in honor of last weekend's family gathering, where all 40 of my family members saw me as a cis straight woman, i wanna have a little shout-out to the people who do not see me as a cis straight woman, because thank the gods, they do exist.
shout-out to the hamburger vendor who sold the lady in front of me a hamburger and said "thanks, have a nice day ma'am!" and then sold me a hamburger and said "thanks, have a nice day!"
shout-out to the ticket checker in the train who said "thank you miss" to every woman in the wagon upon checking their ticket, and said "thank you" to me
shout-out to the person in the queer talk group i joined in my first year of uni who said "that explains a lot" when i shared i was thinking i might be nonbinary
shout-out to the kid in my youth orchestra who has made several "you look like a boy" remarks over the years, always in the most calm, observant way possible (he might have been the first one to refer to me with he/him pronouns, actually)
shout-out to the groupmate who immediately and without a single mistake switched to they/them pronouns upon hearing one of my friends refer to me that way
shout-out to the D&I team member who looked at me when saying their reason for being in the team was that they are a member of the lgbtq+ community and want to be visible to younger students so they would feel welcome
shout-out to the lady who asked me where the bathroom in the uni library was, then did a double take if she was entering the right one after seeing me enter the women's bathrooms
shout-out to another youth orchestra kid who yelled "HEY [name of one of the board guys]" at me when I was in our mascot's uniform
shout-out to the ads on my insta being very clearly targeted towards men
there's more!
shout-out to my colleague on the student magazine who referred to me by name twice in the same sentence in the meeting notes in order to avoid using pronouns
shout-out to the little kid who called me "sir" when ordering his icecream back during that summer when I worked as an icecream vendor
shout-out to the elderly man who came up to me while I was cleaning up the percussion after a concert asking "and you, boy, which of these instruments do you like the most?" (I corrected him and said I was not, in fact, a percussionist)
shout-out to my neighbour's friend who referred to me by "they" and with that became the first person to spontaneously gender me correctly. unless he saw my nonbinary flag wristband, in which case, still shout-out to him for Ăźberhaupt knowing what those colours stand for.
shout-out to the two guys who have apparently been correcting themselves and each other on my pronouns for WEEKS like c'mon that's probably one of the sweetest things people have ever done for me.
shout-out to all of the amazing people in one of the Discord servers I'm in who complimented the new name I was trying on. no questions, just "that's such a nice name" and "it suits better".
shout-out to the guy in the car that almost ran me over, who yelled "watch out boy!" at me
shout-out to the guy in my group project who came in late, got greeted by me with a "morning", sat down, looked all confused, and asked "wasn't [my name] supposed to be here as well?", because he didn't realise it was me, he thought i was one of the other guys
shout-out to the HR department for saying "the noted changes have been made" and nothing else when i asked them (among a few other notes) whether they could remove the "Ms." from my contract
shout-out to the guy from my orchestra who took a selfie with me after i got my hair cut and proceeded to show it to everyone, saying "look at this picture of me and my little brother!"
and shout-out to the other orchestra guy who looked at the picture while i was standing right next to him, and went "huh who's that, you don't have a brother?"
