There are many wrong things to say to a trans person. If this were an episode of Family Feud, “What’s your real name?” would come up with lots of votes, as would “Have you had The Surgery?” But recently, I was reminded of another statement, one that might not come to mind as quickly. I was reminded of the terror inspired by the statement, “Now we’re going to divide, by gender, into groups.”

Let me set the stage. I was at a talk about female sexuality. Specifically, we were discussing myths about the female orgasm. The organizers did their opening spiel and then explained that we would next be splitting into smaller groups for discussion. I was feeling optimistic at that moment—smaller groups are great—discussion is richer, everyone gets to talk. Unfortunately for my good cheer, a second later, in walked Trouble. The groups, the organizers explained, would be split by gender. They explained that guys and girls get different messages about female orgasms, so it was worth discussing them separately and then reconvening.

Everyone around me seems really on board with this idea. “All girl group means no stupid guys talking all the time,” say the girls. “All guy group means unabashed, upfront, sex talk,” say the boys. Meanwhile, I’m sitting in my seat agonizing over which group to go to. I’ve slumped down as far as I can in my chair, hoping that if I slide a little further, I’ll be able to disappear completely, rather than make this decision. If I go to the guys group, I have to settle in for a game of pretend play where I act as if I watched porn with my buddies at age 13 and went into sex with my first female partner completely ignorant of her anatomy. Alternatively, I could stick with the girls group, which is more likely to include discussion of issues relevant to my experience, but which comes with all sorts of confused and/or angry looks from women who don’t know trans men exist. Either option sounds absolutely miserable. At this point, I strongly consider walking out. The idea of faking it for guys (perhaps appropriate, in a discussion of the female orgasm) or feeling the brunt of girls’ questioning eyes are both way too far outside my concept of reasonable sacrifice to bother enduring.

Luckily, though it felt like it took forever, the facilitators came to the rescue! After allowing me to squirm for a painful ninety seconds, the speakers explained that we’d have three groups: guys, girls, and one group for those folks who didn’t want to meet within a gender segregated group. Moreover, trans folks were welcome to join any group which felt right. I hopped right over to the last group where I joined a handful of other gender misfits and enjoyed a fantastic discussion where I didn’t need to pretend I was anything I wasn’t, nor did I need to defend who I was. Glorious, really.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it usually ends up happening. One of the great struggles of being trans in American society is that everyone loves splitting folks up by gender and trans folks don’t always fit neatly into one gender or another. Am I a man? Yes. Absolutely. 100%. But was I a boy? Nope. I don’t have that experience at all. Sometimes it makes sense for me, or another trans guy, to go with the boys’ group—after all, we do walk through the world (to varying degrees, depending on the guy) as dudes. But other times, it makes no sense. When teachers, directors, speakers and organizers segregate groups by gender without providing a third option, many trans folks must agonize over two bad options.

What’s particularly frustrating is that giving a third option, in many cases, is entirely feasible. Yet it seldom happens. Instead, individuals throw trans folks into a painful balancing act between honesty and safety, deception and education, making what was meant to be a convenient division of bodies into an imposition of assumed gendered experiences onto every body in the room. This has myriad problematic consequences. In the more benign cases, it leads to the type of discomfort and frustration that I felt at that talk. But in more serious cases, it can have remarkably negative, long term consequences on the trans person. For instance, a trans person getting sex education may be directed to the wrong information, information that is useless to them, because the groups have been divided by gender, not sex.

I’m not advocating for sex based groups. But I do want meaningful choices. If it’s a talk about something that might apply differently to men and women, to bio female and bio male bodies, it’s time for folks to stop assuming that they can tell who in the audience belongs in each side of the room. And if it’s not a talk about gender or sex? For pete’s sake, stop dividing people by those categories. Use hair color, shirt color, mac vs. pc user, anything but gender! Because really? We trans folks have enough decisions to make about gender already. I’m just suggesting that you all help keep the unnecessary ones to a minimum.