What is misgendering? Everything you need to know

What is misgendering and does it happen?

Misgendering is a daily occurrence for some and for others an experience that has never happened to them, nor something they would even consider happening.

We use gendered language in most of our daily conversations. We take one look at someone, hear a voice, or even see a name spelled out, and we jump to a conclusion of who they are and put them into one of two boxes, ‘male’ or ‘female’.

This assumption then plays out with gendered pronouns, titles, and words such as ‘love’, ‘mate’, and even ‘pet’, depending on where you are from.

People who experience being misgendered are commonly those from the trans, non-binary, and gender-fluid communities.

But cisgender people (those who identify with their assigned sex at birth) can also experience being misgendered because others think that they don’t look and ‘fit’ in the ‘right’ gendered box. For example, a woman having short hair or a man with long hair.

What impact does misgendering have?

Being misgendered creates a cocktail of emotions from embarrassment, sadness that it happened another time, anger at society that we can only be two things, and sometimes scared for your safety in case the other person gets defensive or doesn’t accept you.

This mixture of emotions you can feel in a split second is exhausting and upsetting. You can imagine if this is something you are experiencing daily, it really takes its toll on a person’s confidence and self-worth.

No matter the scenario of being misgendered, the emotions are the same. Inevitably you sometimes wish there was a James Bond eject button to catapult you out of the supermarket or a large hole you wish your desk chair could fall into.

The use of masks during the pandemic means many people have experienced an increase of being misgendered as people make assumptions of someone from their voice, hair, clothes.

I write this after being misgendered as a lady approximately 15 times in one interaction in a shop last weekend, all because there wasn’t a price on a plant pot I wanted to buy.

The misgendering went a bit like this, ‘This lady can’t find the price…. This lady needs to leave soon… can you sort this for the lady’. One simple way to avoid this was to call me a customer. I only picture ‘ladies’ as those in big puffy dresses spinning around a ballroom in TV dramas, not me in a garden centre.

In a society educated and therefore programmed to use he and she, this is 99% of the populations go to everyday language and pronoun use.

So many people misgender someone unintentionally, but this is still misgendering. But once a person knows someone’s pronouns, and decides not to use them, they are intentionally misgendering on purpose which is discrimination.

This can cause a lot of harm. If this occurred in relation to a trans or non-binary person, this would be transphobia which is defined as a ‘dislike or prejudice against trans people’.

Having someone either purposefully or accidentally misgender you can make you feel invisible and othered.

And although this blog today is covering the topic of misgendering, it’s important to remember that this is only one of the many barriers and stigmas the trans and non-binary community face. But it’s a relentless barrier due to the frequency of communications from buying a coffee, going to the doctors, and joining meetings at work.

Due to this frequency of usage, research shows this leads to social-psychological outcomes from hostility, guilt, and anxiety. Research shows that out of all young people, those that don’t identify with their assigned sex at birth, have among the highest rates of suicide, depression, and self-harm.

This significantly reduces when they are in a supportive and safe space, which includes the correct use of their pronouns.