How to Not Be a Jerk When It Comes to Gender

As a kid, lice seemed particularly attracted to me. The bugs infested my head all the time, meaning that throughout most of my childhood, I had a very short haircut.

So, from age six to 12, I was constantly misgendered.

I remember the first time it happened and how devastated I was. I had just survived my first lice hair chop and my mother took me to a store where I opened the door for an elderly woman who said, "what a fine young gentleman."

She meant it as a compliment, but I saw it as something else. Being referred to as a boy reinforced the idea that something was visibly wrong with me - my weight, my face, my haircut, my style, my sexuality - and that I was an outsider in the world of the feminine.

I tell you this story because there are millions like it from similar people who don’t quite fit into the boxes placed around our ideas of gender (or sexual orientation, which I discussed in my last article).

I tell you all of this because I want you all to stop gendering people automatically.

We all know that assumptions hurt, but we still make them daily. We live in a world that likes to categorize. From a young age, we are taught to put people in gender boxes and we are told what those boxes are supposed to look like: Girls line up on the left, with pink dresses and Barbie dolls. Boys line up on the right, with blue shoes and G.I. Joes. But when you fall somewhere in the middle, like many people do, it’s hard to pick a side. And it can be traumatizing, especially at a young age, to have that side picked for you.

Read: It Takes More Than Preferred Pronouns to Respect Gender Identity

By not assuming someone’s gender, you can save them from embarrassment, shame, frustration, anger and fear.

My partner, Alex, is 6 feet, 2 inches tall, has a shaved head and is very handsome. When Alex goes out in public, people panic about a boy being in the girls' bathroom, and they make a big deal of calling Alex "sir." Then, when they realize Alex is female, they try to justify their assumption by placing the blame on her looks, and saying horribly rude things like, "Well, can you blame me?".

For this reason, Alex hates going into bathrooms, through airport security and often out in public in general. If people asked, they would find out that Alex mostly identifies as genderqueer and mostly uses female pronouns, but also is fine when respectful people use whichever pronoun they see fit.

The problem for Alex isn’t that people think she’s a man - parts of her are masculine and she does feel and look like a man sometimes - the problem is that people make a large to-do over her gender, making a point to choose one or the other, calling it out in public and trying to make themselves feel better while making her feel worse.

The situation could be made easier on everyone if people would simply use gender-neutral language when dealing with strangers.