Using they/them as a catch-all for trans people, rather than learning each person's actual pronouns, is a form of cis-centred mistreatment, even when it comes from allies. It signals that someone's individual identity matters less than an ally's comfort. The fix is simple: ask, listen, and use the pronouns someone actually uses for themselves.
What does cis-centred mistreatment actually mean?
We talk a lot about mistreatment that comes from hostility: the deliberate misgendering, the slurs, the refusals. That is its own conversation, and an important one. But there is another kind of mistreatment that is harder to name precisely because it arrives wrapped in good intentions. Cis-centred mistreatment is when the feelings, the comfort, or the convenience of the cisgender person shapes how a trans person is treated, even by someone who thinks of themselves as supportive.
The they/them default is one of the clearest examples of it. A cis ally learns that pronouns matter, decides they want to be respectful, and lands on they/them as the obviously inclusive choice. They feel good about this. They are signalling awareness. They are trying. And for some trans people, specifically those who use they/them, that default is absolutely correct. But for a trans woman, being called they rather than she is still misgendering. For a trans man, they rather than he is still misgendering. The form changed; the effect did not.
Why do allies reach for they/them as a default?
It is worth being curious about this rather than just frustrated by it, because understanding the impulse is part of addressing it. Several things are usually happening at once.
First, people conflate non-binary identity with trans identity as a category. Non-binary people are trans, yes, and many use they/them. But not all trans people are non-binary, and the majority of trans people use binary pronouns: she/her or he/him. Somewhere along the way, a genuine effort to include non-binary people became a template applied to all trans people, which is its own form of erasure.
Second, asking feels risky. The ally worries they will get it wrong, look ignorant, cause offence. They/them feels like a hedge, a way to demonstrate awareness without exposing themselves to the discomfort of a direct question. What they have not reckoned with is that the hedge has its own cost, and that cost is paid by the trans person, not the ally.
Third, some people genuinely do not know that trans identity and pronoun use are individual. If the only model of trans experience they have encountered centres on they/them as the progressive default, they are working with incomplete information. That is fixable, and it is why conversations like this one matter.
Why does the impact outweigh the intention?
I have heard so many versions of this story from trans people over the years. Someone in a new workplace, a new school, a new friendship group, finds that the people who are loudest about being allies are addressing them with they/them pronouns. On the surface it looks like inclusion. In practice it feels profoundly othering, because what it says is: I know you are trans, and I have decided what that means for you, without asking.
The message underneath the well-meaning pronoun is that the trans person's specific identity is secondary to the ally's performance of inclusivity. It centres the ally's knowledge, the ally's comfort, the ally's effort. The trans person becomes the occasion for the allyship rather than the person the allyship is for.
And it compounds. Every time someone defaults to they/them without asking, the trans person has a choice: correct it and risk seeming ungrateful to someone who is trying, or let it go and continue being misgendered. Neither of those is a fair position to be in. The fact that the misgendering comes from someone who means well does not make it easier to navigate; sometimes it makes it harder.
What does asking actually look like?
The simplest version is so straightforward it barely warrants a paragraph: "What pronouns do you use?" That is it. It is not a clinical interrogation. It is the same kind of question as asking how someone takes their coffee, once you know, you just remember.
Some people prefer to offer their own pronouns first: "I use she/her, what about you?" That approach works well because it frames the exchange as mutual rather than placing the trans person under scrutiny. It normalises the conversation rather than making it a special procedure reserved for people who seem trans.
And this is worth saying explicitly: asking about pronouns is not exclusively a question for people who look trans, or who have disclosed a trans identity. Workplaces and schools that normalise pronoun introductions across the board remove the burden from any one person, because the question becomes structural rather than personal. The trans person is no longer singled out. Everyone is asked, everyone answers, and the information is used.
What if you get it wrong?
You will, sometimes. Everyone does. A slip, a moment of autopilot, a brain that has not caught up with new information, these are human things. What matters is how you handle it.
A brief, direct correction followed by moving on is all that is needed: "Sorry, she, I meant she." No lengthy apology, no visible distress, no turning the moment into something the trans person now has to manage for your sake. The over-elaborate apology that requires the trans person to reassure the ally is another form of cis-centred harm, because it makes the ally's feelings the subject of the moment rather than the correction itself.
The goal is not to be perfect from day one. The goal is to care enough to ask, to listen carefully when told, and to correct without drama when it goes wrong. That is what genuine allyship looks like in practice.
The difference between including someone and actually seeing them
There is a version of allyship that is more about the ally than the person they are supporting. It uses inclusive language as a credential, a way to signal belonging to the right side of a cultural moment. That version will often reach for the easiest, most visible gesture, and they/them as a universal default is exactly that: visible, plausible, low-effort, and still wrong when it is not what the person actually uses.
Seeing someone means doing the individual work. It means asking a specific person a specific question and carrying the answer forward. It means not grouping all trans people into a single pronoun because that is simpler than treating them as individuals with distinct identities. It means understanding that trans women are women and trans men are men, and that insisting on they/them for everyone is not inclusive of them, it is a quiet erasure of their gender.
People tell me that what they most want from the people around them is not elaborate gestures or public declarations of solidarity. It is to be called by the right name, in the right pronouns, without making a performance of it. That is the bar. It is not a high bar. It just requires paying attention to the actual person in front of you.
If this is something you are navigating
If you are a trans person dealing with this, the frustration is entirely reasonable. Being misgendered by people who think they are helping is a specific and exhausting kind of invisible harm, and you are not obliged to receive it gratefully. If you have the energy and the safety to correct it, do. If you do not, that is also a legitimate choice, and it does not mean you are letting it go because it does not matter.
If you are an ally reading this and recognising yourself in some of it, the response is not self-punishment. It is the adjustment: ask, use what you are told, and do it consistently. That matters far more than any prior slip.
And if you are in a workplace, a school, or any institution thinking about how to build structures that actually serve trans people rather than the people performing allyship at them, start with the question. Normalise it across the board. Build it into introductions, into onboarding, into the everyday texture of how people meet each other. That is how the burden shifts from the individual trans person to the systems around them, which is where it belongs.
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