Evan Urquhart

This is just one word. Every word in our language is an example of this, though the most obvious differences are found in nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Internally, these artifacts aggregate into our individual perception of “The World”.

In simple, practical terms: everyone lives in their own little world. This is something we don’t take seriously enough. While external phenomena have their own genuine reality, it’s a reasonable bet that not a single person alive has ever actually fully seen it.

When we’re arguing about something like gender, one of the things we’re actually doing is asking the other person to change the way their minds categorize a symbol. And if they’ve put that much stock in it, changing the way they see that symbol can literally break their world.

This is part of why we see so many arguments from transphobes about how “gender ideology is destroying the world”. It isn’t destroying the larger world: it can’t. But it deeply threatens the complex matrix of Internal Artifacts that they’ve used as for organizing perception.

This is something I experienced and continue to experience. I once had very strict IAs for m/w based on secondary sex characteristics. Accepting myself and other trans people led to shifting those, but I still struggle to call any idealized form to mind for "nonbinary person".

When I was first confronting those and trying to grow beyond "trans people are valid IFF they pass to my idiosyncratic satisfaction" it was actively painful. I FELT man and woman as objective, unchanging, and eternal. I KNEW what a man was and what a woman was.

It was a huge barrier to accurate pronoun production. Even if I wanted to be polite and believed trans people were valid my mind kept telling me it was sure who was a man and who was a woman very strongly.

I'm at a point now where the first pronouns I learn for a person "rule" my perception of them which is ALSO quite problematic, but at least a bit better. The goal is to have the pronouns in charge and able to change quickly, and I hope I'll get there.