[gizmo686]

Your probably right. I think I was subconsiously biased by my linguistics background, as sementic gender and syntactic gender need not agree, so I don't consider the choice of pronoun to nessasarily imply a choice of meaning.

I can see how someone with a naive view of gramatical gender would disagree. (Actually, the fact that transgender people so consistantly change pronouns is somewhat problamatic to the prevailing linguistic thinking. I have never seen a fully satisfying account of why this happens. The best I have seen is that it is a sort of meta-linguistic social signal that the speaker accepts the transition, which does seem to fit nicely with calling it a form of political correctness).

I still see a difference in usage where the modern usage implies offensiveness; whereas the older usage implied a disagreement in policy. Eg, saying gender is determinex at birth could be PC in the classical sense because of, say, a policy allowing people to change the indication on their license, or psrticipate in other-gender's activities. Unless you want to claim that the taboo of mispronouning people is to support this type of policy (which it does do), then it wouldn't really fit. Although it is a very reasonable bit of sementic drift to include this in the classical meaning.