So I’m Marja, trans woman, lesbian, more butch than femme. I’ve been active here for some time.
If you don’t have trouble with archaeopronouns, then si/ija/izos/izai are good.
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If I may make a suggestion, you might want to take a different approach when asking such questions. I can see you’re uncomfortable with asking this question, and are deflecting with humour and a lot of unnecessary context to help you get over that discomfort. I get it. But as a trans person, I get this all the time and it feels a lot like you’re asking me for emotional labour to help assuage your discomfort. It gets pretty old.
I suggest something like “Why are pronouns important?” or “Why do you use fae/faer?”. Direct, to the point, and doesn’t ask me to do more work to make you feel better about asking.
Why though? My pronouns are part of my identity, much like my name. They’re who I am, and like my name, you don’t know them without me telling you.
Avoid awkwardness for you, maybe. But how would you feel if someone refused to refer to you except by name? I can tell you that when someone does that to me, I disengage and get away from them since I know they’re not someone I can be safe with.
As for accidental insult, the vast majority of trans people I know realize this is not something many people deal with on a regular basis and we get it when you mess up. Just correct yourself without apology or explanation, and continue on. The viral videos and such you see of people going off about being misgendered are almost always someone intentionally misgendering them to the point they lose their cool. Then those videos are used to say “look how violent and unhinged trans women are, they’re dangerous!” It’s an intentional tactic to discredit us.
In short, identity. I am not a man. Like at all. I’m also not fully a woman. I am partially some third thing. I always knew he/him was wrong, but I accepted it since I was told I was a man by my family and the people in my life, and everything society had to say on the matter told me I was too. But I knew it wasn’t right. It was like having a pebble in my shoe. I could walk fine, but I was uncomfortable and I knew something was amiss but it wasn’t until I finally decided to transition and took that pesky pebble out that I realized how much better it felt without it.
I initially thought, since I wasn’t a man I must be a woman. And that fit a whole lot better than he/him. I felt free of the pebble and could walk with more confidence. But over time I realized there was still something wrong. Not a pebble, but like a few grains of sand. Just enough to cause minor discomfort if I walked too long.
I’d learned recently through my gender support group about nonbinary identities and started exploring that. I found a list of neopronouns and when I got to fae/faer it was like a lightbulb went off. I got someone to use them with me and suddenly it was like the most comfortable pair of shoes ever. I felt right.
With work.
I mean, I accept she/her because I know 99% of people have a hard time with fae/faer. Even most of my community does. She/her is ok, because I can deal with a little sand. I almost never get called fae, even by my wife and girlfriends. Because it goes against assumptions that are drilled into us by society from an extremely young age, it’s difficult to overcome that feeling of it being gramatically incorrect. But neopronouns are just as valid as he/she/they. Yes, they’re ‘made up’, but so is every word ever and language evolves constantly.
And when people do use fae/faer, it basically makes my month!
I agree 
Just keep that cold iron away from me please. 
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I can address this one somewhat. My youngest is trans, and the learning curve is… different. I find for someone I have just met, if they introduce themselves with “My name is … and my pronouns are …” I can deal pretty easily, especially if they are presenting in a way that my old eyes recognize as consistent. If not, I do stumble more, but try not to make a show of, just correct and move on. With someone that I knew as one name and pronoun, who is now something completely different, it is hard. I stumble frequently, misgender, deadname, and try to quickly correct and move on. She is great about not taking it as an affront, but I still feel badly. So how do you do it? By doing it. It is not the job of the individual to make me better at it, it is my job and my responsibility to make myself a better man, to respect the autonomy of other folks who have as much right to their name and image as I do.
One other issue, a bit tangential, is the resistance to singular “they,” which for me also is a go to if I am uncertain. Go back in time to your childhood:
You: “Mom! There is someone at the door!”
Mom: “What do they want?”
Behold! Singular “they” has always been, it only became an issue when it was a way to dehumanize a vulnerable population.
Wordier than I meant to be, but, well, I am known for that.
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My youngest is nonbinary and has asked to be referred to with they/them pronouns since they were 7 (10 now). I still mess up occasionally. They also accept she/her, but I know it’s because they don’t want to deal with correcting people all the time, which given they’re still a kid and schools are pretty dang gendered, I get.
Yeah, this is often an issue. No one bats an eye at they unless it’s referring to a nonbinary person.
But there is another way they is weaponized as well. My pronouns do not include they. If I tell you my pronouns, and you continue to use they, then you are misgendering me. Given I rarely tell people my actual pronouns in most spaces and ask to be referred to with she/her and present fairly high on the femme scale, it’s blatantly obvious that they are doing it intentionally. They is not a ‘get out of bigotry free’ card.
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I’m nonbinary. For pronouns I’ll sometimes say “they/them” and sometimes “he/they” (mostly meaning there’s no wrong pronoun to use for me). I’m not out about it at work or in official documents, although I have complained to a couple of organizations that required selecting a gendered title or an M or F in contexts where gender should be irrelevant.
