So I'm telling my colleagues about a little adventure I had over the weekend wherein I went to see Spider-Man 2 but somehow ended up in the wrong cinema and didn't realise my mistake until The Other Woman started playing. I hightailed it out of that cinema before a minute had passed and I said to my colleagues "the other people in the cinema were probably thinking, 'wow, he must really hate this movie'"...yes, I referred to myself as "he" without even realising. It was the slightly widened eyes of my colleagues that made me realise I'd slipped up, but I decided to ignore it and just continue with the story. They never made light of it but wow, I feel like a dope. If I can't gender myself properly I can hardly get cross at other people for slipping up! :-\ :P :laugh:
I have done the exact same thing. I spent 35 years thinking I was uncomfortably cisgender, so the occasional "she" happens out of habit...
I have done that too Grace and my friends graciously corrected me LOL.....
It's hard to break old habits.
Totally! I often think of my life being narrated in the third person, because I'm grandiose like that. It's such a habit to think of myself as "he."
You're not the only one.
That will come with time! It happened to me a few times shortly after going full time. It's especially funny when it's around someone you recently had to remind about proper pronouns ;)
Like my best friend a little over a year ago.. He kept misgendering me and even though it was on accident I still felt like I had to remind him (he was of course super apologetic and it was never a problem again). But then I misgendered myself once and he gave me the biggest grin with a look of "ohhhh!!!!!" :police: Yep, I deserved that look.
A lifetime of habits. Very understandable.
Fortunately it doesn't come up that often in English. I'm a bit worried about slipping up in Spanish where most words referring to yourself have a different ending for men and women. For instance, "I'm Mexican" = "Soy Mexicano/a" So for me saying "Soy Mexicana" is going to take some getting used to. But at the same time I really like saying it that way. :)
I'm certainly glad to hear I'm not the only one to do it! :D
I'll just have to be more careful when I get carried away talking about myself in the third person!
Funny thing is, this thread made me realize I'd never gendered myself at all until I started gendering myself as female. I guess I was never talkative enough to call myself in third person until now. Now I'm always typing little things like, *sleepily drinks her coffee* or something. I never did that before. As far as I know, I've never slipped up doing that, but maybe I have and just didn't realize it. It's not like I can see anyone's shocked facial expressions through text. :P
Quote from: Ms Grace on April 28, 2014, 05:22:51 AM
I'm certainly glad to hear I'm not the only one to do it! :D
I'll just have to be more careful when I get carried away talking about myself in the third person!
Hah! Just do it the way the Japanese girls do it. Refer to yourself by your own name!
I almost outed myself at work once by almost referring to ladies at work as "the other girls" >.<
Took me a lot of effort to stop doing that...
We were used to it so its difficult to stop it...
Do you think it had anything to do with the activity you were doing? By that I mean running from the "chick" flick to the "boy" flick? Yes I know girls read comic books and love Spiderman too but you can't have too more gender opposite movies and I do think of my boy side of myself as the geekier of the two.
Ha! Well I did wonder about that. I wondered for a moment if I shouldn't stay with The Other Woman, having since seen the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes I'm glad I didn't!
I've done it a number of times myself. Especially if I'm telling a funny story or something about me when I was a kid and like I've told it so many times and have it down a certain way and will slip up and say she O_o then I'm like -facedesk-
Quote from: katiej on April 28, 2014, 02:19:20 AM
Fortunately it doesn't come up that often in English. I'm a bit worried about slipping up in Spanish where most words referring to yourself have a different ending for men and women. For instance, "I'm Mexican" = "Soy Mexicano/a" So for me saying "Soy Mexicana" is going to take some getting used to. But at the same time I really like saying it that way. :)
Actually Katie, I find the gender references in Spanish much easier for me - I don't misgender myself in Spanish. In fact, at work, where I am not yet out, I have to catch myself quite often, and have slipped and gendered myself as a girl quite a few times. My one female colleague has no doubt noticed it.
But I find if I am referring to myself in ironic mode in English, I screw up: "Actually, he said to himself..." Aaaargh, oh gawd, oh gawd. A lobotomy is needed, urgently :-)
This just goes to show that we must be very patient with the people closest to us....even after almost 3 years FT I still refer to myself as he sometimes....and I even call myself by my old name when mumbling to myself!! LOL
It still hurts when my children or sister do it the very few times but I must remember its not because of what they see but what their use too....imagine having to call a window a door, or a nickel a quarter. Or think about how many companies change there name and it takes time to get use to that!!
It happens to me a LOT. It makes sense, no matter how you are inside, you have an entire lifetime of being referred to by the wrong pronouns and your birth name, so even when you break free of that, there's still a habit you have to break. It's not just other people who have to break that habit, but yourself, too.
Doh!
