Asklemmy

Just drop the pronouns. Super easy, doesn’t change based on who your are speaking to, and just saying Thanks or Thank You is 1000x better than your average retail customer.

I recently said “thanks mate” to a blatant MtF person that works for the same organisation as I do. I probably very visibly shit a brick and thought “not your best choice of words”. If it’s obvious, I will use gendered words, if someone has pronouns or something to make it obvious how they want to be referred to, I’ll use them. If it’s not obvious, and they have nothing to indicate how they want to be referred to, I’ll just be polite.

Mistakes happen, be polite and apologise and I reckon you’ll be fine.

I'll often just go for a "thank you kindly!". It has the same flow.

So you’ve gone an entire lifetime saying these things with no problem, and then one day you encounter someone who’s decided to request “they them” pronouns, and youre going to drop this entire habit?

Did this person signal to you that you’d hurt them somehow? It sounds like they corrected an error on your part. Unless they displayed some anger or hurt, perhaps it’s just that you used the same pronouns everyone else does by virtue of how they present themselves, and then they corrected you, and you can use their pronouns from here on out.

I don’t think you should model this as a situation where you hurt someone. You used wrong info, got corrected, and you can move on.

Don’t start misgendering 99% of the people you meet just because one person corrected your assumption once. Don’t do that. Your cultural upbringing is not garbage to be discarded so easily.

I think just go the Invader Zim route and infer honorifics by height.

"Yes, my tallest" and "forgive me, my tallest" should cover you in most yes/no situations.

And if they're not taller than you? Well then they're less intelligent, so you can turn up your nose in scorn and look over heads until they go away.

I learned a lot of about social interaction from that show.