The Grammar of Control: Why They Won’t Learn Your Name

Or ... Refusal to Learn: Misgendering, Calvinism, and the Policing of Reality

Why do some people refuse to use the names and pronouns we've offered? This essay maps misgendering as belief, not error—rooted in theology, enforced by language, and undone through the resistant act of neuroqueering.

Introduction

This is not a call-out. It’s a map of a system. One I didn’t build, but one that built itself around me. Its foundations are older than any one interaction—older, even, than the institutions that now enact it in policy and practice. When I trace its outlines, I’m not looking for individual villains. I’m looking for the shape of something structural. Something that appears in patterns, in refusals, in what’s treated as obvious or natural or simply “how things are.” I’ve learned to pay attention to those moments—not because I enjoy confrontation, but because they’re often the first clue that something much larger is at work.

The process I use to make sense of these moments isn’t linear or slogan-ready. It doesn’t fit neatly into the framework of personal growth or professional development as those are typically understood. I’ve never learned through shallow optimism or catchy mantras. The world has never allowed me that luxury. I learn because I have to. Because something doesn’t sit right in my body, and I need to understand why. Because I feel harm before I can name it. Because I’ve been told too many times that what I’m experiencing isn’t real. Because I need to find others who’ve felt it too. And from there, I begin to see the system—not as theory, but as lived reality—and only then can I start writing my way through it. Writing, for me, is not about explaining myself to others. It’s about assembling truth from the fragments left scattered in the aftermath of harm. It’s a form of resistance. Of reconstruction. Of making the invisible visible.

This piece follows that same pattern. It began with harm—not physical, but no less wounding. After I published The Last Person Before Gender, a number of people responded with generosity, insight, and recognition. But alongside that came another response: a cluster of comments, not all hostile, but all dismissive in a particular way. Some insisted that I was confused about language. Others framed my existence as an affront to their beliefs. A few simply said they “didn’t get it”—and made no effort to. And in each of these, I recognised something I’ve seen before. Not misunderstanding, but refusal. Not discomfort, but defence. And so I returned to my pattern: I listened to the tightening in my chest. I questioned myself. I searched for resonance. I found it. I saw the pattern. And now, I write.

This is not an essay about personal identity. It is not about justifying my pronouns or asking to be understood. It is about why some people refuse to learn. It is about what that refusal reveals—not about me, but about the system they believe in. A system that needs gender to be fixed. A system that treats fluidity as danger. A system built not merely on language, but on the moral and theological scaffolding of control. What follows is an attempt to name that system. To show how refusal is not neutral, but ideological. And to offer another way forward—one not rooted in obedience, but in recognition.

Recognising Harm: The Somatics of Erasure

Misgendering doesn’t just happen in language. It happens in the body. It begins in theirs, but finishes in mine. There’s a split-second where the air shifts—where I brace, though nothing physical has touched me. Where my heart jolts, not from danger exactly, but from dissonance. A sudden and public undoing. It is not a misunderstanding. It’s a rupture. One I’m meant to carry quietly.

I feel it in my jaw first, usually. A tightening. My hands grip a little harder at whatever they’re holding. My shoulders rise, just slightly, the beginnings of that all-too-familiar curl inward. I don’t always register the words themselves—I register their effect, like a bell ringing far too close to the ear. I go still. Not quite freeze, not quite shut down. But still enough that it marks the moment. And in the seconds that follow, I begin the internal maths of safety: Do I correct them? Is it worth it? Will I be safe? Will I be punished for reminding them of who I am?

People like to imagine misgendering as a one-off mistake—an innocent slip of the tongue. But it’s rarely that. It’s repetition that makes it sharp. It’s the daily abrasion of being called by a name you’ve laid to rest, of being pointed to with words that do not belong to you, of being returned—again and again—to a self you’ve already outgrown. The violence isn’t just in the word. It’s in the insistence.

And it’s also in the silence that follows. Because after misgendering comes the erasure. You’ve just introduced yourself. You’ve just corrected them gently. You’ve made yourself vulnerable by naming who you are. And then, nothing. They continue as though you haven’t spoken. They look past you, sometimes through you. And there you are, newly invisible, even as their words define you.

That is the wound. Not just the word, but the refusal to see you after you’ve named yourself. It is a breaking of the social contract. It tells you that your truth will not be held, that your offering will not be met. And if you are autistic—especially if you are a gestalt language processor like me—this can register not just as a social injury, but as a neurological one. An interruption in your internal script. A short-circuiting. A loss of grounding. You can feel your words start to scatter, become less accessible. The hurt is not theoretical. It is lived. It is felt. And it accumulates.

