Gender, Pronouns and Transgender People: A Beginner’s Guide

Before we get into it, a video recommendation. If all this gender stuff makes you angry, if you’re sceptical, or if you’re simply interested in hearing another perspective, I highly recommend ContraPoints’ video Gender Critical. She’s funny, thoughtful and wonderfully articulate, and I think it’s a brilliant watch no matter where you’re coming from. If you’d prefer to start with the basics, keep reading.

Transgender, non-binary, cisgender, pronouns… What does it all mean? A friendly, straightforward introduction to understanding gender.

There’s been a lot of conversation about gender in recent years, and now I am here to bring it front and centre as well.

You might have heard words like transgender, trans, non-binary, cisgender and gender identity. You might have noticed people introducing themselves with their pronouns, or wondered why someone you used to know as a woman now identifies as a man.

For many people, gender is something they’ve never really needed to think about. You’re born a boy or a girl, you grow up to be a man or a woman, and that’s that. So when other people start talking about gender as something separate from biological sex, it might seem strange or unnecessarily complicated.

And that’s understandable!

But not everybody experiences their gender in the same way.

I’ve written this guide for people who are curious, confused, or simply haven’t encountered much information about transgender people before. You don’t need to know any special terminology, and there’s no such thing as a silly question when you’re genuinely trying to learn.

Let’s start with the basics.

First, what is gender?

Most of us grew up with a fairly simple understanding of gender: people are either boys or girls, men or women, and which one you are depends on the body you’re born with.

But there are actually a few different concepts that often get lumped together.

Gender identity is someone’s internal sense of themselves as a man, a woman, both, neither, or something else. Think of yourself, what gender are you? If you are cisgender this will feel quite automatic – “well I’m a man, obviously!”. That’s it, that is your gender identity. It’s more than just looking at your own crotch and deciding. There is a feeling that accompanies it. If you were to wake up in a different body, like in a body swap movie, you wouldn’t automatically lose that feeling. Your “you-ness” has a sort of feeling to you, and for most people that feeling fits within the box of “man” or “woman”.

Gender expression is how someone presents themselves to the world, through things like clothing, hairstyle, mannerisms and appearance. If you are gender conforming then you present yourself in a way that is typical to today’s standards, expectations and stereotypes for your gender. If you are Gender non-conforming, you are pushing against that grain. One easy to reach example of gender non-conforming is a butch lesbian woman. They will dress and perhaps act in ways typically associated with masculinity, while remaining a woman.

Biological sex involves physical characteristics including reproductive anatomy, hormones and chromosomes. When you’re born, a doctor generally records you as male or female based on visible anatomy. That’s what we mean by sex assigned at birth. It’s not a determination of your gender identity. Most of the time this classification is straightforward, but biological sex is more complicated than a quick glance at someone’s genitals. There are also naturally occurring intersex variations, where someone’s sex characteristics don’t fit typical definitions of male or female bodies. And regardless of what the doctor sees between your legs, they can’t know your internal sense of gender at birth. It’s simply too soon to tell.

For most people, their gender identity aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth. Their gender expression is another story. Plenty of people don’t fit traditional expectations of how a man or woman should look or behave, and that doesn’t automatically make them transgender.

A man might enjoy wearing dresses without considering himself a woman. A woman might have a masculine appearance but feel completely comfortable identifying as a woman. These are instances of being gender non-conforming.

But another experience of gender is when your felt sense of your gender identity is not aligned with your biological sex. This is referred to as being transgender.

These are different experiences, and understanding the distinction is important.

What does transgender mean?

A transgender person, or trans person, is someone whose gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth.

A trans woman is a woman who was assigned male at birth. A trans man is a man who was assigned female at birth. The words woman and man tell you who the person is, not what they were called when they were born.

You might also see the abbreviations AFAB (Assigned Female At Birth) and AMAB (Assigned Male At Birth). These describe a person’s birth classification, not necessarily their gender today.

Yes, trans men exist

A lot of people have heard of trans women but hardly ever hear about trans men. Some even assume that a trans man means someone who was born male and is transitioning to be a woman. That’s a trans woman. A trans man is the other way around: he was assigned female at birth, usually with anatomy such as a vulva, and he is a man.

