like, it kinda hurts to be told to have some grace about being misgendered (we're giving concessions for fucking what exactly) but like. for instance, even though i don't actually come across this problem (my native language doesn't have gendered pronouns, and i don't talk to people anyway), it's still really easy for me to put myself in the Struggling Cis Ally spot. genuinely i would write stories plural about trans characters and mess up their pronouns. gender's fucking stupid.

thus, i guess what i would do is to have a boilerplate response for both honest mistake mess-ups and "okay sigh we're indulging in your fantasy but urrgh" kinda mess-ups (doing mental calculus to figure out whether a person is one or the other would just be psychologically unaffordable). about this i'm reminded of sarah z's recent queerbaiting video. about how the ostensibly same kind of anger actually wrongly hurts "easy" targets more severely than the capital that subsumed it. so then, kindness towards people making honest mistakes probably goes a longer way than aggression towards an assumed bad actor.

the enlightened centrist argument would probably be not to assume anything about people. but if you do assume, i guess err towards kindness. unless it's someone you have personal grievances with, in which case they're ontologically evil