This is what I mean when I say misgendering is not just about language. It’s about being placed outside of reality—again and again—until you begin to question whether you were ever in it to begin with. And the hardest part is knowing that many people who do it will insist they meant no harm. That it’s your reaction, not their refusal, that’s the problem (aka, gaslighting). And still, I remain. Still, I speak. Even through the tightening in my chest and the static in my brain. Because I have learned, again and again, that silence is not safety either.

Wondering If It’s Just Me: Internalised Gaslighting and the Demand to Be Gracious

Even after the harm is named—after the jolt, the stillness, the unmistakable sense that something sacred has been disregarded—there’s a second wave that follows, quieter but no less damaging. It’s the voice that asks, Was it really that bad? Am I overreacting? Did I imagine it? This voice isn’t external—not anymore. It’s been internalised over time, layered in through repetition. The social conditioning that tells us, again and again, that what we’ve felt isn’t reliable, that what we’ve named isn’t valid unless someone else agrees.

For me, this part is almost worse than the original injury. Because it forces me into a kind of self-surveillance—questioning not only what happened, but whether I’m allowed to feel it. That’s the particular cruelty of gaslighting: it doesn’t just make you doubt your memory. It makes you doubt your capacity to perceive.

And if you’re trans, autistic, or both, you already live under suspicion. Your experience of the world is constantly framed as unreliable—your emotions too much, your perceptions too intense, your responses too inconvenient. You’re told, either directly or through a hundred small cues, that you are the problem. So when harm happens, the assumption is that you’ve misunderstood, misread, misjudged. That you’re being “too sensitive,” or “not giving people a chance.”

There’s a script that emerges from this—a script of enforced graciousness. You’re expected to smile through erasure, to correct gently, if at all. To act as though nothing happened, because acknowledging the wound would make others uncomfortable. There’s no allowance for the truth of your reaction, let alone space for it to be witnessed. You become the manager of everyone else’s comfort, even in your own undoing.

And this script isn’t new. It’s an inheritance. A continuation of the same emotional labour demanded of marginalised people throughout history. We are expected to absorb the harm, translate it into something palatable, and present it back with a smile. The wound is not to be mentioned unless it can be made educational. Even then, only if it’s delivered in the soft language of empathy for the person who caused it. Their good intentions always outweigh your experience.

This is how the gaslighting system sustains itself: by placing the burden of proof on the person who’s already been hurt, and by demanding that we respond not with clarity, but with caution. With care. With grace. It is not enough to survive the harm. We are expected to rise above it. And when we don’t—when we dare to name it plainly—we are framed as the problem all over again.

But I’ve learned not to trust that voice anymore. The one that says maybe it wasn’t that bad. It’s not mine. It was trained into me by a world that wants my silence. And I’ve spent too long mistaking that silence for safety.

Researching Others’ Experiences: Solidarity in the Margins

Once I’ve felt the harm and questioned myself, the next part of my process begins—not with answers, but with a search for resonance. I don’t always have the words for what I’m experiencing at first. That’s the particular challenge of being an autistic gestalt language processor: I don’t enter situations with pre-scripted meaning. I learn by pattern, by echo, by piecing together fragments until something clicks. So I start looking—not for slogans or takes, but for others who’ve lived something adjacent. LinkedIn, BlueSky, Instagram—these become portals, not platforms. Sometimes it’s in the comments of another trans person’s post. Sometimes it’s in a thread of quiet recognition. Occasionally, it’s in the message that arrives a day later: “Yes. This. Me too.”

That’s when the fog begins to lift. Once I know others have felt it too, I can begin shaping my inquiry. I don’t enter research as an outsider—I come with the wound. And I come with access, thanks to the perpetual library login attached to my doctorate. It’s one of the few privileges I use to its full capacity. I dive into the databases, search for the pattern under keywords that shift as I read. I chase citations sideways and backwards. When I find something that feels useful, I track down open versions—Google Scholar, ResearchGate, university sites—because I don’t want what I’ve found to live behind a paywall. This part of the process is deeply autistic in the best way: absorbing, immersive, intentional. And it’s shaped by the ethic of not just proving myself right, but stress-testing what I’ve found. I want to know if the null hypothesis holds. I want to know where the pattern breaks—if it ever does.

What I’ve found, repeatedly, is this: refusal to use someone’s name or pronouns is not confusion. It is structured, repeated, and taught. There is research—growing and cross-disciplinary—that affirms what many of us have known from lived experience: misgendering isn’t random. It’s patterned. And it serves a function.

