Michelle, Faith, Cassie, Liz, Sarah, Kathy, Donica: Thank you so much for your support and insights!
vent
Quote from: Michelle_P on September 23, 2018, 11:59:09 PM
Oh, I've run into this one before! What I call the 'conditional acceptor', the person who will accept us in spite of the horrible, mild temporary discomfort that we cause them, if only we will just meet their conditions.
They might have heard something in passing, such as another neighbor telling them "Stephanie doesn't like it when you don't use her correct pronouns." Their perceptual filter and deflection mechanisms have turned this into "I am without flaw, of course, but Stephanie and the neighbors are very much at odds over these pronouns, and I as the only person who can see the situation correctly, must show Stephanie the error of their ways!"
It's worse than that, even. Substitute "Steve" for "Stephanie" and "he" for "her" in your statement and it would be more accurate. He, either unthinkingly or deliberately, continued to call me "Steve" through the entire conversation. I suspect he was trying to get a rise out of me, since his thesis was "Steve is far too sensitive to what people call him."
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That is very likely true. His head is stuck in the cultural gender binary hole, and he cannot see how anyone could possibly have a gender identity other than their assigned sex at birth since he has never experienced this. Therefore, in his world view, being transgender is impossible, and he is determined not to see Stephanie. That makes all this stuff about correct pronouns nonsense, and since it makes him slightly uncomfortable, he needs to find a way to show you the error of your ways.
Extreme right wing, Trump fan, Rush Limbaugh listener. Manages to turn almost any conversation toward politics, with Obama and liberals the cause of all the evils in the world. Most likely has drunk the "Gender is defined only by DNA" Kool-aid. But so reasonable and accepting!
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Stephanie, I don't think you have done anything wrong here. If misgendered, and the neighbors don't correct themselves ("He.. Oh, sorry. She...") is is OK to speak up. ("She, please")
The argument is, correcting someone just alienates them. He definitely understands that I'm unhappy with being misgendered and deadnamed, not because I force a correction, but because he can read it in my face. That was definitely true early on, but not so much now as I get comfortable with who I am and understand who he is and why he won't change. He's basing a lot of his theory on past history (he brought up an incident when I was out on a fly-out with him and had a meltdown due to what I perceived to be a slight toward my transition...
last November), and a conversation with the lady who invited me to the ladies party night at her house - where an incredible amount of information was lost or scrambled in translation.
I'm guessing here, but the only place that what he said he was told could have come from was when I told my other neighbor that I was worried that the government was going to remove the mandate that makes it illegal to discriminate against LGBT people, which is what's driving the inclusion of transgender care in most insurance policies (Section 1557 of Health and Human Services Rules). His right-wing mind received it as, "Steve is pissed off because he considers himself handicapped and the government owes him help to fix it." That is literally what he said he had been told by my other neighbor. When I told him over and over (in tears, unfortunately) that I never said anything like that, and never would, he accused me of calling my other neighbor (a long-term friend of his) a liar.
I told him that it didn't bother me much if he screwed up with pronouns and names around the neighborhood where everyone knows the story, but I did try to make him understand that it was terrible for me when he did it around strangers who only know me as Stephanie. He read that not as "I need to be recognized as who I am now, not as who I had been, and as much as possible, without a "trans" prefix" - but as: "Steve is worried there will be trouble with someone who can't accept that he's a guy pretending to be a girl." He was insulted then that I would think that my neighbors wouldn't defend me in that case. It was an interesting reaction to a false conclusion.
One absolutely telling part of the conversation, which laid bare the way he thinks of me: He was trying to make the point that I need to consider other people's feelings. He said that to be feminine one has to first consider the family, and the neighborhood is like a family. He used his wife as an example: not particularly girly, but would always put the kids, then the family, then the extended family before her own welfare. According to him, that's how women think. That's when I stopped him and told him, "Don't try to lecture me about how women think. You are not a woman." To which he replied, "You aren't either." I should have walked right then.
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You have one unaccepting neighbor. That's a pretty good score. Be nice and low pressure to everyone else, and he is unlikely to gain the upper hand in dominating the neighborhood's attitude.
Nice and low pressure is what I have been striving for, successfully I believe, for a while now. If anyone is stirring the pot, he is. Yes, I was ultra-sensitive to such things in the early days, but I'm proud of who I am now, and can handle with understanding and humor the mistakes of those who are actually trying.
He seems to be most upset that I don't hang out in the man-caves any more, I don't turn bolts with the guys, and I have let my airplane project languish. I'll admit that I have a hard time getting ambitious about working in the shop, but he seems to believe that if I don't adhere to the stereotype his brain has created for me, I am rocking the very foundations of the entire neighborhood. I told him flat out that the Steve he knew was a facade, that he is gone and will not be coming back, that Stephanie has replaced him, and that she is here to stay. If she choses to build airplanes - or not - that's up to her.
He's teflon. It rolls right off. For all his reasonableness and insistence that he bases all of his decisions and actions on logic, he is impervious to any new ideas that don't fit into his world-view. Otherwise he would be willing to absorb the facts that we all know concerning the physiological underpinnings of what we're dealing with. The
fact that we have been born with brains - with absolute understanding of ourselves - with
souls, if you will, that don't match the shell we were stuck within.
He is ever so calm, and if I get upset or raise my voice to make a point, I'm the one who's unreasonable. It's maddening.
Our "kids" play together (the dogs). We can fly together for breakfast (in separate planes), and we can be cordial as we run into each other. But as Michelle says, since he insists on being the one to define the parameters our friendship is based upon, with no consideration of my needs, I don't see how I can consider him a friend any more. I believe that his actions, no matter how well-intentioned he thinks they are, have alienated us to the extent that he has put himself into the "acquaintance" category. I'm sure he will consider me to be the unreasonable one for seeing it that way. So be it.
/vent
Stephanie
