The Trans History of the Wild West

I think it does, albeit slowly and not necessarily without backlash. The alternative to having LGBT people assert their own identity is to have their identity asserted for them, by people who may not understand them or who may be hostile to them, and that sort of thing never goes well.

And the desired goal is to remove the stigma of LGBT existence and have it be accepted as being normal. One way to facilitate that normalization is for LGBT people to simply not be hidden, and to participate in society, and the most obvious way to do that is as part of a culture that can be easily recognized by an outgroup.

It's progress for people to simply complain about there being too much gay representation in the media, rather than for it to be illegal to represent it as anything but an illness (as was the case under the Hayes code.)

>I'm part of society, but I for sure aint doing that, and I don't really want to be put in the same box with people who do.

This seems to trip a lot of people up when discussions about the intersections of race, gender and culture come up. It's difficult to argue that, for instance, toxic aspects of masculinity can exist without people interpreting that as a claim that all masculinity is toxic and that, therefore, all men are toxic. Likewise, discussing rape culture leads to people dismissing the concept entirely because they, themselves, are not rapists. Yet both are criticisms of group dynamics, systems of power and identity politics, not of individuals or of all members of a class.

Individuals can differ in the way they respond to the influences of society, but its influence still exists. Speaking at the level of abstractions rather than individuals is important because those abstractions are what form people's concepts of normality, decency and justice, and because people act both as individuals and as conformist (or non-conformist) members of a group. Men who don't display toxic masculinity are still participants in the culture of masculinity, and men who don't rape are still participants in rape culture. Women participate in both as well.

Likewise, it's entirely possible to correctly claim that society puts hostile labels on LGBT groups, and for that not to apply to you personally. If so, that's fine, but not relevant, and there's no need to be defensive about the premise.

Some people might even take it as a potential clue that Julie could be non-binary, because of how much we expect gender-matched pronouns at that point. (Not saying they should, just that they might.)

So in terms of the order we learn things about people we've never met (when it's not directly relevant), we expect gender much earlier than many other attributes. It mostly reflects our values as a society, as language often does, but that's kind of my point.

It's a linguistic quirk of English that "Can you hand this to [that female person]" is accepted and natural. On first principles it shouldn't be.

(It is interesting IMO that Japanese has a pronoun for "she," and it's a compound word that literally translates as "that woman." It only developed as a pronoun in the last century or so, from the influence of Weatern works which had he/she or equivalent pronouns.)

Also, as someone currently leaving in a place rich with Scousers I would put forward ‘yous’ as a second-person plural pronoun that rolls off the tongue a bit better (and, I would conjecture, makes more intuitive sense for learners of English).

In German we have "sie" which is both third-person singular female, third-person plural, and when written "Sie" also a formal second-person singular/plural. It works just fine.