Some trans men take testosterone, have surgery, change their name or pronouns, or make other changes to live more comfortably as men. Others don’t pursue medical transition. There’s no required set of steps, and no particular body a trans man has to have.

Trans men also tend to receive less attention in public conversations about transgender people, which can make them seem almost invisible. And here’s something you might not have considered: you may have met trans men without realising they were trans.

Some trans people live stealth, meaning they go about their lives as their gender without routinely telling people about their trans history. A trans man might simply be known to everyone around him as a man. Especially after changes from testosterone, such as a deeper voice or facial hair, someone might have no reason to guess he was assigned female at birth. When other people recognise someone as their gender, that’s often called passing.

Trans women can live stealth too. Keeping your trans history private isn’t about deceiving anyone: it might be about safety, privacy, comfort, or simply not wanting your gender history to be everyone’s business. And passing isn’t a measure of how valid someone’s gender is.

So if you think you’ve never met a trans man, or a trans woman for that matter, you might simply never have known. You can’t reliably tell someone’s history by looking at them.

Does being transgender mean having surgery?

Not at all.

Some transgender people choose to undergo medical treatments, such as hormone therapy or gender-affirming surgery, to help their bodies better align with their gender identities.

Others don’t.

Some people transition socially, changing their name, pronouns, clothing or presentation. Some pursue medical changes as well, and some make no outward changes at all. Some trans people aren’t comfortable or safe being open about their gender and continue presenting in ways the world expects. So when you look around, you can’t necessarily tell who is transgender. Surveys can estimate how many people identify as trans, but that doesn’t mean everybody feels safe or ready to say so.

There are all sorts of reasons someone might or might not pursue medical transition, including personal preference, health, finances and access to healthcare.

A person doesn’t need to have surgery, take hormones, or look a particular way to be transgender.

What about gender dysphoria?

Gender dysphoria describes distress that can occur when someone’s physical characteristics or the way they’re perceived by others don’t align with their gender identity. Cisgender people may recognise a little of that discomfort in experiences where their body or appearance doesn’t match how they want to be seen as a man or woman. Breast implants, hair transplants, chest reductions and similar changes can sometimes be about feeling more at home in your own body. That isn’t necessarily the same thing as clinical gender dysphoria, but it’s one way of relating to how important that sense of alignment can be.

For some transgender people, this distress can be significant. For others, it might be mild, occasional or absent altogether.

There’s also something called gender euphoria, which describes the happiness, comfort or sense of rightness someone might experience when their body, appearance or social interactions affirm their gender. Again, this isn’t a feeling that’s completely foreign to cisgender people. If you’re a man who’s ever felt particularly masculine after lifting something heavy or catching a big fish, you might recognise a little of that feeling. Of course, lifting heavy things or catching fish doesn’t make anyone a man. I’m talking about the satisfaction of feeling affirmed in your gender, not about passing some imaginary test of masculinity.

Not all transgender people experience gender dysphoria, and experiencing distress isn’t a requirement for being transgender.

What does cisgender mean?

You might have heard the word cisgender and wondered what it means. You might even have heard people object to being called cisgender, a cis man or a cis woman.

But it’s actually a very simple concept.

Cisgender is simply a word for someone whose gender identity aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth. And it’s not a slur.

If you were classified as female at birth, you’ve grown up considering yourself a girl or woman, and that’s always felt right to you, you’re probably cisgender.

If you were classified as male at birth, you’ve always considered yourself a boy or man, and you’ve never had any reason to question that, you’re probably cisgender too.

That’s it!

Where does the word cisgender come from?

The prefixes cis- and trans- come from Latin.

• Cis means “on this side of”.
• Trans means “across” or “on the other side of”.

These prefixes have been used in science, geography and other fields for a very long time.

You might recognise trans- from words like transatlantic, meaning across the Atlantic Ocean, or transcontinental, meaning across a continent.

In chemistry, cis and trans are used to describe different arrangements of atoms in molecules.

When we talk about gender, we’re using those same prefixes to distinguish between two experiences.

Transgender describes someone whose gender differs from the sex they were assigned at birth.

Cisgender describes someone whose gender aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth.

Neither word is inherently positive or negative. They’re simply descriptions.

But I’m not cisgender! I’m just a man or a woman!

That’s a reaction I’ve heard before, and I think it’s worth exploring.

