"Truth-in-Love"

      "Using sex-based pronouns, rather than gender-based pronouns, is undoubtedly disruptive and likely offensive to most trans-identified people.  Such a move could close the door to a relationship with that person from the outset.  Yet, if I use pronouns that conflict with sex, I am assenting to an untruth.  More than assenting, in fact; through my own words I am actively participating in a lie. . . .
     "Whenever possible, I avoid pronouns when directly speaking with or writing about trans-identifying people, in order to avoid unnecessarily alienating someone I am called to love.  But I can’t go further than this.  Each time I think about making a full linguistic concession, something stops me.  I run into a hard boundary, a line my conscience has marked not in sand, but stone.  To call a male 'she' is a lie, an inversion of the reality that that word names, a reality I happen to belong to, one that I have not chosen, but that has chosen me.  I object to the very concept of preferred pronouns, because pronouns do not name a preference.  'She' names what I am, my female birthright, with all its blessings and burdens.  To give away that word would be a kind of betrayal:  of myself, my sex, and those bodily threads knit by nature and grace that bind us to Christ, and also to the earth, to all her teeming life."

     Abigail Favale, The genesis of gender:  a Christian theory (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, 2022), 206, 208.