Studies show that even when misgendering is not intended as a personal attack, it is upheld by systemic binary gender norms that are deeply embedded in cultural and institutional structures (Argyriou, 2021). These norms aren’t just passive—they’re coded into healthcare forms, government records, school databases. The system assumes gender as a binary and defaults accordingly, making it harder to see trans and non-binary people as real.

But beyond the structural is the interpersonal. Some misgendering is deliberate—weaponised as a tool of social exclusion. Edmonds and Pino (2023) call this “designedly intentional misgendering,” used in conversation to marginalise or discredit transgender people. This tracks with what I’ve felt: not a mistake, but a correction. A form of disciplining. Of saying: You may say who you are, but I will say what matters.

And it rarely exists in isolation. Corpus-based linguistic studies have shown that misgendering often co-occurs with other forms of verbal aggression or transphobic rhetoric, especially online, where the line between “debate” and harm is so often erased (Requena, 2024).

Of course, there are situations where misgendering is unintentional—where someone lacks the information or isn’t supported by the systems around them. Many institutions fail to provide tools or training that would help people get it right, especially in educational or bureaucratic settings (Woods & Smith, 2023). In multilingual contexts, there’s also the added complexity of language structure—sometimes what looks like misgendering is actually interference from another linguistic system, not malice (Simpson & Dewaele, 2019). I hold space for those nuances. But I also hold firm: unintentional harm is still harm. And the refusal to correct it—once someone has asked—crosses into another realm.

Because ultimately, misgendering isn’t just about language. It’s about belief. Some refusals come from a deeper place—ideological resistance. A moral insistence that trans identities are illegitimate, that acknowledging us threatens the speaker’s worldview. Kapusta (2016) identifies this as moral contestation—where misgendering is not just an error, but an act of enforcement, a refusal to participate in what the speaker sees as a lie.

That’s what this stage of my process reveals: misgendering, especially when repeated and uncorrected, is not a passive oversight. It is a performance of power. One backed by culture, by structure, by theology. And knowing that changes everything. Because if it’s taught, it can be untaught. If it’s repeated, it can be disrupted. And if it’s systemic, then resistance must be systemic too.

Discovering Systemic Patterns: Refusal as Doctrine

Misgendering is often dismissed as a simple mistake—a slip of the tongue, an accident of habit. But when it happens repeatedly, even after correction, it stops functioning as error and begins operating as belief. The refusal to use someone’s correct name or pronouns, especially when that information has been clearly offered, is not about confusion. It is about control. It’s not that people don’t know—it’s that they do, and choose otherwise.

This refusal reveals a worldview in which gender is not fluid, contextual, or self-determined, but fixed, assigned, and policed. It’s a performance, not of linguistic clumsiness, but of dominance. Designedly intentional misgendering doesn’t simply misname—it disciplines. It places the speaker in a position of authority and the target in one of deviation. Misgendering becomes a signal to others as much as to the person being addressed: This identity is not real. This person is to be corrected. This deviation is not permitted. It enacts harm that is more than social; it is epistemic, undermining a person’s right to define themselves, their reality, their place in the world. The act says: I know what you are, and you don’t.

This insistence on fixed identity is rooted in a theological structure that predates most of our modern institutions, but still lives inside them. Calvinism, in particular, has deeply shaped Western notions of order, discipline, and identity. It is a theology of binaries—saved or damned, good or evil, male or female. Under this logic, everything must have its place, and every place must be visibly marked. Identity, then, is not just internal—it must be performed correctly, according to the codes. Gender becomes a moral category, and deviation from its prescribed forms is viewed as sin.

When someone refuses to recognise a pronoun, or insists on deadnaming someone even after being corrected, they are not simply rejecting information—they are reenacting this theology. It is not about speech, but about submission. About forcing the other back into recognisable, compliant categories. It is ritual punishment masquerading as misunderstanding. A secular continuation of spiritual discipline.

And it does not stop at the personal. The colonial project brought this theology with it—not only through churches and doctrine, but through language itself. Many Indigenous cultures had gender systems that were expansive, relational, and unbound by binary. Their languages often reflected this, using pronouns that were non-gendered, or avoiding gender markers altogether. These systems were not seen as inferior, but as natural—until missionaries arrived. Through colonial education, the binary was imposed, often violently. Children were beaten for speaking their own languages, their identities rewritten in the grammar of empire. The shift was not just religious—it was linguistic. Pronouns became a battleground. Language was conscripted into the work of erasure.

That legacy remains. English and other colonial languages still act as tools of classification and surveillance. Our documents, our forms, our school systems—all demand that gender be fixed, visible, and binary. Even in digital spaces, identity must be declared in narrow terms. This is not neutral design—it is a continuation of a project that began with the belief that some truths must be overwritten for order to prevail.

