It is American Thanksgiving, which, as a Canadian, I find strange. Christmas is hot on the heels of this holiday; how much turkey can one person eat within a month? How many sweaters can one person wear and how many rude relatives’ questions can one person deflect?

But I digress... Here, in the spirit of this problematic holiday, is a list of some things I’m grateful for:

• Music so good you want to grind it into your bones, soak it up through your skin, roll around in it instead of getting up and going to work.

• Meals lovingly prepared for you by someone whose eyes go warm and soft when they glance across the kitchen at you, making you feel like, “Yes. This.”

• The way Twitter and other such mediums allow so many of us to access a coveted feeling of renownedness and belonging that can sometimes be the difference between total despair and begrudging grit.

• Word nerds, book nerds, etymologists, agents, editors, voracious readers, overthinkers and graceless dorks.

• Bright colors assembled in ensembles like armor. An unfuckwithable pink cardigan that is feminine but not soft. Dresses that are like “suffragettes, but make it fashion.” Boots that suffer no fools.

• Podcasts you can lose yourself in, that make you laugh until you cry and momentarily forget about the world that lurks outside your headphones.

• Having a partner who feels like home and safety and rightness, whose scent balances your brain, whose kind words stitch you back together day by day.

Happy Thanksgiving, my loves!

Last night Matt and I cuddled on the couch and watched this excellent video by spanking fetishist Jillian Keenan about “how to find your spanking soulmate.” I sat there sipping a perfect cocktail made for me by my beautiful partner to cap off a night spent at a kink workshop, and knew I had already found my kinky kindred, my perverted paramour, my lascivious love. I do not take for granted how rare that is, how lucky.

Jillian notes in her video that, all things considered, it’s very likely your perfect kink partner lives in a different part of the world than you do. This is the blessing and the curse of the social internet: you can find the exact right person for your mind, body, and relationship style, but you’ll probably need a passport (not to mention an air travel budget) to spend time with them. It’s both wonderful and unfair.

For me, though, this is worth the trade-off. I’d rather be with someone who “gets” me, satisfies me, makes me happy, and who I can genuinely do those things for, too – even if I can’t always physically be with them – than attempt to make conversation with locals who go “Huh?” at my jokes and “Uhhh…” at my kinks. Depth of connection can transcend national borders, but sometimes you can’t even figure out how to connect with someone who’s sitting right across from you. I know which I’d choose every time.

That said, I have thought a lot the past few years about how finding a partner who shares all your kinks is an overrated concept. Sure, it’s nice as hell if it happens, but it absolutely isn’t necessary. Every sexual proclivity is a site of enjoyment and potential connection; every encounter with a perv from a different branch of the pervert tree will widen your horizons and teach you about yourself. “Fun” and “hot” are casual friends, not a married couple; it’s lovely when they hang out, but sometimes they show up to the party at totally different times, or don’t cross paths for months, and that’s fine. You’re still likely to have a good time.

If you told me, when I first started noodling around on computers at age 8 (already a sex nerd, already entranced by text-based instructional masturbation websites) that typing words into a computer of sorts would one day register to me as Having Sex, I doubt I would have believed you. I mean, I wouldn’t have entirely understood what you were saying… but if I had, I wouldn’t have believed you.

I was interviewed for this Guardian piece about sexting recently, and it got me thinking about the role sexting plays in my life. I have a folder on my phone, not-so-creatively entitled “sexxxty,” containing screenshots of good sexts I’ve received over the years, intermingled with (of course) the occasional languid nude selfie and solicited dick pic from beaux of yore. Here are some of my favorite sexts I’ve received, and what made them so great…

“My favorite toy is your mouth.” -a then-fuckbuddy in April 2016 upon being asked what sex toys I should bring to the threesome we were planning with my best friend

This is a prime example of how hyperbole in sexts sometimes works a treat. Was this man’s favorite sex toy really my mouth? No. We both knew he possessed a decent-sized collection of stimulating accoutrements, crowding his nightstand and outing him as a sex nerd (hence, um, planning a threesome with both hosts of a podcast called The Dildorks). But did it make me feel good to hear him say this (or, rather, to read it on a screen)? Sure did.

Content note: drugs, hypnosis, blowjob porn.

