Calling someone they/them when you don’t know their pronouns is fine, and them being upset doesn’t ruin anything for anyone else. Neither you nor they are harming “10 years of progress in gender neutral pronouns” as you put it. What a strange narrative.

This is the way: Introduce yourself with your own pronouns, before assuming any for the other. This will trigger them to respond in kind and then you know.

This is the why: Calling someone they/them when you don’t know or forgot, is ok but not best…because if someone is passing, and is called they/them, which aren’t their pronouns, can raise suspicions that the person is nb, or trans, putting them in an unsafe position. If you call everyone they/them, that you think looks trans enough to have questionable pronouns, and label cis people as their gender, then this is othering. And unfortunately this is how it plays out in real life, hardly anyone “they/thems” everyone…99 percent quick scan and assign pronouns. And if they can’t, they assign they/them othering many people.

If I don’t get pronouns back on introduction, then I gender people based on how they look. if someone is obviously fem presenting or at least trying to, then those are the pronouns I use, and vice versa. And if someone looks androgynous guess what I use they/them.

As a binary trans woman I’d rather you guess than use they/them. Those aren’t my pronouns and it’s obvious that they’re not.

Labels have meaning as do the pronouns that go with them

I like my gender alot, I worked hard and still do to get and keep myself passing. I would rather not to have my gender neutered by some everyone’s included tucute bullshit.

They/theming everyone misgenders most people.

And the 10 years that this shit narrative has been pushed has been the false narrative that gender doesn’t exist. Gender abolition is not a good thing, and idgaf about hurting the feelings of identities that have co-opted a medical condition and turned it into a fashion statement of who can have more colors in their hair, piercings in their face, dumpier clothing, and shit takes on gender theory while loudly proclaiming to be the experts shouting down actual transex people accusing them falsely of transphobia.

This is why the right loves to pushback against us. Pretty soon I’m not going to have access to life-saving medication because men with beards can claim womanhood and normalize the bulge. Or that men’s rooms need tampons. That trans men can be lesbians, and that men can get pregnant. Absolutely delusional and made this community a cesspool of support for shit causes that obfuscated the need for our protection pushing binary transex persons out of the trans umbrella.