What it feels like to be misgendered

I got misgendered today. Out of the blue, in a Zoom call, by someone who runs a business where I work. 

I wasn’t expecting it, at all. I transitioned 16 years ago – a full medical, legal, social process. As I went through all that, I was misgendered, often, which was hard. But it’s very rare now. These days, I look the way I want to look, which, to the vast majority of people, is taken as looking like many other middle aged, cis women in middle class, white Britain. That’s partly because it feels instinctive and it makes me happy to present in the world this way, a choice I have personally made (and of course can make, as I have the cultural privilege of being middle class and being white too), and partly – and I hold this knowledge with some pain – because I know that I don’t have the courage or the resilience to navigate the world whilst standing out and attracting attention from a growing number of cisgender people in Britain who may feel that it’s ok to insult or attack me; who may feel that I am somehow an insult to them or that I represent a threat. Hate crime grows, hostile media coverage of trans people is at epidemic levels in the UK, with rapid and catastrophic effects on levels of acceptance of us in British society, our rights and safety are under sustained attack from newspapers (with much coverage beyond revolting), from politicians from wealthy ‘commentators’ with millions of followers on social media, from tech barons, from sports bodies, from health professionals (the ones at least who have literally no experience of working with trans people), from the legal profession (here's a lawyer boasting about misgendering people), from psychotherapists (see 'health professionals') from the centre-left and it's press, the right and the far right...the list lengthens each week. We're Britain Equal Opportunities Scapegoats - these days everyone can hate us. Even the country's statutory Equality Regulator has joined in - led the charge in fact.

As the frenzy has built exponentially, some in the community have hoped that the peak had been reached with the end of grotesque Conservative government. The reality seems very different; as our small and unresourced community becomes more and more exhausted and vulnerable, it feels like those who wish us ill have just been encouraged and are ready (as they pulsate with excitement about destroying help for trans kids with the viciously biased and internationally condemned Cass Review, go on next to rip up what's left of adult trans care in the UK and manoeuvre in the Supreme Court against our basic legal right to exist) to move in for the final act.

As a community it feels to me like we are almost completely friendless within the UK's political landscape, or at least within the parts of it with the slightest access to power or influence. The last government pursued us with a vicious, populist, hysterical zeal. Despite paper promises to 'ban Conversion Therapy' (and include trans people within that ban - a commitment that I fully expect it to abandon), the new Labour administration is also planning to take our rights away, in hospitals and schools, albeit with less hysteria and a more technocratic tone, nuanced to smooth ruffled liberal consciences. Labour indulges in less shouting, adopting more of a tone of ‘calm’ cisgender sensibleness, but its policies, with a few exceptions, plus the almost complete elimination of trans people from conversations about our own destiny, are cut/pastes of its deranged predecessor. A kind of visceral, abstracted, fear, of trans women in particular, a unique, post-colonial terror embedded in Anglo-Saxon culture, is now present across the two main parties in Britain. Of the 650 seats in the UK Parliament, at least 535 are filled by MPs who represent parties that effectively hate us; the Conservatives with their sneering contempt, Labour with its North London, middle-class look of concern, a self-soothing arrogance on its face and a toxic op-ed in The Observer on its desk. 

That’s the context, in 2024, in Britain. 

But back to being misgendered today. It was my voice, I suspect. Testosterone broke my voice when I was in my early teens, almost 50 years ago – as it will break the voice of every young trans girl who has now been told that the use of puberty pausing ‘blockers’ in the UK is now illegal (anyone who prescribes them could be looking at two years in prison). When I transitioned, later in life, I tried over many months, through voice coaching, to lift the pitch of my voice. It cost me many hundreds of pounds. It made some difference, but it was ultimately a disappointing experience. I speak in my ‘upper register’ now, but my voice just doesn’t have the timbre and the tone more typical of a cis woman’s. I tried and tried, but becoming discouraged, I ended up with a voice that could be described as gender-ambiguous. Face to face with someone, when they see me, it usually serves. On the phone, I need to put in a great deal of effort to not be called ‘Sir’ and always make a note to use the full (female connoted) version of my first name rather than the more ambiguous contraction by which most know me. Why did I even need to go through all this? Well, once again, for me, in amongst a feeling that I didn’t sound like me, I felt the heavy hand of cisgender prejudice and a fear that my unadjusted voice would lead to a hostile, even dangerous, response from those around me...and that I’d bear the consequences. 

It might come as little surprise to read that I, like pretty much every other human being, want to be accepted. I want to be part of society, seen for who I am - a determination that is profoundly mine to own and to speak (as yours is yours to own and speak). That acceptance starts with an acknowledgment that I am who I say I am, at a fundamental level. Getting called ‘she’ is part of that, for me. If you want to understand just how fundamental claiming womanhood or manhood in our society has become, you need only look at the increasingly violent hatred directed at those of us who have asked society to engage with our experience, we who ask cisgender society to reflect on some definitions and understandings in ways which lay bare some assumptions and ask questions of them. To not be accepted in society means to be outside it. To be outside it has always meant to face hardship, persecution or even death – and the placing of a group outside society, by not accepting them as they wish to be understood (often a project of politicians who seek to make capital and draw power from doing it) is the first step in a process of eliminating them. 

Misgendering someone is part of all this. 

Before I unpack that connection a bit more, I am going to speak to some cisgender anxieties that can arise about now, often framed in something like, ‘But how can I know what’s right, what the correct pronoun is, what you want me to say?’ Many trans people have heard this, or versions of it, a lot. Sometimes it’s laced together with a dash of ‘You’re making me feel bad for just making a simple mistake!’. This creates the frame for a persecutory complex that can soon morph in to ‘Wait, I’m the victim here!’ and provide a self-pitying energy to fuel their resentment of you as a trans person for imposing this burden on them, a phenomenon seen from the world’s richest man with his endless hatreds on X, to the knuckle-head you run into the pub. If you feel such feelings coming up inside you, please try and stop. Please just say to yourself, ‘Wait, who has the power in this exchange? Who has the privilege?’ 

