Context: I am visiting a high school friend. Another friend who we both knew in high school has posted some interesting things recently. This friend has changed their name, but the friend I am visiting is not following them and is not aware of their transition.
How do I bring up this friend without dead naming them?
I read your other response but this still feels like gossip at this point. Would you want to be gossiped about?
That said, yes, that would be fine. Or since you know the person doesn’t know, you can just say, “Brett Morgan is a woman now; her name is Sarah Morgan.”
Apparently I require further clarification: two friends went to different colleges and moved to different parts of the country. They did not keep in contact with each other but I kept on contact with both of them. The content of the conversation was not the transition itself, it was sharing essentially a blog post related to the topic of conversation (e.g. “Oh yeah, did you see Sarah’s post about the new Wheel of Time show? Sarah Morgan? Used to go by Brett? Yeah, she came out as trans a couple years ago. Anyway, so what she was saying in this post was…”
If you define this as gossip then I honestly don’t know what wouldn’t be considered gossip any time any third party is brought into any conversation.
That’s exactly what they were telling you you should do. I think you may have made it sound like you were going to bring it up out of nowhere
Yeah, I didn’t want to write out an entire “so this is how my conversation went” at the start of the post because it’s mostly boring, but apparently not doing so makes me sound fishy.
I just wanted to make sure I could approach this situation the best way if it ever comes up again. Thank you.
Haha. I was looking for clarification because two days ago I saw someone I knew before transition and was curious if it was you. But I worked with this guy a few times, with his mom for years. You’re not talking about me, but the timing was too specific not to wonder.