My partner gives me a writing assignment every month, and the completed pieces are not always good enough (or sensical enough) to share with you, but this one is, I think. Here’s the prompt I was given: “Write me a 500 to 1,000-word piece of erotica inspired by something on our sex/kink to-do list that we haven’t done yet and that you find hot. Additionally, your character should refer to me as Miss at least once in the piece. Exploring some gender ideas we’ve talked about and giving me more ideas of fun ways to fuck you. Seems good.”

My favorite porn star has a dick in her throat, and I have smog in my head.

Content note: trauma, panic, breakups.

Why, given that it’s been more than two years since my worst breakup ever, does my body still tense up when I walk through his neighborhood like I’m parading toward my death?

Why, while riding in the passenger seat of my mom’s car, did I start to sweat, breathe faster, go fuzzy-brained, and cry a little when we drove by his street earlier this year?

Shannon Bell – feminist poli sci professor, philosophy genius, and erstwhile professional squirter – calls the G-spot the “female phallus.” Or sometimes she uses that term to refer to the entire upper wall of the vagina, a cluster of complicated nerves and erectile tissue rather than a discrete “spot.”

If we can sluice the cissexism off this idea (not all vagina-havers are female and not all female people have vaginas), and reduce it simply to the notion that a vagina might contain a phallus every bit as real, responsive, and stiffen-able as the penis, it becomes revolutionary. It becomes life-changing. It becomes the kind of thought that makes me go “Whoooa” when I’m high and even sometimes when I’m not.

I’ve been thinking a lot about queer sex lately, and trying to parse what it means to me, exactly. Certainly I felt queer when I was pinned under a fragile cis femme in a dainty slip at age 16 while she shoved her strap-on cock inside me. I recall feeling queer when a petite androgyne bent me over a coffee table and spanked me until bruises bloomed on my skin. But I have not always felt queer while having sex with cis men, even though my bi identity means I’m queer in everything I do. You can’t really blame me for feeling that way, when certain segments of the queer community are so quick to call bisexual women traitors or impostors for the high misdemeanor of dating or fucking a cis man.

The two people I’m fucking now both have penises but are not cis men, and the difference is stark. They use their cocks less like oblivious battering rams and more like a finger or a toy: all precision and focus, stroking, noticing, recalibrating. They are happy, too, to have sex involving no penetration at all. Sex that teases me to precarious heights of pleasure through just rubbing and touching and being with me. Sex that feels qualitatively queer.

Content note: drugs, alcohol, and hypnosis.

We were high a lot of the time that we were in Portland. Portable weed vapes were readily available in stores, after all. That drug cast a vibrant glow over my memories from the trip. I am always awed by traveling to unfamiliar places, and I am always awed by Matt; stoned, I was extra-awed by both.

One late night, at a fancy restaurant, I sipped wine through a druggy haze while gazing lovingly at my beautiful partner across the table. We were waiting for our entrees when I glanced up and noticed it: to my right, a wine rack, several wine glasses hanging from it upside-down. One of the glasses, having just been haphazardly slid into place by some rushed-off-their-feet server, was seesawing back and forth a little in its spot. Dangling. Swinging, like a pendulum, or a pocketwatch.

Content note: watersports (i.e. piss play) and mentions of drinking pee. Also a moment of gender dysphoria.

The Multnomah Whiskey Library in Portland is one of the fanciest bars I’ve ever been to. It stocks over 1,500 different liqueurs – mostly whiskeys, of course – in a multi-shelf setup reminiscent of the library frequented by Belle in Beauty in the Beast. It’s low-lit and ornate, and bartenders pour your order right in front of you, at your table, slowly tilting expensive tipples onto ice cubes for your drinking pleasure.

I wasn’t expecting to do a watersports scene at this place, of all places, and yet, in classic perv fashion, I did.

On November 21st, 2017, my friend Clara (not her real name) invited me over to her house and cooked me dinner. We caught up about our lives, drank boozy bevs, and laughed a lot. Everything between us was as normal as could be: no lingering tensions about the many conflicts we’d been through together in our ten years of friendship, which kicked off in a fateful tenth-grade math class. At the end of the night, I thanked her for the meal, told her to sleep well, and headed home. I had no idea that I would never see her again, at least not in the context of her being my friend.

See, over the next few months, Clara first got distant and then completely ghosted me. This was not uncommon for her: spells of bad mental health sometimes rendered her unable or unwilling to answer texts for months at a time. Her last text to me – on January 7th, 2018 – was a picture of a book called Priestdaddy, snapped in a bookstore at the mall. “This immediately made me think of you,” she wrote – and then never texted me again.

