this right here. Asking them to restate themselves forces them to recognize me as me and stop misgendering me.

And I know people don't like being asked to restate themselves... but you'll learn about me real quick, I have trans comfort and safety prioritized far above cis comfort and feelings.

It's easy for cis people to look past my pronouns as weird and stupid. I mean I've gotten to the point where I accept they although I really don't like it and it makes me feel weird and uncomfortable because sometimes it's easier to have the singular they fight than it is to have the made up pronouns fight. but i mean it's really easy for people to ignore me when I say "please use zay/zir/zirs/zirself, fie/fire/fires/fireself, or zyd/zys/zydself pronouns for me." 1. because unless they've been taught before they usually have no idea what that is so they just move over the information and 2. because they're odd and the first times you use them without practice, they're awkward.

It's easy in conversation for cis people to just pretend I don't have alternate pronouns and just use feminine ones. I look feminine, my voice is feminine, my actions feel feminine because many of them knew me as a girl beforehand and those that didn't usually forgot or ignored my talk of my gender when I fist met them. And then when I correct them, it's easy for them to not acknowledge that correction has happened and to move on without a thought about me, my gender, and my pronouns. So I have to break how easy it is. There's a beautiful chapter from the book about cis gender politics called "Untying the Gender Knot" about social change... and it talks about the idea of the "paths of least resistance." We're all taught paths of least resistance to take in social situations. These paths maintain and sometimes create inequality. And it is the job of the social activist to try to break these paths when they can. It's uncomfortable and scary and it makes others uncomfortable. But breaking these paths is necessary for social change of any scale. So I break the paths in my life by asking people to restate so that respect of trans identities, and more specifically, respect of me, gets handled in that moment. Because if not, they'll never practice, they'll never acknowledge, and they'll get to go on living and pretending like I'm cis when I'm not.