It's a boy! Couple reveal sex of their 'gender neutral' kid after five years

[Ms. Toad]

172. I was basing it mostly on the mismatch between her words -

as I would understand them in the US, and the tone of voice, interactions I could see, and so on in the video.

There are actually very few times when I worry about pronouns. I've been out for more than 31 years. We've raised a child together (with both of us treated as moms in our relatively conservative community), and I now participate in an ungated online community using my real name where I regularly talk about being a lesbian (largely and kind of ironically to make the point that they need to permit the use of pseudonyms so I'm not the only identifiably LGBT member of that community). But, truth be told, people hear what they expect to hear. I went a full semester in law school using femalepronouns with someone who sat next to me every day. Sometime second semester I got tired of waiting for his ears to clear and expressly said, "My spouse is female." Another notable time I went to a support group for spouses of people with Alzheimer's - and didn't want to have to dance around pronouns when I needed support. So I tried to be very clear about pronouns and spouse. By the end of the evening I had a sister and a mother with Alzheimer's. They got the pronoun - but having gotten the pronouns, they couldn't process the relationship.

But every once in a while, when I am meeting someone in a setting where personal information is expected to be exchanged - but the important focus of the event is on something that touchy social issues would distract from, I avoid pronouns. It gets awkward fast.

So - no need to commiserate with me. I just have had the experience of having tried to refer to someone close to me without using gender pronouns and know how challenging it is - something that you wouldn't necessarily think was that hard unless you had really tried it before.