[Real names will not be used].
Okay, so I kind of want other opinions. My (24F) sister (14F) has a boyfriend Dominic (16M).
Dominic’s last relationship was with a guy named James (16FTM). However, James used to be a girl called “Jacqueline”.
I feel a lot of sympathy towards Dominic. After all, James cheated on him with other men and such. He also bullied Dominic when they were dating and after they broke up before Dominic blocked James.
However, James is trying to tell my sister that Dominic is transphobic. To be honest, I can see where James is coming from even though I don’t know him and sympathize with Dominic.
James says that Dominic doesn’t care and refuses to call James by his preferred name, and instead used she/her pronouns and refers to him as Jacqueline.
Dominic says that it’s because James bullies him. He says he’s not transphobic and he also seems to call every other person by their preferred name/pronouns, but doesn’t care about James’s.
My sister didn’t know what to do and just blocked James, but she and Dominic’s friend agree that it’s bad that Dominic calls him “Jacqueline”.
I think that Dominic is hurt and that hurt people hurt people. I also believe James is a bully who cheated on Dominic, though I don’t know James, but I still think he deserves respect.
James is not completely innocent and neither is Dominic, but James is a human being worthy of respect and Dominic struggles with empathy and understanding trans people.
The difficulty, I think, is that there are two different conceptions of respect here.
At the most fundamental level, there’s the respect that should automatically be granted to everyone - respect for the simple fact that they’re a human being, and thus deserving of a basic level of treatment and set of rights.
But there’s also a secondary level of respect - the respect that’s granted to a person who’s shown themselves to deserve it by being generally decent, kind, generous, honest, etc.
So in a sense, James really does not deserve respect - he hasn’t earned that secondary level of it.
But the problem is that using preferred gender and name is more in line with the first sort of respect than the second - not something that you grant only to a person who’s earned it, but something you should grant to any fellow human automatically.
So I’d have to say that Dominic is TA, but only sort of minimally.
Maybe a sort of compromise would be in order - Dominic can call James something like “James the asshole” and thereby meet the first level of respect while still overtly denying the second.
I’m sort of kidding with that.
Sort of.