: Re: How to write about transgender issues while avoiding cognitive dissonance? As a writer, it is difficult to help your readers hold two dissonant ideas in their heads. This can occur when the

@Nickens642

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Without getting into social commentary, it seems to me that it's practically impossible to talk about the life of a transgender person without getting into the sort of paradoxical or at least confusing statements that you describe. If you say "Caitlyn Jenner ... she won a gold medal in the men's decathlon ...", this creates the pretty obvious anomaly of how a "she" could win the "men's" decathlon.
I suppose you could say that the same sort of paradox could come up with many life changes, and we typically resolve them by referring to the person by the "status" they held at the time the event occurred, with explanations of how and when that changed if necessary. To take a trivial example: If I am talking about the life of a gray-haired old man, and I tell you about something that happened when he went to elementary school 70 years ago, I don't say, "The gray-haired old man entered the school room ..." I say "The little boy entered the school room ...", because that's what he was then. Or likewise, if I was discussing the life of someone who immigrated to the U.S. from another country, I surely would not write, "So-and-so, a citizen of Austria, ran for governor of California", if he was not a citizen of Austria at the time that he ran. That would just create confusion, and arguably be simply false. I might say "a former citizen of Austria".
What name to use for someone who has changed their name can be problematic. Note this is not just an issue for transgender persons. Many non-transgender people have changed their names. I don't know of any good general rule there. If I was talking about someone who had changed his name, and the old name was relevant to the point, of course I'd have to use the old name. Like if I said, "Eric Jones found that anti-Semitism was so bad that many companies refused to hire him the instant they saw his name on a job application", such a statement would be baffling unless you knew that at the time he went by the name "Isaac Cohen". Or if I was quoting news stories or letters about a person, I might have to use the old name.
Of course if you're talking about the person's sex-change operations, it's not like any of this is going to slip by unnoticed. If a reader really said, "Wait, you say that Bruce Jenner had a sex-change operation and is now a woman, but now all of a sudden you're referring to him as 'she'? How did he become a 'she'? And who is this Caitlyn person who has suddenly appeared? Where did she come from? Is that his sister? I'm confused", well, obviously such a reader has completely missed the point of the narrative. I think you have to give the reader some credit for ability to comprehend what you're saying, or why are you even bothering to write this?
By the way, I'm not sure that "cognitive dissonance" is really the right term here. I understand that to mean the psychological stress caused by trying to hold contradictory beliefs simultaneously, like someone on the one hand being a committed racist but at the same time believing that his black neighbor Joe is a pleasant and intelligent person. The only potential I see for cognitive dissonance here is if someone on the one hand believes that Jenner is a man because he still has XY chromosomes, but on the other hand simultaneously believes that Jenner is a woman because she has been surgically altered to look like a woman. (Note how I subtly shifted the pronouns there to match the two cases ...) If someone believes that Jenner is now unquestionably a woman, or if someone believes that Jenner is still a man, than that person has no CG on the subject.

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