#makes it really hard to go stealth when the people you knew pre-transition won't stop calling you ''they''

[contagious-watermelon]

i think part of the reason that so many people, especially people who call themselves allies or themselves go by they/them, continue to have a problem of calling trans men and women gender neutral terms and refer to them as they/them, is because they have (subconsciously) decided that it's easier to conceptualize trans people as a whole into an "other" category

so then this is fine for nonbinary people whose gender is that "other" that people group them as — though it may be annoying that they're only seen as that because of their transness rather than their gender being respected in itself — but people, including allies and some trans people themselves, think of "trans woman" as a different gender to "cis woman" and "trans man" as a different gender to "cis man."

which leads to things like this person I know calling me and all their trans friends they/them regardless of our actual gender, when in the same breath they think about and refer to my cis guy friends as male. or the ever-prevalent phenomenon of people calling trans women they/them even when they know full well they're women, because it's much harder to get people to believe that using gender-neutral pronouns and nouns can be misgendering as well