It’s not about the pronouns. Deeply surprised to find myself messing up again and again and again with someone who requested they/them. I mean, I’m a liberal! I’m polite! I have friends who transitioned FTM or MTF and I never deadname them! And yet I consistently find myself thinking, and saying, “Oh wait, I need to remember, she wants to be called they.” Which contains the seed of its own downfall: not a she.

I want to respect this – I can only imagine how important it feels to find the true way to identify yourself, as I translate from a different experience of my own when I was in college and found that there was a name and a reason for an aspect of myself that I had always thought was just me being a freak. The relief of having a way to understand myself was incredible. Powerful. Life-changing.

And yet, it’s shockingly hard for me to build a new category in my brain beyond the elemental either/or of kindergarten where the boys lined up on this side of the room and the girls on the other.

That’s what is still tripping me up. Remembering what words to use… that’s just the veneer of acceptance. Good start but stops at the shiny surface. Now it’s time to go deeper. I’m glad to have the opportunity, appreciative of this person’s patience, and hopeful that articulating this will end up being helpful – to me if you share your reflections, or to you if this is something you’re working on too.