For most cisgender people, their gender is something they’ve never needed to think particularly hard about.

You were born, people called you a boy or a girl, you grew up, and that description continued to feel right.

You might not even think of yourself as having a gender identity. You’re simply you.

When you hear other people talking about their gender identity, you might find the entire conversation strange.

Why are people thinking about this so much? Why does it need a label? Isn’t your gender just whatever sex you were born?

If that’s your experience, there’s a good chance you’re cisgender.

And your experience is real, normal, and extremely common. Most people are cisgender. For a bit of perspective, experimental estimates published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in December 2024 suggest around 0.9% of Australians aged 16 and over are transgender or gender diverse, based on 2022 data. That’s a small percentage, but still a lot of people.

But here’s the important part: your experience isn’t universal.

For some people, the gender they were assigned at birth doesn’t feel right. It might feel uncomfortable, inaccurate, alienating, or simply not reflective of who they know themselves to be.

That’s not an experience you necessarily share, and it might be difficult for you to imagine.

But the fact that you’ve never experienced something doesn’t mean nobody else has, just like not everyone thinks coriander tastes like soap.

In fact, one reason you might find the concept of gender identity so puzzling is that your own gender identity has always aligned so comfortably with the way the world sees you that you’ve never had to consciously examine it.

That’s not a bad thing. It’s simply a different experience.

Why can’t we just say normal instead of cisgender?

Because transgender people aren’t abnormal.

Being cisgender is certainly more common, but common and normal aren’t quite the same thing, particularly when we’re using normal to imply that other people are somehow wrong.

We have words for heterosexual and homosexual people, for example. We don’t need to call one group “normal people” and the other “gay people”.

Similarly, having a word for cisgender people means we can talk about the different ways people experience gender without positioning one group as the default and everyone else as an exception.

It’s simply useful language.

Is cisgender an insult?

No. Cisgender isn’t inherently insulting, any more than heterosexual, left-handed or Australian is inherently insulting.

It’s a descriptive term, not a judgement about your character, beliefs or politics.

Of course, any word can be used rudely, and some people have encountered cis primarily in arguments online. That can understandably influence how they feel about it.

But the word itself doesn’t imply that there’s anything wrong with being cisgender.

It doesn’t mean you’re ignorant, that your life has been easy, or that you’re personally responsible for anyone else’s difficulties.

It just describes your relationship with your gender.

You don’t have to start introducing yourself as a cis man or cis woman. In everyday conversation, man or woman is perfectly sufficient, and in most everyday conversations, your gender is not relevant at all.

But when we’re having a conversation specifically about gender, it’s useful to have accurate, neutral words for the different experiences we’re discussing.

That’s all cisgender is intended to do.

What about non-binary people?

We’ve traditionally divided gender into two categories: man and woman.

But not everybody experiences their gender as fitting neatly into one of those categories.

Non-binary is an umbrella term for people whose gender identity isn’t exclusively male or female.

Some non-binary people feel somewhere between male and female. Some identify with both, some with neither, and others experience their gender in different ways.

You might also encounter terms like genderfluid, describing someone whose experience of gender changes over time, or agender, describing someone who doesn’t identify with a gender.

Some non-binary people also identify as transgender, while others don’t use that label for themselves.

Being non-binary doesn’t necessarily mean looking androgynous, either.

A non-binary person might look masculine, feminine, androgynous, or any combination of these. They might change their appearance frequently, or they might look exactly the same as they always have.

You can’t reliably determine someone’s gender identity just by looking at them.

And importantly, being non-binary doesn’t mean someone is confused, undecided, or halfway through transitioning.

For many people, it’s simply the most accurate description of who they are.

You might also hear the terms trans masc and transfem (also written trans fem or trans femme). Those different spellings of trans fem all mean the same thing, and you’ll often hear them used about trans women, just as trans masc is often used about trans men. But the terms aren’t exclusive to men and women. A non-binary person can be trans masc, moving towards or identifying more with masculinity without wanting to identify as a man. Or they can be trans fem, moving towards or identifying more with femininity without wanting to identify as a woman. They’re useful ways to describe a direction or experience of gender without necessarily putting yourself in the box of ‘man’ or ‘woman’.

Where do I fit into all of this?