Why does misgendering hurt a trans person so much? I can only speak for myself. Every trans person will have their own version of the answer. Some deal with having the wrong pronouns directed at them much or all of the time. Setting is important, and skin thicknesses will differ. For me, it’s pretty clear. Being misgendered means that all the trauma I went through, all the years of inner turmoil, the decade of ridicule and abuse I faced in my marriage and its traumatic collapse, the isolation I felt in that marriage and after it, the loss of relationships, my business, my home and the efforts I made to fight my way back from all of that over many years, the years I spent jumping through society’s hoops to meet its ‘requirements’ of me, the tens of thousands of pounds I paid out to get the medical support I needed because my country wouldn’t give it to me, using up all my savings, all of this to earn the right to be seen and treated in a way that reflects what and who I know and have always known myself to be, all of it, in that moment, counts for nothing. I didn't get anywhere. 

At some level, being called ‘he’ also brings back every other time I have been called it, by everyone who wanted to humiliate me, tell me I was wrong, deluded, sick or weird. It brings back every time a newspaper columnist has done it, or a Tory MP, or a Gender-Critical lawyer, or a social media personality, or my ex, and it reawakens the hurt that they genuinely meant to cause, whether or not you meant it that way. At some level inside (I cannot of course always know), the fears flare up that you might actually agree with those who have hated people like me, at some deep, even unconscious, level?

Yes, it’s a limbic response. Yes, it’s my Sympathetic Nervous System dialled up to 11 before my pre-frontal cortex has started to process anything. My reactions are a consequence of my past and I live with them every day, and no, you personally didn’t do any of that because you weren’t even there, but that’s my inner landscape. My story is mine alone, but many trans people have been through their own trauma, perhaps analogous to mine (and let's be clear, I'm talking about things done to us by others because we attempted to assert our true gender identity to the world. I'm not talking about the fallacious assertion, popular with 'Gender Criticals' that all trans people become trans because this whole 'delusion' of being trans is no more than a symptomatic presentation of some other, unrelated trauma). Getting misgendered as a means for others to hurt us is part of our lives for many of us. For me, it triggers a sudden deep swell of fear. ‘I got called he. Am I in danger?!’ screams my brain’s amygdala, because over many years it learned that getting called ‘he’ was part of a package of calculated humiliation that might be intended to crush me, or at best (a strange word to use in this context) certainly underlined my visible vulnerability in the world. Even if the motivation behind it isn't consciously or overtly malign, misgendering may often be used by people who just can’t be bothered to make the effort, can’t be bothered to care or to see you as you know you are. Or who privilege their own needs, elevating the modest challenge of making the adjustment by saying 'You’ve got to understand how difficult it is for me!' (and in so doing parenthetically say, 'The challenge I face in doing this work is so much more important than what you may have been through, for years').

Obviously, I fully accept that sometimes simple and honest mistakes can be made. Motivation does matter and not everyone aims to hurt. There are plenty of resources around about how to try and avoid making errors, if you care, if you are prepared to read them and to resist the words of the politicians and the journalists who tell you that all this ‘woke’ bullshit needs to stop? One rule of thumb; if you are in conversation with someone and you are not sure, politely ask them, 'What pronouns would you prefer I use?'. Most of the time, the person would far rather you did that than speculate, or worse just go with what feels best for you alone. Another; if you can’t ask, then take a look at how that person is presenting, how they are dressed, how they are being. What does that tell you? Another; ask someone who knows them, discretely maybe. Another; use their name in a sentence rather than a pronoun, if that’s possible, until you can find out. Grammar can be flexible (“Oh yes, [name] is coming over tonight. They said they’d be here about 8.”)

If you get it wrong, please don’t ignore it – the other person will have heard it, and it will likely hurt. A recognition from you, if offered in good heart, and an apology, will go a long way. Maybe something like:

Me: "Actually, I use she not he. I am woman, with a trans background, who transitioned many years ago and I use female pronouns".

You: "I’m really sorry. I hear you. I realise that I didn’t get that right and that was probably hurtful for you. I’ll do my very best to get it right from now on".

Me: "That’s ok. I appreciate you saying that. I do realise that people haven’t always come across someone like me, and that it can take a bit of adjustment".

I didn’t get an apology this morning. I don’t see the person who misgendered me as a bigot. Far from it. I don’t know this person well, but from the evidence of what they do and how they do it, I think it likely that they do care about these things. But I did get called ‘he’, before this person then rapidly diverted to ‘she’. I had just been talking about the experience of being trans in the UK, and my plan to leave Britain for a safer country next year. In psychology what happened is known as parapraxis. In the regular world, we might call it a Freudian slip. I do wish he’d stopped and noted what he had said, but I suspect that he was momentarily ashamed of his mistake and tried to press on regardless, as if it hadn’t happened. I was left with the hurt of it – a microaggression (as they say), lying on the pile of others I have accumulated over the years. A hurt that ended up with me feeling I had to write this blog post, to try and externalise the feelings.

Perhaps I’ll take it up with him at some point. I doubt it. I know that to do so means taking on the labour of that myself, maybe having to contain his anxieties, and I’m so tired of it all. I imagine a scenario in which he might recognise what he did and mention it to me some time, with an apology, though this feels unlikely. As it stands, this little insensitive grain of sand just adds itself to that pile of sand somewhere inside. That, I suppose, is what made me burst into tears in my kitchen after our call ended today.