just a quick note- no trans person has ever said “did you just assume my gender.” trans people are very aware of how their gender and physical appearance differ and that visually one might assume that they are a man/woman when they are actually not. that’s kind of the whole idea of gender dysphoria.
and also you’ve beaten your “attack helicopter” joke into the fucking ground. cut that shit out.
i wanted to add one more thing to this post that other people have pointed out: i know its an awkward question, but a lot of trans people are going to be 100% fine with you asking what their gender is, or with calmly correcting you if you get it wrong. and if they’re not, then they’re way more likely to keep it to themselves than get visibly angry with someone. this idea that trans people just go apeshit when people misgender them accidentally/when first meeting them is a complete fabrication for a stupid joke and that’s why i despise it so much.
I can’t afford to get visibly angry about people misgendering me because that puts me in danger of getting harmed. once a cis person finds out my gender, one of two things will happen: they either accept me to various degrees, or they reject me and potentially escalate the situation. politeness is the only way I can decrease the risk of the latter.
the “DID YOU ASSUME MY GENDER?!” trope only serves to make trans people look ridiculous/unreasonable in the eyes of cis people, and places in their minds preconceptions about us that makes it harder, ultimately, for us to come out safely. if all they know about trans people are shitty jokes, then we as a people become those jokes to them.
the scooby doo animated film renaissance (around 1998 to 2001) in which zombie island, alien invaders, witches ghost, and cyber chase came out was literally an iconic era in animation history… the disney renaissance whom??
Sometimes I think about the future of self driving cars and how everyone I talk to about that future is like “okay but in an emergency we’ll be able to take back manual control, right?” and I usually placate them by saying, yeah, that’s totally how it’ll happen, but actually we’re already seeing the opposite. Cars with “self driving” features like steering and breaking that kick in and take control from the driver if the driver is about to rear end someone or is in a dangerous situation because the truth is computers can think faster and have better reflexes than us and I think about this going into the future and how if the self-driving cars are able to share their data with each other and learn from the driving experiences of every car on the road soon we’ll have cars that are so massively experienced at driving and avoiding accidents and making microsecond decisions and partial degree turns of the wheels and being so damn precise that automobile accidents will be almost unheard of and that’s when we’ll develop the most wasteful hilarious extreme sport in history where a single human driver will go up against an arena of ultra smart self driving cars and just by driving around recklessly try to coral them into crashing into each other and I tell you I would watch that sport all day.