Quote from: FalseHybridPrincess on April 28, 2014, 08:46:57 AM
Took me a lot of effort to stop doing that...
We were used to it so its difficult to stop it...
Yep. Still doing this myself.
Maybe every time we do it we need to give a "get out of jail free" card to whoever misgenders us the next time.
Quote from: Julia-Madrid on April 28, 2014, 04:16:50 PM
Actually Katie, I find the gender references in Spanish much easier for me - I don't misgender myself in Spanish. In fact, at work, where I am not yet out, I have to catch myself quite often, and have slipped and gendered myself as a girl quite a few times. My one female colleague has no doubt noticed it.
But I find if I am referring to myself in ironic mode in English, I screw up: "Actually, he said to himself..." Aaaargh, oh gawd, oh gawd. A lobotomy is needed, urgently :-)
Julia, that's really interesting. I wonder if it's because we don't really have the opportunity to misgender ourselves in English very often, so it just slips out more easily. But in Spanish, we have to use those modifiers every time we talk about ourselves, so maybe it's easier to do because you get in the habit of saying it the new way.
Quote from: katiej on April 30, 2014, 10:04:51 PM
Julia, that's really interesting. I wonder if it's because we don't really have the opportunity to misgender ourselves in English very often, so it just slips out more easily. But in Spanish, we have to use those modifiers every time we talk about ourselves, so maybe it's easier to do because you get in the habit of saying it the new way.
Hi Katie
I think you're probably right... as you say, most adjectives and adverbs have to match your gender, so you tend to think about these more carefully... Partly it might have to do with Spanish being my 2nd language, so in any event I have to think a little harder about what I'm going to say, compared to English for example.
xxx
J
Quote from: Kade1985 on April 28, 2014, 03:47:19 PM
I've done it a number of times myself. Especially if I'm telling a funny story or something about me when I was a kid and like I've told it so many times and have it down a certain way and will slip up and say she O_o then I'm like -facedesk-
Yep.. It's the funny or interesting stories from my past that get me.. Especially the ones that don't entirely make sense if I don't misgender myself..
Even though I'm not out to most people yet (and definitely nowhere near even thinking about passing), I find myself not only misgendering myself among those who know, but also right-gendering (is that a word?) myself among those who don't (or at least shouldn't) know. It's embarrassing, but I can't help enjoying the puzzled look on people's face :)
I'm really finding this difficult, since I spent most of my adult life always making sure to distance myself from what women do, how women feel etc. Even when I'm now with people who know, I sometimes do this, it's a reflex that simply takes a while to get rid of. At the same time, I'm getting so used to accepting myself, that I sometimes slip when speaking to everyone else.
I'm getting increasingly successful at simply not gendering myself though, which is probably the best strategy for a while. Now I just hope I won't have to work a lot to get rid of that habit too, when I'm going full time...
I haven't done it in English but I've done it in French where you have to use feminine adjectives in writing to describe yourself (i.e. fatigué for tired if you're a man and fatiguée if you're a woman). On one of my French compositions once my professor got tired of this habit, corrected my error for the umpteenth time, and in big bold letters in red ink on the margin wrote:
"VOUS ETES UN HOMME?" (Are you a man?)
She was just reminding me to use female adjectives but it was kind of mortifying! :)
The firth thing noticed is that you were talking about what "other people" and I do the same, when I think of what other people think about me I auto asume that they are going to think he. So I use he when I talk about what people think. The highlight to this is that that's not always what they think, with no hormones, or surgeries I was shopping with a freind and asked if I could borrow a note for my purchases to save using my card, and she says ends up saying he, barring In mind I'd been talking to this shop person about shoes and stuff before that, and she was surprised, in her words, "you know I never would of guessed you can't tell at all" but yeah reffering to ones self as he is a habbit that it takes a loot of work to get out of :p
I just laugh about the whole misgendering thing, and cry occasionally :) People try so hard to get it right, and then they fall right into a misstep. I was out shopping for clothes with a girlfriend this weekend. Girl's clothes, me looking and talking like a girl etc. And then another mutual girlfriend calls her mobile, so I shout out "Tell her I say hi." And my dear friend says "He says hi, by the way!"
Aaaaaaargh! Irrelevant and yet totally not!
This issue has morphed into a non-issue for me probably because of my andro presentation now, but there was a time that I self identified as MtF, but years of my spouse, kids and grandkids referring to me as he or dad or grandpa, I just never had the urge to try and break them of it, so I am different things to different people and decided in the long run it just wasn't worth hassling everyone over it. If I dressed en femme all the time then of course it would be an entirely different matter. As it is I just don't have the heart to disrupt their lives with it, my friend Marcie Bowers is still "dad" to her kids too and I'm sure Shelly gets this at home as well. Nice thread tho ladies and gents, something we can all be considerate about with each other.