Since I’m the one doing all this explaining, I should probably tell you where I fit into the picture. I identify as non-binary, and I use they/them pronouns. That might surprise you if you’ve known me for a while, or if you’ve seen me looking rather spectacularly feminine. But that’s rather the point of this whole article: what I look like and how I identify aren’t necessarily the same thing.

For me, being non-binary doesn’t mean I need to abandon everything feminine about myself. I can enjoy dresses, lingerie and feeling pretty while still wanting a body that feels more like my own. I’m making some changes as part of my transition, but I’m not swapping one set of compulsory gender rules for another. That would rather defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?

I’ve also written a more personal post, There’s Something I Need to Get Off My Chest, about my transition, what it means to me, and what it might mean for people who already know me.

Isn’t gender just about stereotypes?

This is a reasonable question, and I think it’s an important one.

If women can be masculine and men can be feminine, why do we need different gender identities at all?

The important distinction is that gender identity isn’t the same thing as gender stereotypes or gender expression.

A woman doesn’t become a man because she enjoys football, and a man doesn’t become a woman because he enjoys makeup.

A transgender man isn’t necessarily identifying as a man because he likes traditionally masculine things, just as a transgender woman isn’t necessarily identifying as a woman because she likes traditionally feminine things.

They’re describing their own sense of who they are.

Gender roles are the expectations society places on people. Gender identity is how people understand themselves.

We can challenge traditional gender roles while also respecting people’s gender identities.

In fact, I think everybody benefits when we stop placing such rigid expectations on what men and women are supposed to look like, enjoy, or do with their lives.

How are traditional gender roles hurting us?

The more we talk about gender, the more obvious it becomes that a lot of us have been handed a pretty restrictive set of rules. Men should be strong, stoic, providers, leaders and always in control. Women should be gentle, attractive, nurturing, accommodating and somehow effortlessly good at everything. And if you’re neither of those things, or you’re a mixture of them, apparently you’re doing it wrong.

This is where a little basic feminism comes in. The patriarchy isn’t just a complaint that men have it easy and women have it hard. It’s a way of describing systems and expectations that have historically concentrated power in men’s hands and prescribed narrow roles for everyone. Women are limited by what they’re told they must be, but men also pay a price when they’re taught not to be vulnerable, ask for help, express emotion or step outside the idea of what a ‘real man’ should do. None of us benefits from treating these expectations as laws of nature.

Something I’m particularly invested in is what these rules do to our sex lives. Men are expected to initiate, perform, penetrate and always want sex. Women are expected to be desirable, receptive, accommodating and somehow responsible for everybody feeling good. That’s an awful lot of pressure and not a particularly sexy starting point. Where’s the room for curiosity, for saying no, for changing your mind, or for admitting that what you actually want doesn’t fit the script?

Whether you’re cisgender, transgender or non-binary, you shouldn’t have to squeeze yourself into a particular box to experience pleasure, connection or intimacy. You’re allowed to be assertive or gentle, to lead or follow, to give or receive, and to enjoy what you actually enjoy. None of those things belongs to a particular gender.

I’ve written a longer piece on this called Traditional Gender Roles Are Ruining Your Sex Life, because I have plenty to say about it. And if you’re interested in what happens when we put aside assumptions and get curious about what people genuinely want, you might also enjoy my article on Betty Martin’s Wheel of Consent.

So what’s the deal with pronouns?

Pronouns are words we use instead of people’s names.

We’ve all been using them our entire lives.

For example:

• She/her: “Sarah left her jacket behind. She’ll collect it tomorrow.”
• He/him: “James left his jacket behind. He’ll collect it tomorrow.”
• They/them: “Alex left their jacket behind. They’ll collect it tomorrow.”

Some people use she/her, some use he/him, and others use they/them or different pronouns. Some people are comfortable with more than one set.

You might be wondering whether it’s grammatically correct to use they for one person.

It is!

English speakers have been using singular they for centuries.

Imagine finding a phone on a park bench. You might say, “Someone left their phone here. I hope they come back for it.”

You probably wouldn’t think twice about that sentence.

It’s the same grammatical principle when we’re talking about a specific person.

Why do people put pronouns in their profiles?

You might have noticed people writing things like “she/her” or “they/them” beside their names on social media, email signatures or professional profiles.

