AITA for confronting our internally transphobic friend (as two ftm people)?
Me (H) and my friend (E) are high schoolers. We have a friend, (V) and she used to be rather transphobic. She used to say things to the effect of "trans people go against God's gift" and other things such as that. I had not talked to her for a while, until the beginning of the school year and we recently became close friends. I realized last year that I was a transgender man, and E has known they were a trans man for a while and preferred to say he is non-binary. I don't have anyone to talk to this about because most of my friends used to be friends with V, or I just don't have the time to talk to them.
I try to believe that people can change, and they can sometimes, but it's hard to see with V. She used to say blatantly transphobic stuff, and when I asked her about it this year she said "I've come to realize that trans people don't affect me in any way, so it's not really my business" BUT if that were true, E and I wouldn't be writing this. E has recently came out as a trans man, and told V. V didn't say anything about it, but was okay with it. Over the course of a couple weeks, V has been corrected a lot of times and very recently, I corrected her. A few days later, V wanted to talk to us in class. We went into the hallway because we were doing group work. When we finished doing work, V seemed upset so I asked her about it and she was being dodgy. She said to get E and we would talk about it, so I got E because he had gone back into the classroom.
V explained to us that she felt that when we were correcting her on our proper pronouns, it was aggressive and that she felt like it wasn't that big of a deal anyways. This was really frustrating to E, and he said to her: "I don't care if you feel like it's aggressive, it's still our pronouns. You should be able to respect that" and I think he said other stuff as well, though I can't remember what else exactly. He was really angry about it, and V said, "I'm new to this and I've never really known any trans people until recently, so it's really hard for me" and E said she was making excuses for it and walked back into the classroom.
It was just me and V and I said: "I know it's hard for you, but it's hard for us too, and it's really cool when you correctly refer to us. Being trans is a spectrum so these things affect people differently. It's really important to E" and maybe a few other things. After that, V started crying and she said something such as: "All of this over stupid pronouns" and "God why can't it be easier? If only you were here" and grabbed her stuff. The bell was about to ring so I went back to the classroom to grab my stuff, and tell E about it. We had a sleepover last night and E is still at my house currently, which is how we got to posting this.
E sent a text confronting her and we are still waiting for a response. AITA?
Posted Dec 6, 2025, 6:22 PM UTC