In March, I wrote, “Hey friend, I miss you! Wanna hang soon?” No answer.

In April, I wrote, “I’m playing a show at the Social Capital Theatre on Friday if you feel like having a fun night out. I miss you, friend.” No answer.

I once tweeted that choosing my outfit for first dates always feels to me like dressing as a “cool girl” for Halloween. It’s a balancing act, crafting an ensemble that communicates aloofness I don’t actually possess. My natural inclination would be to wear a party dress and a hair scrunchie on every date, and not everybody is into that “goodie two-shoes on picture day” vibe right off the bat. So I often end up wearing a T-shirt tucked into a casual skirt, or – in an even more performative gesture of chillaxed-ness – jeans.

Jeans and I have a fraught relationship. I wore them in middle school because it was the done thing, and then matriculated at a performing arts high school full of weirdos who made me feel safe casting off my pants (…metaphorically) and slipping into dresses and skirts. These twirly garments refracted my internal sense of femininity into something externally clockable. When I tiptoed back into denim-land one momentous day in sophomore year, it was, characteristically, in the least chill way possible: with sky-blue skinnies and cowboy boots and pigtails, a caricature of a tomboy I wasn’t. I attempted to strut but mostly just slithered, nervous everyone was staring at my thick thighs and muffin top, now exposed by pants as taut as sausage casings instead of curtained behind a forgiving skirt.

I mostly eschewed jeans again until university, where social anxiety coupled with a more conservative environment (i.e. no more teens in tutus and combat boots en route to improv practice) made me feel pressured to conform – to “dress my age.” People my age were wearing jeans almost daily, so I gave them another go. This time they made me feel pleasantly invisible, blissfully unremarkable. I tucked the cuffs into Bean boots and spent entire winters that way, trundling to class and back home on snow-caked streetcars, sitting in lecture halls with coffees and bagels, praying no one would see through my denim disguise.

Now, at 27, I’ve finally come to view jeans as a comfortably occasional thing for me. It’s a relief not unlike downleveling a romantic relationship to a friendship-with-benefits that suddenly runs smoother than ever before. Recently I tugged my partner into a Madewell fitting room and almost ceremonially zipped and buttoned myself into a pair of high-waisted navy skinnies. The effect was instantly magic: I felt clued-in, cool, and curvy. “That denim isn’t your typical style makes it even hotter when you do wear it,” Matt told me later, once money and pants had each changed hands. “In your new jeans, I find myself staring at your curves for what feels like forever.” I had tapped into the casual confidence of People Who Look Good in Jeans, a club to which I’ve never quite managed to procure full membership but which I drop in on from time to time.

Like many people – perhaps even most people – I grew up thinking of myself as fundamentally unattractive. Our culture is built to make us feel this way, so it can sell us face masks and skinny jeans and curling irons. You know this. But what’s less obvious is the way this sad truth can affect interpersonal dynamics in sexual relationships.

Good, ethical sex is predicated on informed, ongoing consent. Consent is predicated on the assumption of an egalitarian power structure between partners (even if they are playacting a power imbalance, as I often do). And it’s difficult to feel empowered or on equal footing with someone if you believe that they are beautiful and that you are ugly.

I’m not retroactively marking large swathes of my sex life as nonconsensual; I knew what was happening and I said yes anyway, often enthusiastically. But now, with the wisdom of (comparative) age, I often wonder how things would’ve been different for me during my “slutty phase” if I had believed – truly believed, in the core of my brainstem – that I am hot.

I would not have sat through the self-involved tirades of Tinder libertarians over bad bar food I was ridiculed for eating. I would not have swiped through dating apps with increasing desperation at 3 a.m., fruitlessly chasing proof of my loveability. I would not have laughed at jokes that weren’t funny or sucked dicks that weren’t washed. The sexually closed-minded often argue that sluts are sluts because they have low self-esteem; while this flat-out isn’t true (I know tons of happy, confident, self-adoring sluts), I don’t think I could’ve become a slut if my self-esteem had been higher, simply because my standards would have gotten higher too and thus my dating pool would have narrowed. I would have still wanted the same amount of sex with the same number of people, but fewer people would pass muster. What’s a slut to do?

I’m mesmerized by hypnokink. Lately I have been losing myself in the work of Sleepingirl and Mr. Dream, scrolling through their blog posts late at night, plowing through the Two Hyp Chicks podcast, falling into these oeuvres like a trance.

