@COVxy Change begins with kindness, and with humanization.
It's not about distracting from the conversation, or bludgeoning you over the head for being offensive... It's just a helpful piece of advice for people like you who are already advocating for their cause.
It's important to humanize people. Calling transgender people "people" has been show to have a subtle psychological effect on people's attitudes, causing them to be less tribal in their thinking... Words are powerful like that, they can affect what's going on inside people's brains in ways that aren't obvious. Something as minor as saying "transgender people" can make anti-trans people slightly more receptive, more accepting, more persuadable. Conversely, calling them "transgendered" reinforces the fact that they're different, which has an alienating effect.
Moreover, it's a simple human kindness... Why not make a minor change if it doesn't effect you, and can help make other people feel less alienated? It's a simple thing we can do to increase the happiness quotient of the world.
The point is that there is a very important and very valid cause here, and you are undermining it by deliberately finding small offenses rather than paying attention to the important global conversation. By doing so, you are exactly the type of person that people who are anti-trans are going to point to justify their thoughts. Because you just make it look like a ridiculous movement filled with people deliberately looking for things to be offended about.
No matter how someone denotes a transgendered person, there's always going to be some argument you could make to the extent of its offensiveness. Manufacturing outrage over minute and unimportant issues takes away from the fact that there's an entire group of people out there that simply believe that transgenderism is just a delusional state. Maybe it's more worth convincing the public that transgenderism is a real condition before berating every other poster about minute denotion issues that are, quite frankly, manufactured.
transphobes are always going to be able to point to something to attempt to justify their thoughts, whether or not people insist on responding to dehumanizing shit directed towards trans people ---