"Need to know"
I'm learning a lot about people by observing my father. See, he's 75 -- most of his body and all of his mind is in good shape, but for one major thing, he's legally blind.
He developed cataracts in his pre-teens, and didn't have near-normal vision until his grandmother paid for a radical new operation that cut a 'keyhole' into the iris of the better eye in 1956. He learned to drive and achieved normal independence with his monocular vision. He got to know his way around our city -- he already knew it pretty well, from a blind-person's perspective, but now he was adding visual details to his mental map that before he had lacked.
In 1988, blood vessels started leaking inside the one good eye the day after he bought a brand new minivan and had the chance to drive it. No more.
Lately, I've noticed he's usually anxious when we drive around. The city's invisibly (to him) changed without his noticing. He'll follow the mental maps from foggy, fuzzy, blurry clues until we encounter a new building -- or a vacant lot where a once-familiar building stood. He'll start asking questions like, "We're almost at the intersection of [...] and [...], right?" Or, "Did they paint the building here brown? I remember it used to be green." (he was seeing the color of freshly disturbed dirt, where the building stood.)
He never comes out and says, "Help! I can't figure out where I am! What I'm seeing is totally unexpected, and it is worrying me, because I no longer know where I am!" I'm patient with him, describing the details he's missing matter-of-factly, so he can patch his tattered mental map and have some sense of certainty.
On these trips, he's also always trying to identify the genders of people walking on the sidewalks. He can't see -- can't tell. But he NEEDS to know. On a good vision day, he'll see 5 people (correct,) but say there are two girls and 3 guys (wrong.) I correct him anyway, even though I wonder why it should matter so much to him. I daresay I could just Make Stuff Up and he would be satisfied, but I always correctly identify the gender by position and/or clothing, just so HE'LL KNOW...
That's the part that gets me -- society's Need To Know. We as a society are desperate to classify and pigeonhole every single person we meet as either/or. To paraphrase a character in the first Dirty Harry movie, we "gots 'ta Know..."
Jennie is the new executive secretary in the building where I work, but she worked here before, and got hired into the new position from within. She was friends with the Trans-gal that retired last January. She came to see me, so she could update her boss's calendar with the events I had some hand in, and we fell to talking about her new job and the little details federal employees need to know and this and that...
Afterwards, she asked my boss (not me) what I preferred to be referred to as -- as in gender... My boss told her the standard answer I've asked him and other people I'm out to -- "Go ask the source." He said this seemed to upset her a bit. Even though she figured it out, she had to know -- she had to have certainty, but she couldn't come out and ask me, "Are you transitioning like Jean did?" She had to do it the way my father asked for his information, without revealing to me her embarrassment at having to ask.
I guess a lot of people are like that. No, I know a lot pf people are like that. She told my boss, "Everybody knows...", and I haven't had anybody else in the building ask me yet!

Karen