This simply tells other people how to refer to them.

It’s particularly useful when someone’s name or appearance doesn’t make their pronouns obvious, or when they’re meeting people online who haven’t met them in person.

Some cisgender people also share their pronouns, which helps make the practice more ordinary and means transgender people aren’t the only ones doing it.

You don’t have to announce your pronouns everywhere you go, but you can if you’d like to.

What if I accidentally use the wrong pronoun?

It happens.

Most transgender and non-binary people understand that adjusting to a new name or pronouns can take practice, particularly if you’ve known someone for a long time.

If you make a mistake, simply correct yourself and move on.

“Oh, sorry, they said they’d be here at three.”

That’s usually all that’s needed.

You don’t need to make a big apology, explain how difficult you find it, or turn the situation into a conversation about your own feelings.

There’s also a difference between accidentally getting something wrong and deliberately refusing to respect how someone identifies.

The former is a normal human mistake. The latter can be genuinely hurtful.

Using someone’s name and pronouns is a small courtesy that can make a significant difference to how comfortable and respected they feel. If you are a cis man, imagine how it would feel if you were regularly referred to as a “she”. You might start to take offence, right?

Is being transgender the same as being gay?

No. Gender identity and sexual orientation are two completely separate things.

Gender identity is about who you are.

Sexual orientation is about who you’re attracted to.

A trans person can be straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, or have any other sexual orientation, just like anyone else.

For example, a trans man who is attracted to women might describe himself as straight. A trans woman who is attracted to women might describe herself as a lesbian.

Being transgender doesn’t tell you anything about who someone finds attractive.

As a non-binary person myself, I stick to the wonderfully all-encompassing label of pansexual for my sexuality. I’m attracted to all sorts of people, irrespective of their gender. This conveniently saves me the mindfuck of figuring out whether it’s gay or straight for a non-binary person to be attracted to a particular gender. There isn’t really a universally agreed answer to that question, and I’m not sure there needs to be.

Sexuality is deeply personal, and the labels we use are simply ways of communicating our experiences. You get to decide which ones feel right for you. Many non-binary people still identify as lesbians, for example, and that’s perfectly valid. Ultimately, these words are supposed to help us describe ourselves, not force us into boxes that don’t quite fit.

What does transitioning actually involve?

Transitioning means making changes to live more comfortably and authentically in one’s gender.

But there’s no universal checklist of things a transgender person needs to do.

For some people, transitioning involves changing their name or pronouns, their clothing, or the way they present themselves socially.

For others, it might involve hormone therapy, surgeries, or updating legal documents.

Some people make a lot of changes. Some make very few.

Some transition over a short period, while others make changes gradually over many years.

And some people know they’re transgender long before they tell anyone else.

Transitioning is a deeply individual experience.

It’s also worth remembering that medical details are private. Just as you probably wouldn’t ask a stranger about their genitals, surgical history or hormone levels, those aren’t necessarily appropriate questions to ask a transgender person.

Someone sharing their gender identity with you isn’t automatically an invitation to discuss their body.

What if I don’t understand why someone would feel this way?

I think this might be one of the most important questions of all.

If you’ve always felt comfortable being the gender everyone assumes you are, you might find it genuinely difficult to imagine feeling otherwise.

You might think, “I don’t feel like a gender. I just feel like myself.”

And that’s a perfectly reasonable way to describe your own experience.

But consider how many other aspects of human experience differ between people.

Some people experience intense romantic attraction, while others rarely or never do.

Some people have a vivid imagination and can picture detailed images in their minds, while others can’t form mental images at all.

Some people experience sensory input very differently from others.

We don’t all have the same internal experiences, even when our lives look similar from the outside.

Gender is another area where people’s experiences can differ.

You don’t have to be able to personally imagine what it feels like to be transgender to accept that someone else’s experience might be different from your own.

And you don’t necessarily need to understand every detail to treat them with respect.

A few things worth remembering

If you’re new to conversations about gender, here are some useful things to keep in mind.

You don’t need to know someone’s medical history. A transgender person’s body and medical choices are private, unless they choose to share that information with you.

You can’t always tell whether someone is transgender. Transgender people come in all shapes, sizes and appearances, just like cisgender people.

