Oh here's another one, coming from social psychiatrist Eugene Brody:
"Many, if not all, American Negroes appear to suffer from a series of problems in identification, stemming from culture conflict, caste restrictions, and minority status, mediated in part through the family structure.
Ultimately their developing unification around common aspirations may determine certain changes in the forms of psychiatric illnesses which are exhibited... These considerations suggest that growing up as a Negro in America may produce distortions or impairments in the capacity to participate in the surrounding culture which will facilitate the development of schizophrenic types of behavior."
Imagine that. You sit there, you see all the mental strain that being Black in America causes... And the determination is "and that's gonna aid in them getting symptoms of schizophrenia". Not "hey I see that racism is causing Black people amounts of stress that can cause one's mind to snap due to mistreatment, to the point of it being unbearable to function in our current society, let's address the environment". No, it's "they seem to think they're being mistreated, they're going crazy".
You know, we're just crazy pointing things out. To quote our recent racist friend, "like a pigeon pecking at every seed shaped object on the road". 😐🙂🙃
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
I want to be very clear on this: it is not just dependence on smartphones and phones causing mental atrophy. It's that for decades we have taught Three Cueing System as a way to read, and while we are now beginning to correct, it is catching up with us. The reliance on smartphones and short form video are in part a result of illiteracy, not necessarily a cause of it, because we have failed to give students the tools to actually read but also paired it with the belief that they can read. They do not seek remedial reading help but blame the materials for being unclear or too difficult, when the fundamental problem is that the more complex the text, the less functional the three cueing system is. They are often quite literally guessing what the text says by searching for words they recognize (or think they recognize but cannot verify) and texts rapidly become impenetrable nonsense. Of course people will reach for their phones when 90% of the text they encounter in their daily lives and schooling is not accessible to them!
If youre a closeted person somewhere out there thinking "I want to transition but it would be less progressive/unique/countercultural for me to be that gender instead of this one" please know that you are a real person not a character in a narrative and cant live your life based on what is good media representation. You are real you can only be yourself and theres no moral weight to any identity over another
Liberal transphobes enjoy positioning trans identities as regressive compared to cis queerness or like non-transitioning transness or anything else they can leverage to make transphobia look progressive and I think its easy to absorb that message subconciously. But in real life we just are what we are and no ranking of validity can change the fact that you have an identity that is NOT chosen and is just your unchangeable truth. Not only should you not have to live a life dictated by what is most countercultural to identify as or whatever but also: being trans is extremely countercultural and feminist and leftist to begin with and theyre only trying to convince you otherwise bc theyre bigots
"Why cant you be a feminine man society hates feminine men 🥺" and "all the butch lesbians are becoming men we need u 🥺" = stay in the closet for the noble purpose of being an abstract representation point in my new york times opinion column. You wont actually be a gnc cis person youll be a closeted trans person who uses the wrong words but I need you to do that because i hate you
a vampire, wrapped tightly with indestructible enchanted threads: No weapon forged against me shall prosper.
a blacksmith using the vampire as an anvil while making a sword: Shut the fuck up.
A question most people successfully avoid asking: can institutionalized patients ever have sex? The answer is ‘mostly no, unless they are very good at sneaking past nurses’. They also can’t kiss, hold hands, cuddle, or have any other form of romantic contact.
I worked in a mental hospital where two patients snuck past nurses and had sex once. It was treated as a public health crisis of approximately the same urgency as somebody throwing a bucket of Ebola-laced chimp blood all over the dining room. Both patients lost all their privileges, earned themselves 24-7 supervision by nurses, got restricted to their rooms, and had to go through a battery of tests for every STD in the book. We the doctors got remedial training with helpful tips like “If two patients seem to like each other too much, put them on opposite sides of the unit so they’re never in contact.”
-SSC
This is true of other emotional connections too, by the way. You are heavily discouraged from making friends with other patients on the basis that you “may enable each other’s mental illnesses.” When I was hospitalized we were forbidden from trading contact information. Every conversation we had was heavily surveiled by staff so we didn’t really get to talk about personal topics or build genuine friendship because anything emotional could be seen as a risk and would get us punished.
One of the doctors when I was institutionalized was actually very caring and concerned about the patients she worked with. She would actually listen to us and as a result everyone she worked with ended up liking her a lot.
We weren’t allowed to give anyone as much as a handshake. Even if we had family visiting us, if a doctor or nurse came in during that time, and found as much as me (a teenager) hugging my sister, it got treated like I was holding her at gunpoint as a hostage in a bank robbery. My visitation was revoked, I was placed in solitary for a few days I can’t really remember well, and still got set with 24/7 constant monitoring even in the bathroom for a while afterwards.
