Ben would you mind then being called she/her then if that is so silly? I'm a hetero woman and I've been called a male few times when gaming and this is not silly, people are rejecting your identity and I can't even imagine how bad this is for trans/NB people.
I run a product/community of teenage game developers. The girls in my community do not want to reveal that they are girls, probably because they do not want to stand out. So basically everyone thinks it's full of boys (especially the boys), but in reality 50% are girls. So it definitely depends on the person and circumstances how they want to be perceived.
With European names, I also saw plenty of times when wrong genders were assumed, but those things shouldn't be taken as malice. It would be weird for an adult to use that a a means for insult, so why not assume it's an honest mistake?
But that's their choice. It was used as an insult in a pretty straight forward way (I was there you know?) and I didn't mean honest mistake of guessing wrongly based on name or nickname. I have experience being told that I can not be a woman because women don't play wow on fridays.. yea or because I'm a programmer. This even wasn't a one time incident.
The same insult doesn't really work on men in that same setting, since we're not really a minority. So we're more armed against someone calling us "she".
But I can imagine it's hard to have to justify yourself every time for being a woman. Yeah that sucks, a lot of jerks out there and not much to do about it.
Some people are. There are people who intentionally use the wrong pronoun, exactly because they reject someone's transgender identity. We cis-gendered people may not notice this, but to transgender people, it is every-day reality to be confronted with someone who insists on denying their identity. Consider the stupid bathroom bills in a couple of US states for example.
So against that background, it's entirely understandable that they react more emotionally also to accidental mistakes. That doesn't mean overreaction is a good idea, but it's a backlash against a long history of having their identity denied. If we don't like the backlash, maybe we should work harder to address the original hatred that it's reacting to.
I don't think the pronoun movement is about people using the wrong gender by mistake, and that's definitely not "rejecting your identity".
I'm male, and sometimes people outside my native country misread my name and read it as the feminine version of it. I've answered phone calls and gone to appointments where people were actually expecting a woman, not a fully grown man. That's people being silly, not rejecting my identity.
But I don't want any part in this discussion, like the OP in the article, I'll keep using "they" to refer to people on the internet.
