BERKELEY >> Kris Gambardella didn’t know Feral Pines, one of the 36 people who died in the Dec. 2 Ghost Ship fire in Oakland. But when Pines, a 29-year-old transgender woman, was identified in official accounts by the male name she had been given at birth, Gambardella, who is a trans man, took it personally.

The fire was horrible enough. Then, adding insult to injury, the last official word about Pines referred to her by a gender that she’d fought to leave in the past, Gambardella said.

“It definitely made me think, what if it had been me?” said the 26-year-old San Francisco resident. “It’s a reminder to the trans community that even in a place as progressive as the Bay Area, a lot of people don’t get it.”

Gambardella and others in the LGBTQ community say the episode highlights the larger problem of misgendering. That’s when someone uses a pronoun or other term to address someone else that does not reflect that person’s chosen gender.

As societal attitudes about what constitutes male and female have changed, there has been a growing acceptance of gender as a fluid rather than fixed concept. Millennials are more likely to identify themselves on a gender spectrum. On many college campuses, students are now asked for their pronouns of choice.

CHANGING TIMES

Yet there are lots of people, especially those who grew up at a time when there were boys and girls and nothing in between, who aren’t hip to the new gender-fluid times. They still make assumptions about someone’s gender based on physical appearance or the sex a person was assigned at birth. They stumble over pronouns such as “they” (someone who doesn’t identify male or female) or misuse “she” and “he” for transgender people.

When people encounter Jazz Lyles, a 34-year-old engineer from Berkeley, they see an African-American woman. However, Lyles doesn’t identify with the female gender and uses the “they” pronoun.

“It allows me to be myself, which is super important, rather than trying to fit into some binary category,” they said.

Lyles hasn’t been able to convince their aunt, who is in her 60s, to use it.

“She’s says, ‘I don’t think it’s really that important for me to get it,’ ” Lyles said. “I said I’m not asking you to adopt a whole different code of thinking, just call me by how I identify because that’s the same respect that I would accord you.”

It takes mental retraining for people to learn the right gender language and how to use it.

“I feel like I’ve really had to stretch,” said Anne Mitchell, a peer group facilitator at Pacific Center for Human Growth in Berkeley, a LGBTQ center in the Bay Area.

DICTIONARY CHANGES

Earlier this year, Merriam-Webster dictionary added several new words, including genderqueer (“a person whose gender identity cannot be categorized as solely male or female”) and cisgender (“a person whose gender identity corresponds to the sex the person had or was identified with at birth”).

Yet although the words are in the dictionary, many of them aren’t common knowledge outside the LGBTQ community itself. And beyond language, people continue to make erroneous assumptions.

“For cisgendered people we don’t have to say, ‘call me she or he or they’ because people read us and our gender, so we have that privilege,” Mitchell said.

Erin Armstrong, a 32-year-old graduate student at Mills College, came out as a trans woman in 2005. She transitioned early and has been able to “pass” as a woman. Yet she still sometimes gets misgendered.

When Mills implemented a new policy last year allowing anyone who identified as female to apply to its women-only undergraduate program, Armstrong was a well-known trans activist on campus. Yet in one of her classes, another student referred to her as “he.”

“I wasn’t able to pay attention for the rest of the class, I was thinking is it the way I’m sitting, is my makeup wrong?” Armstrong said. “I hate being in that space, but I don’t have a lot of control over it.”

LEARNING EXPERIENCE

Armstrong decided to use the encounter as a learning experience. She corrected the student after class, then invited her to lunch to discuss the issue. The student apologized and accepted her offer.

Hannah Rogge, 22, an artist who lives in Berkeley and doesn’t identify with either male or female gender, uses the they pronoun. Rogge says they have to make split decisions about when to make a point of letting people know their gender.

“It’s always a little bit awkward, like ‘Do I bring this up for a job interview, do I need the cashier to understand my gender?’” said Rogge. “It’s not really that great that she calls me ma’am, but do I really want to put energy into that today?”

Rogge and Lyles, their partner, wear buttons promoting the use of the they pronoun. Rogge also uses they in their email signoff.

“I think a lot of the work is for people who use the pronouns to get their friends and family and co-workers to use them and take a moment to acknowledge that gender non-conforming people exist,” Rogge said. “It’s difficult, but I try to remind myself that there is also something wonderful too about getting to be a part of that.”