#you're either missing or purposefully ignoring what's really happening when people misgender trans people

[rjalker]

some people have been pushing to rename "misgendering" to "mispronouning" because the logic they are using is that:

"pronouns don't equal gender, so someone isn't misgendering you by using the wrong pronouns, because that would imply that your pronouns equal your gender!"

And most of the people I've seen arguing this use multiple or all pronouns.

And they are missing several points.

Yes, pronouns do not automatically equal gender. Anyone can use he/him pronouns, and it doesn't inherently mean you're a man or masculine in any way. Anyone can use she/her pronouns and it doesn't inherently mean you're a woman or feminine in any way. Ect. Ect.

But arguing that pronouns don't equal gender, so therefore no one is ever questioning your gender when they use the wrong pronouns for you, is just so completely flat out wrong it's absurd.

Just because you, personally, don't care what pronouns are used for you does not mean that that's how everyone feels. To argue otherwise is to just be disgustingly transmisic.

These people are also ignoring all of the underlying things that necessitate misgendering in the first place.

I just had someone misgender me on iNaturalist, despite my it/its pronouns not only being on my profile page, but literally in the first paragraph on the first page of the identification guide I made to help people learn how to identify pawpaws and common lookalikes.

@ Nonbinary-naturalist even wrote of this common mix up in her book…

This person misgendered me in direct reference to my book, showing that they'd read it.

And they still ended up misgendering me by using she/her pronouns for me.

Now how, exactly, did this happen? What were the events leading up to this?

They weren't mistaking me for anyone else. No one else has written a free small-flower and common pawpaw identification guide. (I guess most people on iNaturalist don't realize they can just...write their own identification guides, which is a shame).

They weren't talking about multiple people within the comment and mixed up our pronouns by mistake.

"its" and "her" do not share any letters. There's no typo that could accidentally transform "it" to "her".

So how did this person end up misgendering me? Why did they misgender me? What made them type out the word "her" instead of "its"?

Because, and this is the part people who want to rename misgendering to mispronouning apparently do not understand, this person has been thinking of me as a woman this whole time.

Even after reading my book, where I list my pronouns and the fact that I'm nonbinary in the first paragraph of the first page, including instructions on how to use it/its pronouns correctly, even though my profile explains what the word nonbinary means, this person has still spent this whole time thinking of me as a woman.

They didn't accidentally use she/her pronouns for me because they've been correctly thinking of me as a nonbinary person who uses it/its pronouns.

They misgendered me because even after knowing what my pronouns were, even after they knew I was nonbinary, they were still defaulting to thinking of me as a woman.

@ [redacted] my pronouns are it/its, not she/her, so that should say, "Nonbinary-naturalist even wrote of this common mix up in its book…" :)

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My sincere apologies, @ Nonbinary-naturalist. Even after reading your bio and paging through said book, my prior programming still got the best of me.

The people who want to rename misgendering to mispronouning do not fucking understand why misgendering happens. People are not using the wrong pronouns because they're thinking of us with the correct gender, they use the wrong pronouns because despite knowing what gender we actually are, they still think of us as the wrong one.

If you think of a trans person as their actual gender, and you know what their pronouns are, you're not going to accidentally misgender them unless you have to spend half your time not outing them to their family under their instructions.

This person has only ever interacted with me since I started using it/its pronouns. They've only been on the site since after I changed my username to literally be Nonbinary-Naturalist.

They didn't misgender me because they were confusing me for someone else, or were talking about a bunch of different people at once and got two of us mixed up.

They misgendered me because, even though my username is literally Nonbinary-Naturalist, even though my pronouns are listed on my profile page and in the first paragraph of the first page of the pawpaw identification guide I wrote, this person was still thinking of me as a woman. They decided, arbitrarily, based on who knows what criteria, that I was a woman, despite my username and knowing my pronouns are it/its.

Misgendering is called misgendering because the underlying cause of someone using the wrong pronouns is the fundamental refusal to think of the person being misgendered as their actual gender.

Just because you don't give a shit what pronouns people use for you and don't feel misgendered when people use whatever pronouns they want does not mean you get to silence other trans people and deny the very real transmisia that causes misgendering in the first place.