So when someone misgenders me, especially after being told not to, I no longer see it as ignorance. I see it as belief—an act of faith in a system that cannot abide ambiguity. A ritual performance of a world that has always needed people like me to either disappear or be punished for staying visible.

Writing Toward Understanding and Creating Alternatives: Language as a Living Act

This is where the pattern always brings me. Not to answers, but to articulation. Not to neat resolution, but to the place where language begins to take shape again—not as enforcement, but as offering. Because this pattern of mine, messy and nonlinear as it is, was never just personal. It is communal. It is resistant. It’s how many of us who were never meant to survive inside these systems have learned to see what’s really there—and to begin creating something different.

Where others refuse to learn, I refuse to forget. Refuse to adapt myself to a world that only recognises what it has already named. Refuse to contort my life to fit into drop-down menus, into pre-approved categories, into grammars that cannot hold the fullness of who I am. Their refusal is framed as neutrality—mine as disruption. But what I am refusing is not clarity or connection. What I am refusing is harm.

Language, for me, is not a static structure. It is not a closed loop. It is a living act—a space of relation, possibility, and choice. It is shaped in the moment we decide to listen. When someone tells you who they are, when they offer a name, a pronoun, a way of being addressed, what they are giving you is not a demand. It is an invitation. You can accept it, and step into relation—or you can decline, and reassert the system. That choice says nothing about the person speaking. But it says everything about the world you are choosing to help build.

And so I will keep writing—not as proof of my existence, but as evidence of the world I’m trying to live into. A world where difference isn’t discipline-worthy. Where being unclassifiable doesn’t mean being unworthy. Where language stretches, reshapes, and responds—not to enforce correctness, but to honour presence.

If I were to imagine a confession from the reader who clings most tightly to their categories, it might sound something like this:

“Forgive me, for I have refused to update my mental schema. I feared that your existence might unravel the tightly bound gospel of categories I inherited. I was taught that truth was fixed, that words were laws, that identity was revealed only by obedience. I mistook your self-naming as rebellion, when in fact it was reverence. I was afraid that if I said your name, I might begin to see differently. And I wasn’t ready for what that might undo.”

But I am. I am ready. Because I have already been undone. And what I’m building now is not a return—but a beginning.

Final Thoughts …

This began, as so much of my learning does, not with certainty but with unease. A comment here, a dismissal there—a sense that something wasn’t sitting right. That something needed closer attention. Not because it was dramatic or overtly cruel, but because it fit the shape of harm I’ve come to recognise in my body before I can name it. What followed was the pattern I now trust: sensing, doubting, seeking, uncovering, and writing—not as reaction, but as inquiry. As method. As survival. This is how I understand the world. This is how I unmask systems that prefer to stay invisible.

That process brought me here—not just to the question of why people misgender, but to what that refusal reveals. Because the pattern doesn’t just help me name harm—it helps me locate its architecture. And what I found, again, is that misgendering is not about forgetfulness. It’s not an innocent slip. It’s a ritual embedded in something older and larger—a structure that uses language to enforce its worldview. A worldview shaped by binaries, maintained by repetition, and justified by a theology that demands compliance.

Misgendering, then, is not merely interpersonal. It is doctrinal. It insists that gender is fixed and visible, that deviation is error, that names must reflect assigned categories. It disciplines. It punishes. It reasserts control. And when those who enact it are corrected—gently, clearly, humanly—their refusal to change is not neutral. It is a defence of the system itself.

But I do not process harm the way that system wants me to. I do not suppress it, rationalise it, or explain it away. I follow it. I follow it into questions, into conversations, into research, into writing. And what that journey has taught me is that harm is not always loud. Sometimes it’s quiet, systemic, sanctioned. And yet still, it can be named. Still, it can be refused.

Because my refusal is not obstruction—it’s neuroqueering. It’s the deliberate choice to unwrite the scripts I was never meant to follow. Where others refuse to learn, I refuse to conform. I refuse to contort my way of knowing to fit systems built without me in mind. I refuse to treat silence as survival when what’s needed is speech, even if the words arrive sideways or out of order. In this refusal, I’m not resisting clarity—I’m cultivating a different kind of truth. One rooted in relation, in emergence, in language that moves with us rather than against us.

So here is where I draw the line—not with answers, but with intention.
I don’t need you to understand everything about me. I only need you to stop pretending that your refusal is neutral. It isn’t. It’s a theology. And I choose not to worship at that altar.