There is a strange role that trans people often get handed whether we asked for it or not. The walking symbol. The living lesson. The person who is apparently always giving feedback, always “making it political”, always “too sensitive” or “too demanding”. The Angry Trans Totem that certain corners of the world expect us to be.

What people rarely see is the context.
Life is not a hunt for slights. It is a procession of tiny interactions that each require a decision: swallow the small but sharp thing in front of you, or spend some of your energy carefully correcting someone who did not expect to be corrected, and then manage their reaction on top of it.

Most of the time, I just let it go. Truly.
Trans people are some of the most tolerant creatures alive because the alternative is constant self-defence. But sometimes the wrong moment meets the wrong interaction and the whole thing becomes heavier than it should be. That is not overreaction, it is accumulated load, and the fact the system makes you carry it.

So this is the heart of what I am arguing:

People-facing and people-interacting services should be designed to reduce the number of interactions where someone is forced to guess another person’s preferred salutation, and to create simple low-energy ways for people to tell you who they are. Not demanding inclusion by magic, but building it into the structure so nobody has to improvise under pressure.

I am using three examples here, Uber, a hotel reception, and an internal B2B travel provider, because they highlight different pieces of the same story.

A quick caveat about me, and why these examples are broader than my own life

My documents are mostly aligned. My passport says F. I do not have a Gender Recognition Certificate because I am not volunteering to be added to a government-curated list of trans and non binary people for the rest of my days (this is where an older version of me shakes a fist at the sky).

My situation is a little different. I have very few physical opportunities to pass as a woman in the way strangers expect, but interestingly, many people do not read me as trans either. Instead they reach for a safe and non gendered explanation that lets them keep their worldview tidy. Unusual. Quirky. Interestingly dressed. Possibly doing something thematic. People prefer an explanation that does not require a shift in their understanding of salutation or gender.

Their brain is doing the very human thing of trying to match a complex reality to a very limited library of templates. They avoid assuming anything about how I want to be addressed, which is sometimes good and sometimes confusing, and I am left doing the work of steering the interaction back to something functional. Correct, do not correct, smooth the moment, or simply move on.

So the stories in this piece are mixtures. Mine, those of friends, those of colleagues, and the predictable ways systems fail when they assume salutation is obvious and uncontested.

Inclusion is a systems problem, not a politeness problem - me, just now

A lot of well meaning guidance focuses on individual behaviour. Remember pronouns, do not assume, be respectful. These are important, but they are not enough. They are like running a whole railway by reminding drivers to concentrate harder. You need signals, you need good defaults, you need guardrails.

There are two big systems levers here.

1. Reduce the number of interactions where someone has to guess another person’s preferred salutation.
2. When a salutation or title matters, give people a gentle, low stakes way to communicate what they prefer.

None of this is ideological. It is basic error reduction. Though I can imagine someone twisting this into some ideological attack on free speech.

You also have to remember that the people on the other side of these interactions bring their own histories with them. Many speak English as a second or third language, and were taught that “sir” and “ma’am” are the correct polite English building blocks. Many come from cultures where honorifics feel essential. Many are trying sincerely to be respectful.

This is where the system needs to help them, too.

1 Uber, names, and multilingual guesswork

Uber already has many elements of a good experience. A profile, a name on the screen, a little semi-scripted introduction. But the reality is messier.

The name shown to the driver may be a legal or billing name rather than the one a rider uses. Some drivers default to gendered honorifics because that is what their training told them was polite. Many drivers speak English as a foreign language and rely on simple, memorised scripts. Some do not read me as trans or as a woman, and place me into a floating category of “unusual person” which does not give them any clues about how to address me.

I am trying to reduce the risk of someone guessing my preferred salutation incorrectly, and they are trying to reduce the risk of sounding rude.

The system offers neither of us any help.

Small, reasonable design changes could fix most of this.

A display name that is actually used, plus an optional title or salutation, such as Liz or Dr James or something else entirely.

