Thread by @AlexandraErin

Yeah, to the second point here: I believe that to a transphobic, cis-centric society, *not* gendering people at every available turn reads as a security threat, because they're insecure if people around them aren't being gender-marked.

https://twitter.com/jeymccreight/status/1479560777724051457

In the past when I talked online about taking gender markers off airline tickets I had people -- who clearly had never given the matter a second's thought -- immediately declare that this would make flight less safe by making it harder to know who is flying.

And it's like... our tickets are already tied to a unique identifying number on our government-issued photo IDs. There's not someone out there with my legal name, my number, and a different gender. So where's the safety risk?

And for that matter, even if there *was* such a person, for it to matter we'd have to have a terrorist plot that we're both in on but that depends on us switching places for a flight.

https://twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1479571129194983424

But it made me think of back in the 90s, in a Geocities chatroom, there was somebody who refused to use gender pronouns or answer questions about their gender on the grounds that text chat made it irrelevant.

And some people absolutely couldn't handle this.

The conversations would go like:

"Please just tell me M or F, I need to know how to talk to you."

"Like a person."

"But I need to know who I'm talking to."

"Who isn't a gender."

"BUT I DON'T KNOW WHO YOU ARE."

"It's a chatroom. You don't know who anyone is."

And the thing is I referred to this as a function of cis-normativity up top, but I think it is inextricably tied up with hetero-normativity and homophobia (which, I mean, is par for course), because the root of I Must Know Your Gender is the idea that Man + Woman = Man Gets Sex.

The actual root reason at the heart of transphobia is that if people resist categorization, if people can be sorted into one category and go, "Um, Actually..." then that calls into question the whole system of sorting.

And if there is not a super concrete, super official, super objective, and super permanent way to sort people into two distinct and separate piles marked Man and Woman... then you have to be prepared to relate to anybody as a person, at any time.