This nurse was kind enough to just awkwardly and visibly turn away during this time. She always chose this because everyone was Infinitely more comfortable with her showing us she wasn’t watching than the people who would watch us like a hawk and would report if we tried to cover our chests or crotch.
She’d also recognize when someone with an eating disorder just actually couldn’t eat what was expected of us to eat. And she would have snacks and other things for us to eat instead, and wouldn’t punish us if we couldn’t finish our plate.
She got fired. She was accused of being a child predator because the small kids and the teenagers liked the one person who treated them like a human being. There was a criminal investigation that literally led to nowhere because SHE didn’t commit any crime. She was still barred from entering the profession ever again and had to fight to keep it off her permanent records.
The exact thing that got her pushed over the edge? A kid asked for her specifically after they had a bad panic attack
We weren’t allowed to keep in contact with anyone. we weren’t allowed to make friends. If we were too friendly we’d be taken away from each other, but anyone hostile was allowed to remain together. You’d be woken up at 6 am sharp by a nurse checking your vitals and you’d be expected to stay awake and active for 16 hours a day, through anything else going on. Going to your room was a privilege before nighttime. Going to the bathroom was a privilege. Choosing between eating lunch or drinking water was a privilege. Getting to fucking do homework was a privilege. They didn’t teach you anything for once you’d actually get out because they don’t expect you to be well enough for Out Patient.
Obligatory opening line about walking into the bats-swinging-at-hornets-nest room.
Anyway, I keep seeing transandrophobia discourse that uses the argument, "transmisogyny is real but transandrophobia is not real, for the same reason misogynoir is real but misogyn-(white)-y isn't. Because being male or white isn't an oppressed identity."
And I think the analogy is the wrong analogy. For misogynoir, gender and race are DIFFERENT axes, and as such something like misogynoir is the combined experience of two SEPARATE axes of oppression. "Being trans" and "what your gender is" are NOT different axes. Which gender you have transitioned into is a detail OF the trans experience! Comparing this to intersecting two separate axes (race and sex) is fundamentally the wrong analogy!
Gay men and lesbian women both experience homophobia. They also have different experiences OF homophobia depending whether they're MLM or WLW. I think this is a significantly better analogy because, like with being trans, "same gender attraction" and "what gender you are" are NOT independent axes.
I would never fault a gay man for talking about the kinds of homophobia gay/bi men face, or a lesbian woman for talking about the kinds of homophobia targeted at lesbian/bi woman. Because there are some different societal reasons that people direct hate at men-loving-men and women-loving-women, which are, inextricably, tied to how society demands different genders act.
Like you cannot say "men shouldn't separately identify and talk about the kind of homophobia experienced by men, because men aren't oppressed" because being male is inextricably linked to how that homophobia is experienced
And in that vein, there are different societal reasons that people direct hate at FTM and MTF people, which are all within transphobia. But the kind of transphobia someone experiences is inextricably linked to what the person's transitioned gender is, and what society wants them to be. This is not introducing a second, uncorrelated privileged axis! This is a detail of the transphobia! Details are allowed to have names! This is different kinds of real people's lived transphobia and acting like someone is throwing in an unrelated axis of privilege (like being white, or being upper-class) is disingenuous!
Also, you may notice, I'm strongly advocating for people's voices to be heard and the details to matter! I want trans women to talk, LOUDLY, about transmisogyny. And its specifics and why it matters! This is not shouting down any of that! Talk about your experiences and the parts that are specifically transmisogynistic! I just think it's bonkers that somewhere along the way, people who think every single identity class is a perfectly independent, perpendicular stat bar that shows up on a character customization screen came around and decided half of the experience of transphobia needs to be un-named and un-personed because someone heard "men" and looked that word up in their privilege stat book and got real scared.
Like in conclusion, "Trans men can't talk about transandrophobia because men aren't oppressed" reads exactly the same to me as "gay men aren't allowed to talk about the way gay men are specifically hated (hatred of emasculated men, etc etc) because men aren't oppressed." If someone started calling the second thing "homoandrophobia" would you like, start claiming sodomy laws were never real?
I also find it incredibly disingenuous as a trans man of color, specifically a BLACK trans man of color, that at every turn I'm likened to a white guy for pointing out that yes actually my gender does make a difference because this is different from how I was treated as a black girl and it's different from how my black trans & cis fem friends get treated and it's different from how my black cis guy friends get treated and it's also different from how my white friends of any gender get treated but you know it's really similar to how my black trans guy friends get treated because my blackness and my gender and my transness are all tied up in a way that is impossible to seperate ***and that was the entire point of coining the word intersectionality in the first place*** -
But I ALSO find it frustrating because there is always the comparison to whiteness. Why whiteness? If we are going to make a race analogy, why are we comparing trans women to blackness and trans men to whiteness when both of these demographics are inherently going to experience the system of transphobia? Why not compare, say, Black to Asian, who would be both inherently going to experience the system of racism? Is it because that's messy, because it's hard to say who is always going to be considered more oppressed, because it depends very much on the context and this may change for the same two individuals being compared on a day-to-day or even minute-by-minute basis? Sorry but that's also just... how oppression works.
