Quote Originally Posted by Lycunadari View Post
That said, not understanding gender doesn't make you a bigot, and not understanding why people care about it doesn't either, not automatically. I'm not "soccer-phobic" just because I don't get how people can care so much about sports. What matters is how you treat people- do you use the name and pronouns they tell you to use, including those a lot of people see as weird (like neopronouns)? Do you support trans people's right to self-determination and their right to transition? Do you treat trans people with the same respect you treat cis people? If you can answer yes to all of these questions, you're probably not transphobic. In essence- you don't need to understand us to support us.
This hits the nail on the head. There are people who are in places that I do not understand with regards to gender, but my understanding of what it means to them is not required; only my respect and understanding. Do neopronouns sound silly to me? Yes, I'm not a fan, for purely structural and linguistic reasons, but if someone tells me "my pronouns are ze/zir" then hey, all right, those are your pronouns. It doesn't have to make sense to me, because it's not about me. It's about the other person and what matters to them, and whether your default assumption is "I will respect what you tell me to call you and how you want to be known" or "you can be one of the following things because those make sense to me, and anything else is fake."

My personal default assumption about everything is I might be wrong. Something may not make sense to me or seem silly to me, but 20-year-old me thought that she was in the last long-term relationship she was ever going to be in and that she had her whole life planned out right down to adopting children. Neither of those things were accurate or played out the way she thought. 20-year-old me even thought she knew who she was attracted to without any doubt, and that was wrong. If I can be wrong about me, I should give everyone else the same benefit of the doubt.