- Username
- val ʚĭɞ
- Date posted
- 4y ago
I’m not trans but some of my best friends are, so I can speak from what they’ve told me. Basically, if you mess up someone’s pronouns, what you’re supposed to do is apologize, correct yourself, and then move on. I know with ocd we often have a tendency to want to confess, or to apologize over and over, but that not only is harmful to you because it’s a compulsion, but it also makes the person you misgendered feel uncomfortable. I will often though, to avoid misgendering someone, practice using their pronouns by myself in private. Don’t let that become a compulsion though.
i apologized and i’m more calmed down now. i just felt really guilty.. like it was really unexpected and it happened so fast and i just didn’t know how to react. i didn’t know they were trans until today and i literally went down a spiral.
@val ʚĭɞ Glad you’ve calmed down some. I’d say what’s happened happened, and just treat your friend the same way you’ve always treated him. He’s the same person now as he was before you knew he was a boy.
i cant breathe and i can’t stop shaking someone please
ugh i’ve never felt so horrible someone please
Exactly what Nikki said. My sibling transitioned a decade ago and we still slip up occasionally and misgender or use his dead name if we are talking about the past/childhood etc, even though we DO think of him as male. I've never known someone to be mortally offended by it, especially if you didn't know they were trans at all in the first place it's extremely understandable. We all just want respect and acceptance for our identities and you haven't disrespected that at all, you recognise and respect their identity now that you know about it and I'm sure they get that. Ambiguous gender presentation causes this situation all the time, every trans person knows that it can take people time to adjust to the change both in words and the mental image of them in your mind. You can survive feeling guilty until it just goes away again by itself (as it's supposed to), you don't need to dwell on or punish yourself for an innocent mistake. You also don't need to obsess and make yourself ill about being certain that you never do it again, either. We all slip up. It's fine to slip up. We can't get everything right all the time, and we can all survive it when we make a mistake. The only offensive thing would be doing it deliberately to hurt their feelings or out of 'disagreeing' about their identity.
thank you for this. we talked today and we got over it:) he thought i knew that he was trans but i didn’t so we laughed it off. i’ll learn from this and maybe apply it in a nearby future!
it is fine u already know ur "mistake", u didn't know he was a boy.
i just feel so bad.. i really didn’t mean it at all. i was just making sure about his pronouns.. ugh.
@val ʚĭɞ it's okay to make mistakes as long as we learn from them, try to not feel guilty ik your mind will be punishing you but tell yourself that you recognize that mistake and u learned from it
I said something stupid and insensitive earlier. I didn’t mean to offend but realized it came off that way. Now I’m feeling guilty and ashamed of myself. I’m sorry.
i keep accidentally looking at peoples private parts and i don’t mean to but i just happen to glance and i hate it because i feel like i make them uncomfortable. like yesterday my friend was talking about how her shirt made her uncomfortable because it was low on her chest and i glanced down there and i feel so bad cus i made her even more uncomfortable than she was before. i naturally keep my eyes to the floor but sometimes my end up on someone’s butt and i have to look up and tell myself how horrible of a person i am that i did that.
I'm worried that I, purposefully or not idk, used my bad mental health to make my friend have a bad night and worry about me because I feel like they don't care about me anymore. I feel awful. I hate myself.
Share your thoughts so the Community can respond