This guide to challenging incorrect pronouns and misgendering covers what it means to misgender someone and how it happens in practice, how it feels to be misgendered, what you should do if you make a mistake, and how you can respond to misgendering by others.

If someone's gender identity has not been disclosed to us, we should use gender-neutral language such as 'they/them' pronouns to ensure that we do not misgender them.

The use of gendered language in relation to someone's partner(s), or potential partner(s), can display assumptions about someone's sexual orientation and/or gender identity. Gender-neutral language such as 'partner' and 'spouse' can be used, in place of gendered terms like 'girlfriend' or 'husband', where someone's gender identity and sexual orientation has not been disclosed.

Our use of gendered language in relation to certain experiences or traits can be exclusionary of trans and intersex people. For example, if we refer exclusively to women when talking about experiences such as menstruation and pregnancy, or use 'women' to be interchangeable in meaning with the group of people who have those experiences. This excludes trans men and non-binary people who also experience them, and also 'others' women who don't. More precise, inclusive language recognises that the experience is not unique to women, or universal for women. For example, in a parental leave policy we could refer 'pregnant employees' rather than 'women'.

Another common example is using gender in place of a more accurate description of anatomy, attributes or experiences under discussion. For example, using 'men' to refer to those who are at risk from a condition affecting the prostate, whereas it would be more accurate and inclusive to refer to 'people with a prostate', since not all men have a prostate and not everyone that has a prostate is a man. Similarly, a genetic condition might affect 'those with XY chromosomes' (rather than 'men'), since not all men have XY chromosomes and not everyone with XY chromosomes is a man.

Consider whether you actually mean 'men' or 'women', or whether you are using an imprecise proxy for a different subset of people. If the latter, take a moment to consider the more precise way of defining the group by their experience, or their traits.

Some language contributes to non-binary erasure, where it implies that there are only two genders (male and female). This includes phrases such as:

• "ladies and gentlemen" and "men and women", which can be replaced with terms like "everyone"
• "either gender" or "both genders", which can be replaced with "any gender" or "all genders"
• "the opposite gender" and "the other gender", which can be replaced with "another gender" or "a different gender"