my frustration is that I always felt there were pretty obvious, bold lines that I knew not to transgress in work contexts, and expected others not to in turn. Trans identity is the first time (that I can think of) where this boundary was transgressed. The current formulation of trans ideology necessitates said transgression, I guess. But I am dismayed by the degree it has seemingly bowled people over.
Yeah, that's fair. And honestly, this did all happen before the culture war kicked off at full force - I'd have to check to get an exact date, but I'd say 2014 or so. We were not in the same climate of fear that we arguably are today.
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Drawing from this anecdote, it's worth examining what other groups get to impose this sort of compelled cooperation with their mental idiosyncrasies. I recall people really, really not liking public prayer, for an example. It's hard to imagine any level of enforced cooperation with Christian preferences under our current norms, for example.
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