Maria writes about how it felt to " throw away gender signals ingrained since birth, " and about the rejection she experienced from friends and relatives.
What you want to do is to be able to converse and communicate but perhaps if nobody is correcting you you might start to get little errors ingrained into your brain.
And yet we rarely speak with any degree of clarity or sincerity — out of fear of retribution, a dread of vulnerability, a pessimism as to the chances of being understood or perhaps stubbornly ingrained good manners.