YES to all of your frustrations. And then YES some more.
"Problem is: I can't get that from strangers, and that's who I actually want it from." Exactly. And, any genderfuck you add to your presentation only gets you read as queer, rather than getting you read as having a non-binary gender. You really can't win.
I only use gender-neutral pronouns and even for me the effort threshold of correcting strangers is always higher than just rolling with it. It's frustrating, but there never seems to be a good place to derail a conversation that's already gone many stops past pronoun town with a paragraph about my identity.
(These two thoughts are probably highly related. If you want to be identified as something that other folks don't even know exists, maybe it'd be a good idea to widely broadcast your identity, even to strangers. Maybe they'd think twice and give somebody else that space the next time.)
no subject
"Problem is: I can't get that from strangers, and that's who I actually want it from." Exactly. And, any genderfuck you add to your presentation only gets you read as queer, rather than getting you read as having a non-binary gender. You really can't win.
I only use gender-neutral pronouns and even for me the effort threshold of correcting strangers is always higher than just rolling with it. It's frustrating, but there never seems to be a good place to derail a conversation that's already gone many stops past pronoun town with a paragraph about my identity.
(These two thoughts are probably highly related. If you want to be identified as something that other folks don't even know exists, maybe it'd be a good idea to widely broadcast your identity, even to strangers. Maybe they'd think twice and give somebody else that space the next time.)