Erotic hypnosis isn’t new to me, having dated a hypno pervert for nearly two years now. But this thirst for practical info and first-person accounts is new. I’m an obsessive person and have become fixated on certain kinks for periods of time before, and there always comes a point where I want to move from disinterested, clinical explanations of the thing to dirty stories of people actually doing the thing. I mean, would I have gotten half as focused on spanking as I did if I’d never read “spankophile” Jillian Keenan’s electric book peppered with impact-play eroticism, Sex with Shakespeare? Doubt it.

The thing that Sleepingirl, in particular, captures so well about hypnosis is the intimacy of it. Nobody really explained this aspect to me when I first threw myself into this kink, probably because, to hypnokinksters, it’s often so obvious one might forget to mention it. Of course this sex act you fetishize, which is predicated on extreme focus and listening and paying attention to your partner, might feel romantic to you. Of course you’d feel more connected to someone when they’re manipulating your mind with carefully-chosen words than you do while doing “normal couple things” like scrolling Twitter across from each other at the dinner table or holding hands absentmindedly as you stroll down the street.

There are a lot of misconceptions about hypnokink – listen to Matt’s episode of the Bed Post Podcast for more on that – and one of them, maybe, is that it isn’t romantic. This is the same narrative that’s been used to suppress and oppress queers and kinksters for generations: if you can PR-spin a particular relationship style to seem dirty, illicit, “all about the sex,” you can strip its practitioners of their humanity, and their love stories. It’s why, still to this day, many right-wing cretins will talk about the supposed horrors of (consensual!) anal sex instead of proposing any actually valid arguments for why gay people shouldn’t exist. Love isn’t a prerequisite for respect or acceptance – after all, aromantic people exist, and rough, casual anal sex is just as valid as getting married and having babies, all of which you can do in the same lifetime or even in the same week if you want (kudos!). But love is often part and parcel of alternate sexualities and their expressions – whether or not it’s the romantic kind of love – and to ignore that is to dismiss, dehumanize, and “other” the people who traverse these less-traveled-by routes of erotic connection.

Landed: back in the Toronto airport, back in my regular life. Swaying softly against my suitcase on the subway. Lugging those pounds of dirty laundry and well-loved sex toys down my little street and up the steps in front of my little apartment building. Everything feels so little now, in memory’s shadow of New York, Matt’s New York, even me.

The day is a blur of catching up on emails and catching up on sleep, and then at night, Matt calls me. Their sadness sounds heavy in their voice, the same way mine feels in my chest. “How are you?” I say, the way people do when beginning a conversation.

“I miss you!” they whine in this way that’s like repeating a prayer. In long-distance relationships, “I miss you” becomes an incantation, a mantra, a forever-truth bubbling under the surface of every conversation and sometimes demanding to be spoken aloud. I miss them too, already, so much that I start to cry when I say it. But crying is okay.

“I cried when I left work today,” Matt says, trying to soothe me, “because I viscerally realized you weren’t going to be in my apartment this time when I got home.”

A couple months ago, I polled my Twitter followers for their thoughts on the concept of the “soulmate.” Being a largely non-monogamous bunch, many of them posited that it’s likely incorrect and even harmful to imagine there is only one person each of us is “meant to” “end up” with. When I was a kid, I swallowed Disney ideology hook, line, and sinker, and genuinely believed there was a fateful person out there, wandering the earth, looking for me as I looked for them – which seemed cosmically unfair, because statistically that person probably lived on another continent and maybe didn’t even speak English.

But at some point during my tumultuous teen years, I saw the movie Kissing Jessica Stein, and in addition to validating my burgeoning bisexuality, it gave me the gift of this line: “I don’t even believe [in soulmates] anymore. I don’t believe there’s just one person [for each of us]. I think there are, like, seven.”

This is a heartening concept even if you’re not polyamorous. It’s a comfort to know you could lose one soulmate – through death, distance, negligence, or any other trouble that can befall a relationship – and not have to give up on deep love forever. Plus, if we all have seven soulmates, then probably at least one of them lives within reach and speaks your language.

