Canāt find it, going to just going to explain it. Iāve been out for like 4 and a half years. I saw this post when I was Freshly Out, and this post has been so deep in my fucking rat brain for actual years.
You have to react like youāre not expecting to be misgendered. Itās hard and itās weird, because I know, you walk out into the world very aware and afraid of how the cis people are going to perceive you. But deadass there is a āWow, that stranger has made a bold call thereā mentality that, yeah itās a fake it till you make it type of deal. But once I internalized that, I genuinely donāt even hear people misgendering me most of the time.
Iām nonbinary, most of the time my gender presentation priorities are Have Fun and Look Queer.
The first time I noticed that being misgendered slides off my brain like a wet duck I was in a 7/11 and a cashier tried to direct me to the cardboard drink sleeves while I was like 3rd or 4th in line (yeah it was kinda weird, I was holding a large hot coffee in my bare hand and I guess it freaked the dude out, but like my hands are actually really heat resistant I was fine, anyway) He said several variations on āMam, would you like a cardboard sleeve for your coffee, theyāre right thereā and I legitimately did not process that he could possibly be talking to me until he tried something like āthe one in the red hatā and then I tuned back in and declined the heat protectant sleeve. (I do not know why this human man was so insistent that I needed a heat protection cardboard sleeve, and Iām gathering that me totally zoned the fuck out to his multiple attempts to get my attention holding something that he apparently thought was made out of fucking lava probably had the exact Genderless Eldritch Horror effect that we all know and love)
I accidentally also did this to one of my professors a couple weeks ago, I was given an instruction with she/her pronouns in it, purely by accident, this professor genuinely does right by his trans students as best he can, but I legitimately did not even process that it was for me until he repeated it with they/them.
This compared with a couple years ago a different professor slipped up and used me in an example to the class with she/her pronouns and I literally barely held myself together until the end of the class, made it 4 steps out the door and started silently crying.
It feels fucking powerful in a āthat should have hurt, and I didnāt even notice, cis people have no power over meā way. I have a little piece of the security that cis people have in the way that they interact with the world. And that is absolutely precious.
It takes untraining years of social conditioning, and pretending that you canāt fathom that someone would use those words on you, that no one has ever said that to you before and the words are so foreign that they mean nothing to you.
And yeah I started out begging my body not to flinch when a stranger calls out āmamā, and practicing a moment of confusion and unaffected disbelief when cashiers would ask if I found everything I was looking for āyoung ladyā and deliberately ignoring the incorrect gendered terms. And you know opās āJust look at the person like theyāre an idiot, break out the deep voice and say āUm, alright thenāā it will feel fake at first.
But fuck at some point it stops being an act, and that feels fucking bulletproof.
