How to get out of an uncomfortable egg culture situation with this one simple trick.
Real talk: Calling people eggs is a violation of the egg prime directive, and is considered invalidating as you are trying to say that a person is not the gender they identify as, that their identity is invalid. Don’t call people eggs, like ever, it’s extremely uncool.
Someone doesn’t have to be doing things as bad as the transphobes to still be doing something that isn’t ideal, or something that makes other people uncomfortable in a way that has nothing to do with transphobia. It feels bad for anyone to get told they’re doing gender wrong, even if the person doing it is trying to be helpful.
It doesn’t mean anyone doing that is evil, it just means gender is a messy thing to talk about and understand. People can’t always see that what is very affirming and clarifying for them may be constraining for someone else.
That’s a fair point of view, but I am still thrown that most people see the word “egg” as something outsiders use exclusively to coerce or out people since by the time such discourse reaches me it has devolved into people saying to never even consider the idea of respectfully discussing the idea of transing genders with anyone (rather than being a shorthand for “before I realized”).
Anecdotally I reached a stage in figuring things out where I knew what I was but was to batshit terrified to tell anyone, and anyone even considering discussing such a thing around me would’ve felt like a lifeline bordering on divine intervention. Instead I unintentionally played gender-identity chicken with a whole friend group who believed in the egg prime directive for like 8 months because my whole life is a long stream of sitcom-esque idiot plots.