I can't view them as the gender they want no matter how hard I try.
And to be clear, I still use preferred pronouns and try to do all the least upsetting things for genderpeople. I just am bothered by how afraid I feel to express the way I experience gender. (5/6)
Conversation
In my ideal world, they would say "Hey, my pronouns are they/them", and then I'd say "Nice to meet you! I process your gender as your birth sex and don't view you as nonbinary personally, but I'm happy to use your pronouns if that makes you more comfortable." (6/6)
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"in my ideal world, I invalidate other people's identity by rejecting it to their face despite paying lip service to it"
Weird ideals there.
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No, I'm being honest about myself and the way I view the world, and I try to make accommodations so that I don't hurt others who really want me to view them a certain way.
My sense of identity doesn't match up with the way others see me, often, but I'm okay with that.
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The way you view the world inherently invalidates their identity. There's a big difference between someone perceiving incorrectly as opposed to being directly told something from the source and rejecting it.
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I don't know how to update certain categories. If someone is constantly going to parties and around people 24/7 but tells me they're introverted, I can't just... *stop* viewing them as extroverted. I can view them as having a self-identity as introverted!
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But my brain is like 'Oh, they pattern-match onto 'takes actions to be around other people a lot'", and I can't *un*match that pattern just because they tell me they're different. I don't have control over that level of processing the world.
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I understand it taking a while to make the adjustment - when I learn things about people I've known for a while that correct an assumption I had, I don't necessarily collate it right away. But I also don't reject it, which is what it sounds like you want to do.
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I don't have a particular desire around it, I just notice that my brain isn't updating based on the information.
Some assumptions do update over time! But the gender thing feels like it belongs in a special category, very close to the way identifying objects feels.
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As in; the part of my brain that does "Oh, that is not a tree, that is a house" feels like it's the part that's doing gender, for me. And you can tell me the house is a tree and I can try very hard to accept this but I don't have conscious access to my perception in this regard.
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I've mostly come to suspect that different people have super different processes around gender, and probably have very different associations with that word. Likely gender for some other people does not lie in the same part of their processing that it does for me.