It kind of irks me to be spoken for, so to say, so just for the record: me right here, I wear dresses, and I especially like to wear long ones. We do exist!

Also, any inconvenience is a worthy trade-off for vastly minimised accidental flashing risks, for me personally. I like dresses, but I'm not always good at remembering I'm wearing one 😅

No offense, but I'd say your claim of 'not uncommon' is rather inaccurate, and with an additional 'r' at the end, that would be even fewer people. Honestly, in all my life I've neither met nor heard of someone named either variant. (Though for the first one, a quick wikipedia search brings up two apparently-notable-enough people, a quick general search suggests overall it's less than 500 out of the 84 million Germans. No result for the r-variant, and one news story about a guy struggling with his name being the German equivalent.)

I suppose "Niggemann" or similar would be more common, but also not terribly so, from my experience.

Intersex people are also caught in all the anti-trans legislation.

That's something I wasn't aware of (and have the priviledge not to think about) - do you happen to know more about how they are impacted, or any good resources for reading up on it?

Just instinctually, it sounds like a conundrum for all anti-transgender legal 'logic'. Those people are biologically not exclusively male or female (to my understanding, corrections welcome), so which part of "you have to be your rEaL gender" applies to them? Or is being born intersex just intrinsically criminal?

Awesome things I appreciate and/or identify with:

• cookies
• the blue monster that chomps them down
• cats

Surprisingly, so far my clever play on words has rarely been taken anywhere I signed up, so I use it for any accounts I don't mind being link-able.

I am reminded of when, back in school, I considered an exchange year in the US. Exchange agencies hosted a bunch of info/prep events for potential exchangees, often with former participants sharing their experiences. Probably the most unsettling piece of advice was to expect seemingly absurd questions from students there. Examples we were given included whether we have fridges here, or electricity in general, or if Hitler's still around. (To clarify, this was late 2000s, I'm from Central Europe - hence Hitler - and those students would've been about 16.) I also learned that "American History" is a complete, stand-alone high school subject and, from what I understood, isn’t necessarily backed up by a "General History"-type class, so that made the idea of internet-era teens asking such things somewhat more conceivable.

Going on that, I really hope you get an answer on the phone question. On the off chance that they are not just trolling, that would be some fascinating insight.

Also, obligatory-but-involuntary WhatsApp sucks so much!