Practicing is actually super useful. I remember that I kept slipping up when I first knew someone who used they/them pronouns. They didn’t hold it against me, because I was at least trying to get it right (unfortunately many people who misgendered them weren’t receptive to being corrected). A different friend suggested the idea of finding a passage of fiction and reading it out, using the name and pronouns of the person I’m practicing the pronouns for. It really helped to begin to unravel the instinctual binary classification that I had been raised to think of as essential
I thought it was really easy to use the right pronouns, then my older sibling came out as non-binary. It’s really hard to overcome an entire lifetime of practice.
Practicing is actually super useful. I remember that I kept slipping up when I first knew someone who used they/them pronouns. They didn’t hold it against me, because I was at least trying to get it right (unfortunately many people who misgendered them weren’t receptive to being corrected). A different friend suggested the idea of finding a passage of fiction and reading it out, using the name and pronouns of the person I’m practicing the pronouns for. It really helped to begin to unravel the instinctual binary classification that I had been raised to think of as essential
I can usually get it consistently with about two minutes of recontextualizing.
I thought it was really easy to use the right pronouns, then my older sibling came out as non-binary. It’s really hard to overcome an entire lifetime of practice.
A large portion of my misgendering mistakes happen when I’m taking to a pet about enby people. Brains are weird.
Probably takes more than two minutes for a sibling, yes.