"I would," Loen says, trying to be appeasing. "The gender thing was there before the power. It was actually how I first noticed the power manifesting."

"It answered me, if it doesn't care how I talk why should you?" Boots says with an illustrative gesture at Loen.

"It?"

"...I do care if you call me 'it,' though." Points at self. "He." Points at Glam. "She."

"Isn't it important to you? You said yourself that if someone called you 'she' it'd irritate you, I feel like I have the right to be irritated as well. If it helps, I won't mind if you don't call me 'your majesty.'"

"Everybody can't just make up their own rules," says Boots. "That's not how it works, that's not how anything works. I didn't decide 'hey I want everybody to call me "he"'."

"Well, why not? If you decided to be called anything else because it made you much less uncomfortable or much happier, then I think it'd be pretty okay for me to have the minor inconvenience that is using a different pronoun to ensure your happiness."

"For that matter, I still don't prefer being called he or she most of the time, but that's the compromise I got with Yates."

"If everybody did your thing it'd be impossible to remember. I can't even keep track of you and there's twice as many of you now," says Boots.

"Well, everybody won't do my thing, this thing is done by less than 1% of the population. And the rule's pretty easy in my case: the one that looks like a boy is a boy, the one that looks like a girl is a girl." He gestures at himself and Glam as he says this. "And if there's someone you genuinely don't know or remember, using 'they' is actually a pretty good and grammatically-correct catch-all alternative."

"Most people don't really care if you slip up. Just, saying the wrong thing on purpose as opposed to because you forgot is hurtful, again just like calling you 'she' on purpose would be hurtful."

"I'm not confusing, it's not the same."

"Confusing or no, what it feels like is the same."

"Not everybody you meet has to make a big deal of caring about how you feel!"

"No, but her teammates should, at the very least," says Dauntless.

Dauntless +1. A thing Sadde has only thought about Lorica so far is being thought about Dauntless as well.

"Nobody here seems to care if I think it's stupid," Boots points out, "even my teammates."

"On any reasonable scale, stupid and hurtful don't really compare."

"I could say it was hurting me like," Boots gestures at Loen and Glam in lieu of coming up with a way to refer to them, "say it is, you've only got say-so to go on."

"Yes, you could. Are you going to?"

"Nobody'd give a shit," snorts Boots, "'cause I'm not some bullshit queer who wants protecting all the time."

"And that has earned you a write-up."

"No, there's no need, I don't really mind if he calls me queer, even if he is appallingly wrong about anyone wanting protecting."