For me, the experience has been:
- in young childhood I didn’t quite get why some stuff is reserved for girls and some for boys; I wanted to be a mermaid or a princess. I tended to admire certain feminine ideals more than masculine ones.
- of course a little older, I internalized gender-based boundaries/shame, and the idea that anything trans/gay/etc. was weird/icky/funny etc. And yet I still had this concept of having a sort of dual aspect, but mentally I walled that off from transness. Cognitive dissonance ahoy!
- in my 20s when I started playing a (very social, text-based) online RPG I made a female character, without really putting a lot of conscious thought into it. There was a lot of thought afterward though.
- in my late 30s, thanks to the internet I started to encounter ideas about gender that were new to me, and that unstuck some gears in my head. It took a while but I settled on “nonbinary” as the most appropriate catch-all term, and will totally accept “trans” as a very wide/inclusive umbrella description.
- I experimented briefly with trying to present myself in a more nonbinary way but I always felt self-conscious about it than comfortable. So I go with jeans/t-shirt and am sort of a Stealth Enby I guess. I’m not out at work or on official paperwork, it’s more just online and among close family and friends.
I don’t have a lot of physical dysphoria, but the body I would choose for myself if I could would be smaller and just barely on the fem side of androgynous.
Generally I don’t feel a strong association with masculinity and a lot of “guy stuff” is just alien/backwards to me. But I also don’t feel like I’m a woman. There are certain contexts where I feel more one way or the other, but mostly I feel like gender is just… irrelevant. I think that’s why I can be comfortable in a sort of vague/cryptic status. I’m attracted to feminine and somewhat androgynous-presenting people, but happily married to my (bisexual) wife.
I will second this. My brother transitioned almost 20 years ago – keeping the same short nickname, but I still catch myself throwing the wrong pronoun out there and quickly correcting myself. Likewise some other people I knew in the past as one gender who have transitioned or are using “they” now, now that I’m talking to and about them again, it’s tricky to break habits. It’s especially embarrassing being a more-or-less-they myself!
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:: nods ::
The reason I use they/them/any is because there are days where I’m running around in boy mode, other days when I’m running in girl mode, and other days when I’m doing some mashup of both styles of clothes. The joys (or curse?) of being genderfluid, I guess. 
It’s only been very recently (like in the last couple months) that I’ve worked up the mental spoons to go into the office in girl mode, and the response there has been positive; I either get compliments, or at least nothing overtly hateful, which I’ll call a win.
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Whilst i still promote myself as male, i think i’m not very male at all socially/mentally.
I do think if someone waved a wand and made me physically female, i’d likely just go with it.
That said, the semi-inbetween state can be fascinating as you see both sides to an extent. 
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Just realised something from my past too. Spent a lot of time at hospitals due to low testosterone levels and getting injected with it… I wonder if that is related?
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Wait, you were hospitalized for low testosterone? Yeah, this is one of those things that is very much in transition right now. What is “low” for testosterone is not really based on a fixed number, but on what is it you (the patient) want. For someone who is fine with less masculinization, “low” may be just fine. It’s once again, all clouds and boxes and letting people be themselves.
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Yep, specifically that at Great Ormond Street Hospital in london…
I remember the trips every few years…
Was a childrens hospital, i was too young to have an opinion at that time though… (for better or worse)
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Wow. Don’t know your age, but gonna guess you are closer to 50 than 30? There was a time when TPTB really worried about men having less masculinizing juice than the Ruskies. That is no longer a thing really, though.
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Quite close: 44
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One of the steps along the way to my coming out, someone asked if I could press a button to become a cis woman, would I press it? The answer was an emphatic YES
To me, that was confirmation that maybe yes, I was actually trans.
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My thoughts immediately went to Richard Green and his attempts to stop children from showing gender variant behaviour. He also worked with John Money, need I say more?
Does anyone know when he started working at Charing Cross? The best answer I have got so far is “sometime in the 80s, maybe”. If the NHS was willing to employ him at a GIC then they probably already bought into his abusive ‘treatment’ of children.
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I am now somewhat scared by my past that i don’t remember…
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Thank you so much for that reply. I now have a lot of things to think about.
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That’s why I created this thread. If you want to know more about any of that, you know where to find me. 
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I have heard of the button thought experiment from a very dear friend. In her case, even though it came with the stipulation that everyone would accept it, she didn’t think she would at first. It took some time to decide she wasn’t non-binary but a woman. (I am so very honored to have been trusted being there through the decision process.)
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I had daydreams when I was a kid of being put into this sarcophagus like machine that would turn me into a girl. The really odd part about that, looking back on it, is that (a) I didn’t think it was odd at the time, and (b) the light bulb didn’t go on until much later in life.
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