Pronoun Anxiety
The news story is that a poll shows young people growing less tolerant of LGBTQ individuals. The poll’s methodology is dodgy, but I'll add my own anecdote for whatever it's worth.
I have a bunch of trans folks that I often avoid interacting with because pronouns give me so much social anxiety. English is not my first language and both of my native languages are heavily gendered (e.g. doors are male, apples are female, etc) and I wonder whether that has an effect on me. I'm also sympathetic to the anxiety written about by Aella_Girl where they say they have to play a game of pretend whenever they're around trans or non-binary folks.
When I see a gender nonconforming person, my brain automatically places them in a male/female bucket and I have to give myself several seconds of pause in order to recall the appropriate pronouns. Whenever I speak, I start to slow down around innocuous words like 'were' and 'there' because I'm hyper vigilant about all the ways that language could potentially misgender somebody. Despite all these efforts, I unintentionally misgender people a lot and while it always results in a soft correction, there's an obvious tension and annoyance visible from the people getting misgendered.
I tried to compromise by defaulting to singular 'they' for everyone, regardless of their gender preferences, because I recognize I can't trust myself to use proper pronouns for everyone. I thought this was a clever solution that would appease everyone, but it didn't take long for me to find someone that kept correcting me every time I used 'they'. In the end, I found it infinitely easier to just avoid interactions than deal with that. I still think the best way forward is to just normalize singular they and make it socially acceptable to use it as a default for anybody, but there still seems pushback.
Related anecdote: An Arab (this is relevant, just wait) friend of mine recently changed their names from a male name to a male-but-potentially-ambiguous name. In another circle of friends, I was relaying a story about this friend and, having realized they don't know of the new name, said something along the lines of "[new name], but you knew them as [old name]".
One of the folks present took me aside later and sternly scolded me for "deadnaming" someone. It was then that I realized the name change had anything to do with gender identity. I'm an Arab immigrant and a routine aspect of the Arab community is how often folks change their names, most often to Americanize it. Ahmed turns into Al, Ghassan turns into George, etc etc. I explained this to the person and they in turn were horrified that they [a white trans person] suddenly stepped into a cultural arena they were completely unprepared for.
It was all a little silly, but I did start to wonder. I asked this trans person, how do you refer or discuss a person that has "transitioned" to someone who is unaware of this transition? and they didn't really have an answer. Am I just supposed to repeat the new name and hope they get it?
I don't really have a broad lesson to pull from this isolated incident but it left me more confused than anything. I recognize that deadnaming someone can be incredibly rude, especially if done with intentional malfeasance, but there's got to be a way to talk about people without treating it as a satanic verse that must not be uttered.
The broad prohibition on deadnaming never made any sense to me. I used to date a cis woman that has since become a transman. The transition didn't suddenly make me a gay man because that's the conclusion from the nonsensical requirement of "We've always been at war with Eastasia".