Games, games, games!

- act like you didn’t say anything wrong and gaslight them

- loudly and dramatically self-flagellate and threaten to kill yourself until the trans person reassures you that you don’t have to treat them with respect to be a good person

- roll your eyes and joke with the other cis people “ugh I’m so bad at this! Lol.” bond with everyone over relatable humor about how new and confusing this trans stuff is

- immediately accuse the trans person of something so they have to defend themselves and the misgendering appears like the “lesser” aggression or maybe retroactively justified to others

- talk about how hard you’re trying to humor accommodate them, rationalize why your circumstances are unique, and make a show of pleading with the trans person for mercy, as if they are a judge and the room is a jury and correcting you is equivalent to leveling a cruel punishment

- simply correct yourself and move on like you would do if they were cis

"Hey! I just wanted to let you know that I reported your account when I meant to report someone else. It was a mistake, and I hope it didn’t cause any problems. If you want to see the ticket Tumblr sent me, let me know I can’t message you directly for some reason."

Having seen many of these now I easily recognize the template (the call to action is meant to lure you into a malicious interaction to steal your account, whether a link or discord or false reporting system), but at the time it seemed like a potentially legit message because I do in fact have messages turned off for non-mutuals. And I thought to myself, well, I haven't seen any problems yet, and so idk if this is even a cause for concern. If it was truly a mistake, my blog will not have whatever content they were reporting, and so the review won't affect me. And if it does, I have this info to contest it. And also, you could easily given me the ticket information in the ask, but didn't, and the info wouldn't really be useful to me anyway (because tumblr would just contact me if it goes anywhere). And so what you're looking for is an interaction. A lot of weird tumblr asks and replies are in fact looking for validation, often times inappropriately, and this was pretty small fries - just someone eager to be cleansed of the sin of a misclick, with the unnecessary offer of the ticket being the sort of overcorrection a stressed person makes. I decided to be nice and just put it to rest.