When Erie City Councilman Ed Brzezinski called Council President Tyler Titus "ma'am" during a June 9 meeting, he may have thought it was a small thing. The people of Erie did not.

Dozens of residents packed the Bagnoni Council Chambers at City Hall on June 17 for what became more than four hours of public comment. They came to say, clearly and at length, that what happened was not acceptable. Many called on Brzezinski to apologise. Others called on him to resign. And their council president, Tyler Titus, who is openly transgender and uses they/them pronouns, sat through all of it.

A trans elected official, doing their job, having to listen to hours of testimony about the harm done to them by a colleague who then sat in silence — that takes a particular kind of steadiness.

Was it deliberate?

The question that keeps coming up around misgendering is always the same: was it a mistake, or was it intentional? Rie Witherow, who also uses they/them pronouns and spoke at the meeting, addressed this directly. They said they are misgendered daily, and they consider most of those incidents simple mistakes. They did not consider this one to be in that category. "Let us be clear," Witherow said, "this was a deliberate act of disrespect and intent to harm a trans member of our community."

Titus and the Erie County Democratic Party have both described the June 9 comment as deliberate. Brzezinski has not publicly contradicted that characterisation. At the June 17 meeting, he said almost nothing. When his turn came during committee reports, he mentioned an upcoming meeting. "That's it. Thank you," he said, and that was all.

Silence, in this context, is its own kind of answer.

Why this is not a politeness question

I hear, sometimes, a version of this argument: using the wrong pronouns is just a matter of manners, and people should not be forced to use language they disagree with. I understand why that framing circulates, but it is wrong, and it is worth saying why.

Using someone's correct pronouns is not about politeness. It is about whether you recognise the person in front of you as real. When you misgender someone, you are not just being rude, you are telling them that your opinion of who they are matters more than who they actually are. When that person holds elected office and you are their colleague on a public body, you are also making a statement about whether they belong there at all.

Savannah Wilson put it plainly at the meeting: "The actions last meeting is permission for discrimination." That is exactly right. Public officials set a tone. What they do at the dais is watched, recorded, and repeated. When a colleague misgenders an elected trans official and faces no formal consequence, it tells every trans person in that city something about their standing.

What the people of Erie showed

Here is what I find genuinely moving about this story. It did not happen in a major coastal city with a large and visible LGBTQ+ infrastructure. It happened in Erie, Pennsylvania, a mid-sized city on Lake Erie, and the community turned out in force. Three hours of public comment. Dozens of speakers. People showing up on a Tuesday evening because they thought it mattered.

That is not nothing, but a community deciding that the dignity of a trans person in public life is worth their time. And that community includes people who are themselves trans and know exactly what it costs to be misgendered by someone with power, and people who are not trans and showed up anyway.

Councilwoman Jasmine Flores, for her part, explained from the dais why other council members had not intervened in the moment on June 9: Titus, as president, had called for order, and interrupting would have undermined Titus's authority. That is a reasonable procedural point, and it suggests that Titus's colleagues were not indifferent, only constrained by how the rules work.

What Tyler Titus said

At the end of the June 17 meeting, Titus spoke. The words are worth quoting in full, because they are remarkable.

"Healing does not happen by pretending harm did not occur. Healing happens when we tell the truth about what happened, we take responsibility for our role in it, and we commit ourselves to building a better city. That is my hope for this council, that is my hope for this city, and despite everything that hope remains stronger than my anger."

I have read a lot of public statements in my years working in this field, and that is one of the best I have encountered. It is not naive. It does not minimise what happened. It names the harm and it names the condition for healing, which is truth and accountability. And then it refuses to let anger be the final word.

That kind of moral clarity, from someone who has just spent weeks being the subject of a public controversy they did not start, is extraordinary. Erie is lucky to have Tyler Titus.

As for Brzezinski: Pennsylvania law does not allow an elected official to be removed simply for making comments others find hateful, and I am not here to argue about whether recall mechanisms should be different. What I will say is that the absence of an apology is a choice, and the people of Erie were right to name it as one.