As a follow-up to an earlier post in this thread, and the advice that followed, especially from @downtide and more recently from @bookish1:
I became well enough acquainted with the particular mid-twenties young person I was describing above (looking very girlish and smooth-faced and yet wearing masculine clothes, no makeup, and short hair, chubby overall but completely flat-chested, having no hips, walking like a boy, and with a voice pitched midrange) to know his-or-her name and have a few chats. The person uses an ordinary genderless adjective as a name (a descriptor along the lines of “cool,” “strong,” and “clever”), so there’s no help there.
In one conversation, this young person happened to tell me—with considerable indignation—how in a public place a child had pointed at him-or-her and asked its mother loudly, “Is that a boy or a girl?” I said, “Well, to be fair, you do cultivate an ambiguous appearance.”
“That’s true,” he or she said, leaving me completely unenlightened and extremely reluctant to ask.
That’s the part that blows me away: the person does everything possible to conceal the answer to the question and then gets angry when people don’t know it. To me that’s a passive-aggressive trap. I’d like to respect a person’s preferences, but not past the point where I have to spend an undue amount of energy playing their guessing game and practicing exquisite delicacy to avoid giving the offense they seem so eager to take.