I totally go by what other people tell me they ID as.
People often think about gender in one of two ways. They either see a spectrum with lots of little points along it, and each of these is a gender, almost separate from the others. (I am wildly oversimplifying.) But basically, they understand that once someone has struggled with gender a certain amount, they are probably tg or genderqueer or gender variant or something like that.
OR, people can understand that there may be just a few genders, each rather elastic, each able to manifest in many different forms.
Either approach is liberating, and I respect any individual's conclusions about gender. (Of course.) BUT, I am more in the second camp. I do not love the list-of-qualifiers way of naming gender. I prefer expanding a few categories. I personally find that a lot more liberating than the string of qualifiers approach. I am not sure that the lived reality is much different for most non-trans folk. I know the string of qualifiers works for some, but I groove on subverting the big categories and stretching them till they scream.
So that may pre-dispose me to not assuming TG. It does not pre-dispose me to making normative assumptions.
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