This TED Talk features journalist Stephen Petro, recorded live at TED Salon, up for debate 2019.

I want to start by telling you two things about myself before I get into the full talk.

And the first is that I've been writing about manners and civility for more than 20 years as a book author and as a magazine columnist.

The second is, my friends know to be very wary of inviting me over for dinner

because any fo'pah that happens at the table is likely to wind up in print.

So I'm watching, I can see back there, and I can see through the portals too.

So speaking of dinner parties, I want to take you back to 2015 and a dinner party that I went to.

To place this in time, this was when Caitlin Jenner was first coming out, shedding her identity as a Kardashian

and moving into her life as a transgender activist.

I wrote a column in People magazine at the time talking about the importance of names

and how names are our identity, and that to misuse them or not to use them erases us in a certain way.

And especially with Caitlin Jenner,

I talked about Caitlin, but also the use of her pronouns, her pronouns.

So I'm at this dinner, delicious, wonderful, fun,

when my host goes on a rant about Caitlin Jenner.

And she is saying that it is disrespectful for Caitlin Jenner to force

her to use a new name and to use these new pronouns. She's not, she's not buying it. And I'm listening.

And because I do meditation, I took my sacred pause before I responded.

And I reminded her that when she got married, she changed her name

and that she took the name of her husband.

And that's the name all of us now use.

We don't use it just because it's her legal name, but we use it because it's respectful.

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