A lot of people directly misgender ‘Dirt’ as an insult.

In addition, people implicitly misgender butches, lesbians and gays, and feminists as insults, as they do trans people. I suppose to some tradcons I must be “a man who wants to be a woman who wants to be a man.”

(Addendum: I won’t begin to pretend I know what misgendering feels like to anyone else, trans* folks in particular. But the above is why I cared, and cared a lot, at the time.)

being upset that you’ve been misidentified, gtfoi, if it’s ‘misidentified’, i.e. insult, good reason to be cranky. i can’t see it as all that important, if you dress a certain way, you have to be prepared to be identified that way, at least sometimes, by strangers. dressed in workboots, denim jacket with a bunch of spikes and vile green mohawk, someone’s gonna think ‘punk’. jumping to apologise for misidentifying someone, that’s almost like believing that you’ve intentionally, subconsciously, insulted someone, or that you risk your life for not making amends immediately, some day perhaps there won’t be a need, though there still is.

i’ve always identified zinnia as female, that’s not the problem, problem is, at one time, i mixed her up with that happy goth person, the one in the vids that wipes boogers on people.

I’m a ciswoman, and I have had cause to think about why I care that my gender is read correctly – I got asked why I cared so much on a regular basis when I was a child, because thanks to my short hair and tomboyish presentation, strangers gendered me male more frequently than female, and I HATED it. I lacked the conceptual vocabulary to answer my mother and other people then, but it’s been really interesting to revisit those memories as an adult.

I cared so much as a kid because when someone misgendered me, it felt like an invalidation of my asserted identity. They weren’t seeing *me*, they were seeing my short hair and then filling in the rest. (I DID look more like the boys my age than the girls, so it was a pretty honest mistake, but that didn’t make it hurt any less when, for instance, I was announced as a medalist in the boys’ division of a martial arts tournament despite the “female” on my registration.) Now? My attitude has shifted, but I think that’s because no one would misgender me without a substantial effort on my part to look androgynous (and it would, at that point, be my CHOICE to make my gender ambiguous). Instead, I can compare the way I felt as a misgendered little girl to how I feel now when someone tells me I can’t possibly be queer, because my features and body are very conventionally feminine and/or because I’ve ever dated men. It’s an erasure of how I consider myself, and therefore, it’s offensive.

I think that it must be more of an aesthetic problem than anything else, because to me, transgender LOOKS LIKE someone who cannot accept the reality of who they are. Someone who’s in denial. Which, incidentally, is ironic, because I’m sure that I’m personally in denial about certain realities myself. However, I’ve noticed that when people look more “real” to me, or more “natural,” it doesn’t bother me as much, accept that it implies that a football player looking guy dressed as a woman is not a fake because if I can accept one, I must be able to accept the other as true.

If I tried to present as a man, that wouldn’t be the reality of who I am. That’s not just my opinion – you would actually notice it, because it would look utterly strange on me. I mean “football player looking guy dressed as a woman” levels of noticeable, just reversed.

And I was worried that asking your nephew that question was intrusive and impolite! Glad to hear he was pleased.

“Almost no one directly misgenders cis people as an insult, so if I called a cis person by the wrong pronouns or honorifics they’d probably be more confused than annoyed.”

My correction to that: almost no one directly misgenders cis people as an insult and really means that they think the cis person is a gender other than the one they are. When a playground bully calls a boy a girl, they both know that the bully doesn’t actually believe the boy is a girl, but that the bully is claiming that the boy is like a girl, or is of the same status as a girl among the social group of boys. When someone refers to a trans women as a transsexual male, or intentionally uses the wrong pronouns, it is always a direct denial of the gender of that person.

It is a subject that I find difficult to understand, personally, because I do not ever think about my gender. Whether that is because I am cis, or lean towards androgyny I do not know, but I have no concept of what it means to “feel like a woman/female”, aside from those times when my hormones go crazy once a month and it hurts like hell. I am also aware of emotional differences between myself and my friends, and that is something they are aware of too, “Anj is one of the guys, but we can talk about emotional shit”

This is a conversation I have had with friends, and there are a wide range of responses, usually the majority say that there is a definite sense of gender for them, and they feel male or female, and feel that they are perceived and treated as a certain gender and a few who are not aware of these feelings.

Maybe it is because I mostly associate with those of the opposite gender to me, so am completely used to “one of the guys”, “we are all men here”, or “Anj is just a guy without the attachments”.

To me, Zinnia looks absolutely female, so I would refer to her as, well, her 🙂 There have been a few people who I am not 100% certain of gender on first meeting them, so if I do not know their name I have tried to find out by asking the person who introduced us “oh, so what did your friend think of the bar we were at”, which then results in the answer “He/she thought X”.

These have all been people who occupy the middle ground on gender identity though, so neither clothing nor appearance is markedly of one gender or the other.

I understand that there is a deliberate hatred/fear underlying mis-gendering people, and that this can escalate to violence. It is not the same level as for trans people, but I have been harassed while out with a boyfriend because a group of men thought we were both male.

In my experience, the majority of trans people I have met are very clearly identifiable as their gender, so any mis-gendering is deliberate and bigoted, and with the sole intention of causing hurt to the individual.