You don’t have to get everything right immediately. Learning unfamiliar terminology takes time. Being willing to listen, learn and correct mistakes goes a long way.

Not every transgender person has the same experience. Transgender people are individuals, with different identities, opinions, bodies, preferences and life experiences. One person’s experience doesn’t speak for everybody.

It’s okay to be curious. Genuine questions are often welcome, but context matters. There is a difference between trying to understand someone and expecting them to explain intimate aspects of their life simply because they’re transgender.

Being transgender isn’t an ideology

You might have heard the word transgenderism used in conversations about gender.

I prefer to talk about transgender people or being transgender.

The reason is simple: being transgender isn’t a political belief, a philosophy or an ideology. It’s a description of someone’s experience of their gender.

There are certainly political, medical and social discussions surrounding transgender people, and people can have different opinions about those subjects.

But transgender people themselves aren’t a political movement. They’re people.

People who have jobs, families, hobbies, relationships, hopes, disappointments and ordinary everyday lives.

Being transgender is just one aspect of who someone is.

What about trans people in bathrooms and sports?

Ah yes. Bathrooms and sports. Somehow these two subjects manage to appear every single time transgender people ask to be treated like ordinary human beings.

My view is that they’re often used as strawman arguments. It’s possible to have genuine questions about safety or fairness in a particular setting. But a very specific disagreement about a sporting rule or a bathroom gets inflated into an argument about whether trans people should be afforded basic rights at all. And I think that’s a pretty enormous leap.

When we talk about trans rights, we’re talking about people being able to access healthcare, education, employment, housing and legal recognition without discrimination. We’re talking about bodily autonomy, privacy, safety, and the freedom to go about life without being harassed or humiliated. And yes, that includes the basic courtesy of calling someone by their name and pronouns. You don’t have to agree on every possible policy question to recognise any of those things.

So, bathrooms. Public toilets aren’t gated communities. If someone wants to commit an assault, a sign on the door isn’t some magical forcefield stopping them. Assault is wrong regardless of who commits it. But treating every trans woman who needs to pee as a potential predator doesn’t protect anybody. In fact, research on public bathroom access has found no evidence that allowing transgender people to use facilities matching their gender identity increases safety or privacy risks. It does find that transgender people themselves face harassment and danger when accessing bathrooms.

Much of the bathroom discourse online is fearmongering masquerading as concern for women. If our goal is to prevent sexual violence, we need to focus on people who commit violence, not make perfectly ordinary people prove that they’re allowed to use a toilet.

And sports? This is a more complicated subject than a viral post is ever going to explain. Different sports have different physical demands and different eligibility rules, and some people have genuine concerns about fairness and safety. I’m not a competitive athlete or an expert in sports science, so I’m not going to pretend I can settle all of that in a paragraph. I do know that there’s no single testosterone threshold that applies to every sport. In fact, the International Olympic Committee adopted a new policy in March 2026 that will use SRY-gene screening for eligibility in women’s Olympic events from LA28, with limited exceptions. That’s a different approach from simply checking hormone levels, and it remains controversial.

What I find disturbing is what happens when people online appoint themselves the gender police. Suddenly, any woman who’s particularly tall, strong, muscular, masculine-looking or simply successful can be accused of secretly being a man. And now, instead of celebrating her achievements, we’re poring over photographs of her body and demanding she prove she’s a woman. How is that supposed to protect women?

Look at Imane Khelif, the Algerian boxer who won Olympic gold in Paris in 2024. She has not identified as transgender and has said she was born and raised female. Nevertheless, she was publicly accused of being a man or a transgender woman, and subjected to an extraordinary amount of abuse. Her gender became a global spectacle, despite serious questions about the evidence used to challenge her eligibility. And she wasn’t the only female athlete caught up in the outrage.

This isn’t just about hurt feelings, either. Women’s sport has a history of compulsory sex testing that included invasive physical examinations and even genital inspections. The new Olympic policy specifies genetic screening rather than routine genital examinations, but the history matters. When we normalise questioning whether a woman is really a woman, who gets to demand proof? What kind of proof will satisfy them? And how many women will be harassed, examined or publicly humiliated along the way?

If you’d like a thoughtful discussion of the human cost of this, I recommend this PBS interview with sports journalist Katie Barnes about the false accusations against Khelif.