The most common quality my Twitter followers ascribed to a soulmate (or “great love,” if you want to be less woo-woo and more poly-inclusive) is that the two of you just “get” each other. You “click.” I’ve reflected a lot on this feeling each of the few times I’ve truly encountered it (which have been, it’s worth noting, mostly in platonic relationships and not romantic ones), and the oddest thing to me about how it touches my own life is that 3 of my 4 “great loves” were born and raised in the U.S., a country I didn’t set foot in until I was nine years old. Knowing what I know about social psychology, it seems strange that I would feel so deeply connected to people who don’t share many of my cultural touchstones, social identities, or formative experiences. But I suppose that just reinforces the apparently soul-deep link I had (and still have) with these people – we could come from starkly different backgrounds and still click into place like magnets as soon as we crossed paths.

Content note: This essay talks about knife play (including surface-level non-bleeding cuts on the skin) and fear play.

This morning I woke up with shallow red marks criss-crossing over portions of my skin. They congregate on my arms, my thighs, my chest. They were given to me last night by someone I love, wielding a massive, heavy knife.

My interest in knife play phased into existence about 2 years ago. Maybe I’d been watching too much American Horror Story, but I’d begun to eroticize wild-eyed men wielding weapons and glamorous women who could cut you in two. The therapist I saw when I was in university – who I’m no longer seeing – would have a field day with this information, because she helped me work through recurrent nightmare-visions that I was being stalked by armed men in my own home. Prevailing anxieties crept into my mind from all angles at that time and one of their manifestations was this unfounded (?) fear of steeled invaders. For weeks-long stretches, I slept on my family’s living room couch instead of in my own bed, longing to feel centered in safety, convinced somehow that the middle of the house was more secure than its edges. I kept the light on and stopped watching horror movies and cuddled my cat close to my chest. With these measures (and therapy) to help me, I eventually set those petrifying visions aside. So it was odd when they came roaring back years later as – of all things – sexual fantasies.

Two things happened in late 2017 that contributed to a boost in my book consumption: I bought a Kindle Oasis (while drunk at 1 a.m., might I add), and I moved into an apartment where, for the first time in my life, I didn’t have a TV. I stopped whiling away fruitless hours in front of old Simpsons reruns and bad ‘90s rom-coms (well, mostly), and started devouring books again the way I did when I was a nerdy, overachieving third-grader. Ah, bliss.

Being a sex writer, I tend to apply a sexuality lens to almost anything I read: “Okay, that’s interesting, but what does it say about how humans fuck?!” For that reason, I found these 5 excellent books sexually illuminating in one way or another, even if that wasn’t strictly their aim…

High Heel by Summer Brennan

This is ostensibly a book about shoes, but really it’s a book about gender, history, beauty, morality, and fairy tales. Each page made me want to either never wear heels again or wear them every day from here to eternity. More to the point, this book made me think more critically about my own self-presentation, the places where it cleaves to what’s expected of me and the places where it noticeably, deliberately doesn’t. I think this short tome would be a revelation for anyone with a gender and a pair of feet. And probably even people without those things, too.

I’m scared beyond reason of getting a tattoo I later regret. Every piece of art I’ve had inked on me – four so far – came after weeks or months of pondering the design, the meaning, the long-term ramifications. I diligently googled my chosen phrases and symbols to make sure they didn’t have some secret, sinister connotation. If I was going to welcome a piece of work onto my skin, I wanted it to be something I could be proud of, and uplifted by, forever.

This is also why I’ve never allowed a romantic partner to attend any of my tattoo appointments. Oh, they have asked. Two of my most serious ex-boyfriends – a tall, goofy-grinned man with shaggy ginger hair, and a short goth with a great laugh – had more tattoos than I could ever dream of wanting, and offered to accompany me to my inking sessions so they could share in that experience we both knew so well. I politely declined, not entirely explaining that I couldn’t sew a beau into my memory of a particular tattoo, because the ink would be forever, and the relationships would not.

I knew the evil way mementos associated with sad memories can suck the sparkle from your smile every time you look at them. I’d once kept a dime on my bedroom floor for over a year because someone I loved had dropped it there, and while the sight of it initially brightened my days, by the end of that period I had come to loathe it. It reminded me too much of not being loved back, of being abandoned – but it nonetheless took a lot of time and emotional energy for me to eventually decide to pick it up and put it away. With tattoos, you can’t even do that – you have to look at them forever, or spend gobs of cash having them removed or covered up. To me, it didn’t seem worth the risk to ink something on my skin that could be eternally associated with someone who’d broken my heart, or who I’d ultimately come to loathe. (I had not yet truly conceived of a relationship ending in any way other than these – or of a relationship never ending at all.)

