Also, re: this post on misgendering
Some people will likely read this and say something about how it excludes nonbinary people or gender nonconforming people, because "not all trans people are going to dress like a Man or Woman" and I want to preemptively respond to this.
There is a knee-jerk feeling that gendered communication is only ever a replication or performance of a hegemonic ideal and thus relying on it at all is excluding those trans people who are not "binary" or "conforming"*
(*if there even meaningfully is such a class of trans people--personally, I don't think "binary" versus "nonbinary" are coherent classes in the way that for instance "man" is a different class than "woman" or how transfeminized people hold a meaningfully different class position than tme trans people of any gender. The binary/non-binary distinction feels like a positionality distinction more similar to like, gay people and bisexual people-- a lot of overlap, people define the boundaries between them differently, some people identify as both at once, and how you are treated as one or the other in a given space is dependent on a lot of factors that are not neatly aligned with an internal sense of identity.)
Someone's understanding of themself as binary and/or gender conforming (or nonbinary and/or gender nonconforming) as a trans person is something that we actually actively communicate.
[ID: nonbinary youtuber and speaker, CJ the X, discussing getting invited to a formal party with a strict binary dress code. They say, "and so I did the men's uniform. I dressed appropriately, but added the makeup, a tiara, high heels, and a purse. I'm speaking language!"]
I had to unlearn this liberal non-analysis too! I had internalized enough transphobia that it was truly only earlier this year that I realized I could expect people to not misgender me, as a nonbinary person. I recognized the transphobia when trans women and men were misgendered based in the refusal to read gendered communication, but I just told myself that I was not allowed to be hurt by being misgendered because no one could possibly read my being nonbinary. But that's internalized transphobia. Just because no one listens does not mean I'm not saying anything.
[ID: nonbinary comedian Carson Olshansky on stage saying, "they say nonbinaty people don't owe you androgyny, which is true, but, I'm very helpfully giving you as much androgyny as I can."]
And honestly, a lot of cis people do read my communication correctly and then deliberately ignore it. My parents asked me if I was nonbinary. How could they have known without me telling them unless they correctly read what I was communicating? And yet, two years later they continue to misgender me. Is this meaningfully different than parents misgendering any other trans person, just because I'm nonbinary? No. It's the same thing.
How is it that I can go through a whole day around a bunch of trans people and be gendered correctly by literally dozens of strangers without wearing a pronoun pin or needing to come out to anyone? Because I am communicating and people in my culture can interpret it!
If I'm around people who respect me, then they respond to what I'm communicating about myself.
I'm grateful to other trans people who made me realize I deserve the basic respect of my gendered communication being considered just like everyone else. I hope someone reading this will be convinced that they, too, deserve respect.