We can say "there is antiblackness in many Asian communities" and we can say "there is Asian hate in many Black communities" and both can be true and it doesn't make either the other's oppressor or that one side somehow experiences Super Racism while the other experiences Lesser Racism. It just means we as people have shit we need to work on. Talking about Asian hate does not mean that no one is allowed to talk about antiblackness. Advocating against antiblackness does not mean Asians are uniquely disposed to hating Black people. Both groups should have the space to talk about the unique way their problems with systemic oppression manifest without being made to feel like they're taking space away from each other. And both should be given the resources needed to fix these problems, because just fixing one or the other does not inherently mean both are resolved.
(And, honestly, to truly resolve any marginalized race's oppression, everyone will need to work together anyway as it is not as simple as just flipping the off switch on racism. Racism is such a multifaceted problem that both has its hooks in everything and also everything has its hooks in it too. It is a spider web which needs to be untangled one strand at a time, there is no scissors to cut the knot on this one.)
Buuuuuut I find many of the people making the black to white comparison are very lacking in their understanding of race and racism, and thus do not have the understanding that it's not quite so (pardon the pun) black and white as all that.
Also, as an aside, unfortunately plenty of people do in fact say that about gay men and men not being oppressed- basically stating that lesbiphobia is the only one that should be expounded on as the rest is "just regular homophobia".
it is interesting and very annoying that you choose to refer to the entirety of this discourse as "transandrophobia discourse". this discourse did not start with transandrophobia. it started with feminism. it is unsurprising that you would choose to center men in this discussion.
"being trans" and "what gender you are," are in fact, explicitly different axes that can intersect.
the axes of oppression here are man > woman (misogyny) and cis > trans (transphobia)
at the intersection of the axes of misogyny and transphobia, you will find transmisogyny
it is important to understand when speaking on these topics that transfeminists are discussing political classes, not identity demographics. the political class of men is privileged over the political class of women. it does not matter what demographic of men you are, you will still be privileged over the political class of women, because class society is heirarchical in nature. men are not opposite to women. men are above women.
you can trivially see this play out in the statistics on who recieves the most money and who is subject to the most violence.
men are paid more than women, and women are subject to more violence than men. when you add the variable of transness, trans men are paid more than trans women, and trans women are subject to far more violence than anyone else.
transandrophobia is not real, because men are privileged over women. it is "normal homophobia" because it is homophobia without the addition of misogyny (lesbophobia). it is "normal transphobia" because it is transphobia without the addition of misogyny (transmisogyny). men think that they face unique oppressions that women dont because they do not listen to us when we share similar experiences, and do not believe us when we say we have it even worse than that.
this is why we make the comparison between transandrophobia and reverse racism. both are a disbelief that others have it worse than you. both are a desire to equivocate between classes in a class heirarchy.
This is what I meant in my tags on my reblog of this when I said that people are treating whiteness and maleness as a default. This exact response does both, likely without meaning to, and prescribes an additive nature and a hierarchy of oppression in a discussion of intersectionality despite the coiner specifically stating that intersectionality is neither about additives nor hierarchies in this way.
By using "white" or "man" as a default, both become a shorthand for an un-oppressed or less-oppressed state. By using the phrase "men are paid more than women" (untrue when discussing the intersection of race, disability status, or immigration vs citizenship status - in which white able-bodied people who are citizens will always be paid more including white able-bodied English-speaking citizen women as compared to men of color, disabled men, and immigrant men) or "women experience more violence than men" (untrue when discussing literally any intersection, as the violence immediately stops being a "lesser" or "greater" overall and starts being a "this demographic experiences more of this particular kind of violence, while that demographic experiences more of this other particular kind of violence, eg binary trans women are statistically far more likely to experience physical violence, violence from strangers, and violence from the state while nonbinary people previously assigned female at birth are statistically far more likely to experience intimate partner violence, sexual violence, and violence from within their family unit- as stated in nearly every large study researching transphobic violence that cares to sort by gender and also by assigned sex) - we are treating this discussion as though there is a default state of being rather than acknowledging that the intersections of privilege and oppression with dramatically change the picture, and that with this dramatically changed picture, such a statement can stop being true quite easily.
It is interesting that you should choose to state that this is a feminist argument, while completely misrepresenting and misunderstanding the words of black feminists, including the very black feminist that I mentioned by name in my reblog. Here is another black feminist's words, if you don't like mine since I am a man.
