Chris

Or maybe you have a tendency to accept things uncritically that ought to be questioned and not taken at face value.

There is a world of difference between being polite to someone on the one hand, and on the other, accepting without evidence or debate, that the whole basis on which we understand human existence has changed. The actor Yasmin Finney is a biological male who has ‘transitioned’ - apparently with the help of hormones and possibly surgery, I don’t know - and for all I know has had that change legally recognised as well. You’re right, it would be needlessly antagonistic and rude to find out the name on Yasmin’s birth certificate and use it instead of ‘Yasmin’. I’d never do that and I doubt many people would.

However, if I were in a group chat including her, and referred to her as ‘she’ while talking to someone else in the chat, I’d bet real money that she wouldn’t object to my using female pronouns in reference to her, without having explicitly checked that with her first - even though, in the Doctor Who scene I referred to above, that is exactly what RTD postulated via a line of dialogue given to the character, Rose Noble.

The problem we have as a society is that thus far, the trans lobby’s ‘no debate’ strategy has only really been deployed in the sorts of liberal circles where their cause was always likely to be accepted as a progressive one without much critical analysis. We are however at the point where people with well grounded, competing philosophies of human existence are going to start asking where such heinous crimes as ‘misgendering’ have sprung from, and why, in a supposedly open, liberal democracy, something so fundamental as this should be off limits for proper debate.