Some of a person’s attributes are externally determined, and some are internally derived. When a person tells you their name, you accept it, and saying “you look more like a Ronnie than a John” is considered rude. When you’re looking to go on a rollercoaster with a minimum height limit, you can’t get over the limit by saying that you consider yourself to be tall enough.

Some attributes you may go along with what a person says for the sake of politeness. Eye colour and hair colour are both attributes that a person may have strong opinions on, and going for “silver” over “grey” or “strawberry blond” over “light brown” isn’t too big of an ask, if it makes them happier.

In previous decades, pronouns and gender have been externally determined: you looked at someone, guessed their gender, and used the appropriate pronouns. There were only two options, and most people fit cleanly into one or the other, so mistakes were rarely made, and easily corrected. Women occasionally crossdressed to obtain education or positions – for example, Margaret King or James Barry in the early 1800s where medical education was forbidden to women.

More recently, there have been movements to allow people to state their own gender and pronouns. Gender has gone beyond the classic two to allow for “non-binary” or “agender” (and far, far beyond in some areas); similarly pronoun choice has expanded from “he” and “she” to “they”, “it”, “ey” and other neopronouns. Even among dissidents, this rarely poses an issue: it is not often that people are in a position to hear themselves being discussed in the third person, so the pronoun choice is simply unknown. Objectors can also contort their speech to avoid pronouns altogether, which is difficult to discern unless focused on (and sometimes an expressed preference – “don’t use pronouns for me”).

Some people say that to use a pronoun that doesn’t match a person’s appearance would be lying. This isn’t something we say about names: Chinese people often take an English name, and this is used preferably as it’s easier to pronounce. Often, this is simply a denial that people should be able to choose pronouns at all, instead of having them be chosen: this is tricky to argue for or against, because it makes things clear that it’s a split in perception of how things should be, and admits the fully generalisable argument that you if you don’t let people do whatever they want to do, or refuse to talk or refer to them as they like, you’re being mean and should be excluded from polite society.