I also want to circle back to the way that the term “transandrophobia” is being dismissed here, because I think there’s a pretty valid argument that the intersection of transness and oppositional sexism already had a perfectly good name, which was, wait for it… transmisogyny. But by and large trans fems have rejected the assertion that, for example, a trans man who is physically attacked for using a woman’s bathroom that he is legally required to use and then told that physical violence is “what he should expect as a man” when he looks for help and support is “experiencing transmisogyny”… So here we are, then. If that’s not transmisogyny, then what is it? If you think the term transandrophobia (or antitransmasculinity, or any of the other terms people have tried over the years) is a bad way to describe it, then what is it? The problem here is not and never was the term, the problem is that some people really don’t want trans men to be able to act like the violence and discrimination that they face is in any way as important as the violence and discrimination faced by trans women. Which, I’m sorry, but that’s fucking crab bucket behavior at every level, and I’m tired of having to indulge the obviously spurious reasoning of why “it’s not about shutting those conversations about oppression down, we just think the term implies the wrong thing.” Come on now. Who are you trying to fool? If you don’t like the term “transandrophobia” then either call it transmisogyny or else admit that the goal was always to silence and to exclude other trans people.
i think completely pre transition trans people should be able to wear one tiny little pronoun pin and get gendered correctly every time. i think cis people should be transitioning just for the fun of it if they want to. i think you should be able to walk into any pharmacy and just buy hrt. i think that little boys should be able to sit in circles and play with dolls and paint each other's nails and make friendship bracelets. i think that little girls should be able to play with flaming monster trucks and play football and get competitive over video games. i think that arson (he/it/paw) should have paw's identity respected and treated as completely normal. i think that we should normalize neopronouns and weird genders and being weird or unusual in general. you should be able to explain your weird one of a kind xenogender to the least queer person on the planet and they should say "oh that's cool!! haven't heard of that gender before". you should be able to wear a tail in public you should be able to make out with your computer if you want i don't fucking care. i love transgenders i love neurodivergent people i love furries i love everyone outside the norm i love freaks i love nerds i love everyone.
if i see another person basically go "but what if this character who is explicitly neutral nonbinary is actually just a binary trans egg because nonbinary people arent REALLY as trans as binary trans people im so woke actually" i will start killing people
its pride month and im very burnt out from working in healthcare however i do love it for the ambiguity the uniform/masks offer. had a conversation with a patient after seeing him for a day or two where he was like
"Sorry, I don't mean to offend--"
Which of course, I brace for hell, since he is around 60, and i am a gangly cryptid that people usually struggle only to find the right slur to apply to. But i dutifully keep my work voice and go "nah nah, don't worry, what can I do?"
He hits me with "Are you--uh, I've been saying 'thank you ma'am' but are you... okay with that? What should I call you?"
And i live in a small conservative pocket within one of the most liberal states in the US, so my experience in public is varied. People have guessed, they've gone with she, he. they, they've awkwardly avoided it, but no stranger had ever asked me.
So i panicked and chuckled. This felt kind of like walking into a fake tumblr post. I said "Oh, you can call me whatever you want, its fine."
Any cis person would probably sound a little insulted. i knew i was confirming some kind of gender fuckery, but giving him the out that he didn't have to change anything. Fucker kindly smiles though, and like. Pounces. Asks, much more confidently, "But would you prefer sir? What are your pronouns?"
He's on script now, I'm astral projecting to a different plane where i'm a bug on a well lit microscope and my throat's a little tight all the sudden. I say, "Oh. I uh--I use they/them."
I use they or he, but 'they' is the language curveball. I know this, which is why i usually just let people use whatever. He nods, and I choke out (because its been a bad bad day, autoimmune flare pain on top of record high patient numbers) "Thanks. No one... has ever asked me. Have a good day."
He told me the same, I booked it, because the dim room was hiding watery eyes but not for much longer. Got it together in a nearby closet (ha) and moved on.
Came back later on in the evening because I had promised to visit when his wife was there earlier in the day. She's sweet, he's sweet, I do my usual spiel, he avoids any 'ma'am' studiously, but on me going to head out again, hits the dilemma of having no polite substitute for 'ma'am' or 'sir' that isnt gendered in some subtle way, and he's fucking trying, but this is not second nature obviously.
So what comes out is "Have a wonderful night, Them!"
Beaming, proud, right next to his extremely confused wife, who he seems to have not outted me to (nice) who now thinks he's probably having a stroke (funny, but not nice lmao)
Anyway, tldr, not adding to the well-meant bigot strawman theory, man wasn't a bigot, it was just. Nice, that in a sea of alt, visibly queer or vocally liberal people my age or younger who never thought to ask or just didn't want to deal with the awkwardness of stumbling through it... some lone dad guy decided 'good enough' wasn't enough and volunteered to correct himself.