We can have sensible, specific discussions about sport without turning them into campaigns against transgender people. We can care about women’s safety without treating trans women as threats. And we can protect cisgender women without insisting that every woman who doesn’t look a certain way needs to defend her own existence.

For me, none of these debates changes the underlying point: trans people are people, and they deserve the same dignity and respect as everybody else.

Why are some people so afraid of trans people?

For some people, it’s simply unfamiliar. If you’ve spent your whole life understanding gender as two neat boxes, and you’ve never knowingly met a transgender person, having that understanding challenged might feel uncomfortable. I get that. Unfamiliar things can be confusing. But being confused by someone else’s experience isn’t the same as that person doing something wrong. I suspect that for some people, feeling confused is too easily mistaken for feeling stupid, and that triggers defensiveness. It’s actually totally okay to be confused! It does not make you stupid at all. Confusion is the first step towards curiosity and learning. Shame runs deep for many people though and can trigger uncomfortable feelings.

I also think some people are frightened of what it means for their own identity. We’ve been taught an awful lot of rules about how men and women are supposed to look, behave, love, dress and live. When somebody steps outside those rules, perhaps it makes you question how much of your own life you’ve spent following them. Somebody else having the freedom to live differently doesn’t take anything away from you, but it might feel like it does. It might make the foundations of who you are feel a little shaky, particularly if you’ve built a lot of your own identity around those rules.

Then there’s the relentless fearmongering. If all you ever hear about trans people is that they’re dangerous, deceptive, coming for children or somehow threatening women, it’s easy to see how you might start feeling afraid. A steady diet of frightening headlines and inflammatory social media posts can make a tiny minority of people seem like an enormous threat. But that’s a reason to question what you’re being told, not a reason to take it out on the people being talked about. Don’t believe everything you read online. Fear and outrage are incredibly effective tools for getting clicks, winning votes and influencing public opinion. It’s worth asking who benefits from making you afraid of a group of people you’ve probably never even met.

And sometimes I think people are just afraid of getting it wrong. They don’t know the terminology, they’re worried about saying something offensive, or they feel embarrassed that the rules seem to have changed. That’s understandable too. The solution is actually pretty easy: be curious, listen, and if you make a mistake, correct yourself. Nobody needs you to pass a gender studies exam.

Of course, not every objection is rooted in innocent confusion. Sometimes it’s plain old prejudice, dressed up as concern. Fear might help explain someone’s reaction, but it doesn’t excuse treating another person like shit. If you feel yourself hating a certain type of person “just because”, it would be useful to do some journalling and interrogate that. Where did that hate come from? Who taught you that? What stories is it based on? Is your hate justified, or have you been hanging onto it for so long that it would just feel hypocritical to let it go? Do the people in your life expect you to hate alongside them, do you fear disappointing your loved ones by letting go of your prejudice?

If you find yourself feeling threatened by the existence of transgender people, I think it’s worth asking yourself a question: What exactly am I afraid is going to happen to me if I simply respect this person’s identity? Not what some stranger online says might happen. What, specifically, do you stand to lose?

At the end of the day

Gender can be a complex subject, but treating people respectfully doesn’t have to be.

If you’re cisgender and you’ve never given your gender identity much thought, that’s a completely ordinary experience. There’s nothing wrong with feeling comfortable in the body you were born with or identifying with the gender you’ve always been known as.

But it’s worth recognising that not everybody has that experience.

The words we use to describe gender help us communicate those differences, just as we have language to describe countless other variations in human experience.

You don’t have to memorise every term, understand every aspect of someone else’s identity, or suddenly change the way you think about yourself.

A little curiosity, a willingness to learn, and the simple courtesy of treating people as they’d like to be treated will take you a long way.

You don’t need to have the same experience as somebody else to respect theirs.

And really, that’s what all of this comes down to.

If you’re cisgender, people are using the correct pronouns for you and respecting your gender identity everywhere you go, all day long. You probably don’t even notice it happening. Trans people are simply asking for that same courtesy.

Honest mistakes and slip-ups are going to happen, and that’s okay. Correct yourself, move on, and try again. But if you’re refusing to respect transgender people on principle, you’re probably just being a bit of an asshole. And I reckon it’s worth interrogating what it is you’re actually so afraid of.