Basic training so that “Hello, are you Liz?” becomes the default greeting.

Only show legal or billing names where they are required by policy or law.

The goal is not perfection, just fewer moments of unnecessary friction.

2 Hotel reception, tradition, and tidy scripts

Hotel receptions are little theatres shaped by older expectations. The software is old, the scripts are older, and the politeness norms have fossilised around gendered titles.

If you arrive tired, this can become awkward quickly.

Even if your ID says F, the person behind the desk may already have filed you in their mind under “unusual guest” or something similar, which means their first guess at a salutation is often incorrect. The recovery from that is where the trouble begins, especially if they panic a little and overcompensate.

Good design here is not complicated.

Default to neutral greetings. “Welcome, Liz James” works for everyone.

Make title fields optional and modern, including Mx, Dr, a free text field, or none at all.

Teach one calm recovery phrase. “Thanks for letting me know, I will update that.”

This avoids unnecessary guessing about preferred salutations, and it avoids the awkward apology spiral.

3 Internal B2B travel, paperwork, and the phone

Internal travel systems shape expectations across an organisation. If the system only stores outdated salutations or insists on legacy data structures, that limitation propagates everywhere. Hotels, conferences, airline agents, colleagues, all inherit the mismatch.

Some constraints around legal travel names are unavoidable, but many surrounding practices can be improved.

Keep legal names for tickets separate from names used internally.

Make preferred salutation or title a proper field with real weight.

Document a clear process for people whose details do not neatly align with older defaults, so that every trip does not become a small bureaucratic battle.

The phone introduces another issue. Many B2B services verify identity by voice, which means I end up listening to the moment the agent hears me speak and tries to reconcile the voice with the record in front of them. Often they ask me to confirm again, not because they are suspicious, but because their internal model of expected salutations and voices suddenly crashes.

It is confusion, not malice, but the burden of repair lands on me.

Cis-guilt, Apologies and Extra Emotional Labour

Not sure if you can tell from my writing style, topics of interest or just general vibe, I think about systems and systems of systems all the live long day. I like to understand the processes, emergent or intended. So when something jarring occurs (and importantly I have the energy to actually spare), I go digging to understand why.

What I find is that: When I ask about a process, it gets taken as a complaint, which in turn becomes an apology loop.

Another predictable pattern appears here. When something goes wrong, I am not trying to file a complaint. I am asking what process produced the outcome. I want to know if there is a lever that can be adjusted, a corner that can be smoothed, a setting that can be modernised.

I am troubleshooting, not accusing.

But many organisations do not have a route for process questions, so everything is funnelled into the complaints pipeline. Once that happens, a chain reaction unfolds.

Staff become nervous.
Managers escalate.
Apologies arrive rapidly.

Those apologies show that the harm was not intentional. That is reassuring, but each apology still creates extra emotional work. I have to reassure the person that I am not angry, help them feel less awkward, and perform emotional tidying they did not mean to hand me.

I walked in asking “how did this happen”, and walked out helping other people soothe their own guilt.

Good systems design would prevent this entirely.

Lets pull all these threads and see what falls out.

The pattern is consistent.

People are not the problem.
Their scripts are the problem.
The systems that trained those scripts are the problem.

Removing unnecessary opportunities for people to guess someone’s preferred salutation is not radical, it is good risk reduction.
Providing a display name is just sensible UX.
Documenting common edge cases is basic operational competence.
Creating space for process questions that do not escalate into formal complaints is healthy governance.

These are not special favours for trans people.
They are normal improvements that help everyone.

They also stop me from being pushed into the “angry trans” archetype that people project onto us. When systems remove predictable friction points, I correct less, I relax more, and nobody spirals into guilt or defensive awkwardness.

Humans are imperfect, tired, distracted, and trying their best. Good systems design acknowledges this and lowers the stakes.

That is all I want. A world where the default path does not require me to carry the emotional bookkeeping for every interaction, and where strangers do not have to guess someone’s preferred salutation in real time for things to go smoothly.