i think that a lot of the discourse re: pronouns ("it's bad to ask for someone's pronouns but it's also bad to use they/them as a default" and so on) comes from an insecurity that binary trans people who are gender-conforming (by this i mean binary trans women who have a very feminine gender presentation and binary trans men with a very masculine one) in that they think if someone asks what their pronouns are, even in good faith, it means theyre not "passing" and that its just a polite version of the ol "are you a boy or a girl" and i totally see where these people are coming from because i feel this insecurity too but my honest opinion, and im sorry if this harsh, is that we need to get over ourselves and understand that many people ask us that question in genuine good faith, or default to they/them, simply because they know better than to assume what our gender is based on our appearance lol. hot take but ive been working on alleviating my dysphoria in ways that dont involve upholding the gender binary or cisnormative ideas such as the one according to which a persons gender always correlates to their gender presentation 100% of the time, and i think yall should too lol. it baffles me to see posts from other trans people, with hundreds of other trans people in the notes agreeing with the op, saying that if someone chooses to be very feminine its because theyre "clearly trying to communicate that theyre a girl" like where the fuck did we go wrong as a community that weve ended up upholding the very gender essentialist bullshit ideas weve been trying to combat for ages. no im not going to address every single nuance of this topic right now because this post is already super long and convulated as hell im sorry please dont yell at me. but one thing i will say is if youre going to ask about peoples pronouns dont just single out the one person whose gender is ambiguous to you because that feels shady and not unlike the "are you a boy or a girl" shit i mentioned earlier