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Thinking it over, I think part of the reason I don't have an issue with it is, ironically, because of the close working relationship. If there's someone I'm interacting with in a professional capacity every day or two, yeah, I don't have any problem making a little room in my brain for pronoun and name; hell, I'm already making some room in my brain for their name, I've just got to change which name is stored in there. (And for what it's worth, they passed reasonably well, so the pronoun wasn't a big deal either aside from the transition period.)
Whereas if it's someone I only intereacted with every few months and every time I talked to them they had a new pronoun/name, my answer would be "dude, pick one and stick with it, or at least stop bugging me about it". And I can kinda understand if someone who hadn't worked with her more closely had more trouble with the transition.
I think nicknames work the same way. There's a few people I've worked with who, quite frankly, I never found out the "real" name of, because they kept using a nickname. But that's okay! As far as I'm concerned, that was their name, so, hey, no sweat.
It's all a lot less fraught in personal relationships. "Am I willing to sacrifice a friendship over this issue" is a lot more clean precisely because it doesnt have the spectre of having my career derailed by a professional superstructure hovering around it. I wouldn't be anywhere near as bugged by a pronoun request from a friend, in the same way it doesn't bug me to abstain from certain topics or off-color jokes in some people's presence. Of course, this all gets more complicated since most people do form personal relationships with professional peers to some extent. How could one not?
I guess my frustration is that I always felt there were pretty obvious, bold lines that I knew not to transgress in work contexts, and expected others not to in turn. Trans identity is the first time (that I can think of) where this boundary was transgressed. The current formulation of trans ideology necessitates said transgression, I guess. But I am dismayed by the degree it has seemingly bowled people over.
Yeah, that's fair. And honestly, this did all happen before the culture war kicked off at full force - I'd have to check to get an exact date, but I'd say 2014 or so. We were not in the same climate of fear that we arguably are today.
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