Quote from: Joanna Dark on April 11, 2013, 01:56:14 PMI used to be a magazine editor for a regional, niche women's magazine (currently a paid blogger) and profiling trans men and women is relatively new. I'm sure once the AP Style Guide catches up the misgendering will stop. All reporters and magazine editors follow the AP Style Guide. Some use Chicago Style (like Vogue).
As a Brit, I'm not familiar with the AP style guide ... but I stand by my sense that it's reasonable, when describing someone as they were when presenting in their birth gender to use the pronoun appropriate to that gender. In this case the writer is very specifically dealing with Laura when she was Tommy/Tom and so the pronoun 'he' is accurate - particularly since Laura had not, at that point, reached the stage of coming out to herself, and so would (however uneasily) have described herself as a boy, or a man and a 'he'. The moment she defines herself as female, so does the article.
Likewise all references to Laura Grace are accompanied by the proper, female pronouns. And so they should be. I absolutely agree that it is deeply offensive and prejudicial when writers describe transitioning/transitioned TSs by their birth gender, since that is a clear and knowing attack on them, their status and their fundamental right to determine their own true identity.
For the record, I take the same attitude to my own gendering. Though I have not (yet) transitioned, I define myself as transgender. When talking to other transgenders or presenting in a female role/name I am only to happy to think of myself and be thought of as 'she' or 'her'. But on a day-to-day basis, going about in the world as a man, then I am 'he'/'him' and it seems like a kind of category error or cognitive dissonance to insist (to myself, let alone anyone else) that this 6ft tall person, with a beard, a deep voice and an entirely masculine manner and presentation could possibly be described as female, or given female pronouns. Frankly it seems ridiculous. And I say that not because I am self-hating or ashamed - neither is true - but because I am philosophically unwilling to pretend that things in life are something that they are not. And as a reporter, the same rule surely applies.