But the truth is, every one of my tattoos reminds me of the people I was dating and/or fucking at the time that I got them, despite the care I took to make sure this wouldn’t happen. The red heart on my belly summons the memory of the boy who gingerly peeled my underwear off the day after, marveling softly at the needle-wounded flesh. The pink “good girl” bows on my thighs make me think of the dominant boy who encouraged me to get them, pinning me to his mattress on the floor and whispering, “You’re a good girl, and soon everyone will know it.” My “this too shall pass” wrist tattoos take me back to the morning I got them, and the then-boyfriend who ignored my excited “Check out my new tats!” texts for hours. The flowers on my right arm, and their accompanying slogan “Do no harm but take no shit,” remind me of Matt, with whom I’d just fallen hopelessly in love when I went to my appointment. The details of that day are carved into my memory the way so many days are when you’re awash with romantic hormones: I remember I took a picture of a blue wall because the shade reminded me of Matt, lovesick as I was, and that the owner of the tattoo shop asked me if my “pun slut” pin stood for “punishment slut” and I blushed because I wanted to be, and was, Matt’s punishment slut.

The pain seeps through my body like a basement flood, creeping along carpets and baseboards until the whole mess is cold and ruined. I’ve had this chronic pain disorder – as-yet undiagnosed, though many of my doctors have ideas – for about four years now, and it just grows steadily worse. I am tired, and scared, and getting older.

The pain is like the deepest part of the sensation of stubbing your toe or crashing your shin against something hard: that bone-adjacent, sickening throb that feels like it’s radiating from inside your body. It shows up in my hands, wrists, ankles, calves, knees, hips… wherever it pleases. Sometimes it seems to spread to my brain, which gets foggy and slow on high pain days, like my CPU is being throttled by just handling all that input. Even now, writing this newsletter is a glacial process of stop-and-start, tapping out a word or two, pausing, having a thought, forgetting it, and trying to keep going.

But this is supposed to be a newsletter about sex and kink and relationships, not boring stuff like body aches, which brings me to BDSM’s role in my pain management.

If you’re familiar with my work, you might expect me to say something here about how good pain helps offset bad pain; how the endorphins released during a solid spanking can calm down my nervous system and push out all those ugly sensations. This is, to some extent, true, but it presupposes I’m well enough to get hit in the first place. Holding myself up on my hands and knees, or even flipping over onto my front, can be a frustrating and agonizing process when my body hurts this badly. No, I’m not anticipating a beating today; I don’t even want one.

Content note: This essay mentions rape and mass murder.

I have filled my head with useless information about “incels” – involuntary celibates, a movement of (mostly) young men who, in the dank depths of the internet, work and rework their sexual rejections into cause for venomous misogyny. I have read voraciously about their ideology, which they call “the red pill”; it frames women as the privileged oppressor in the sexual economy, leaving men of subpar attractiveness with the short end of the stick. I have combed through their message boards until 4 a.m., greedily gulping down their poisoned logic – because, in some ways, it makes me feel safer to do so.

Incels are not always, but notably are sometimes, mass murderers. Two such attacks have taken place in my own city: a van ramming into pedestrians, killing 8 of them, as part of an “incel rebellion,” and a terrifying shooting on a high-traffic street that led to the death of two girls, both not even old enough to be considered women. So my efforts to understand incels’ twisted thought processes are, in part, an attempt at self-defense. Some part of me believes that if I know my way around their philosophical hedge maze, I can scythe my way out, should I ever need to. I don’t know quite what that would look like or what it would accomplish, but it’s comforting to imagine.

My partner came out as non-binary this week and so I am incensed afresh by people who refuse to use their loved ones’ new pronouns.

There are lots of ways to refuse to do this. There’s the outright refusal of people who deny singular they/them pronouns are a thing in English (false), or who deny that anything or anyone outside the gender binary should exist (also false). But there is also the more subtle refusal of people who “have a hard time” with pronoun changes, and who use the supposed difficulty of the task as an excuse to continually misgender people they claim to care about.

Regardless of your reasons for getting someone’s pronouns or other gender descriptors wrong, it is still a hurtful and inconsiderate thing to do. So I’m writing this as a cis person to give you the advice I wish someone had given me, when I met my first trans friend and had to whip my mealy mouth into submission and drill “ze/hir” pronouns into my lexicon:

PRACTICE. Really. Practice using your loved one’s new pronouns. It’s very simple.