I don't recall if we discussed this when it happened, but it's come up a lot at work recently and I think it's worth discussing again:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...der-son-a-girl/
The short version is that a young trans boy attempted suicide and was hospitalized. While in the hospital, several of the staff members repeatedly called him by female pronouns, his deadname, and even joked that he was just "too pretty a little girl" to treat like a boy. He later reattempted and succeeded in killing himself.
While not everyone has a story quite this tragic, many trans people deal with microaggressions like this every day. Little comments that seem like no big deal to the jokester but that feel like violent assaults on their identity to the victim. It's stories like this that make me feel extremely strongly about not letting people trivialize trans identities or make them into jokes. Something that seems tiny to one person is one of a thousand papercuts to someone right on the edge.
The good news is, my work has some connections to this hospital an we are working with them both on staffing policies and training and on ways to protect patients' trans status and prior information from staff who it's not relevant to. However, it's fucking sad that it's necessary that we have to do that. We should all be working at a society where people don't view the lives of others as a joke. Not everyone needs to be an activist (and I don't blame people for avoiding it given the target that so clearly goes on your back if you refuse to be quiet), but the reality is that if even one person in that hospital had spoken up to their coworkers or escalated the behavior that boy might still be alive. You don't need to be marching in the streets, but please don't be a bystander either!