One of my coworkers confided in me that he was gay. He told me when one of my other coworkers who sits in the area was on break because the other coworker and one of the supervisors have said some pretty homophobic things, i.e. ‘I would kill my son if he turned out gay’ etc.
Well, anyway, the gay guy was talking about how he suspects his significant other was cheating on him because of some emails he received, and him and the guy across from me were discussing this, and I occasionally was participating in the conversation. Anyway, talking about the gay guy’s S.O. I accidentally used ‘he’ as the pronoun - the gay guy was doing a good job of using gender neutral pronouns, and the other guy was assuming he was talking about a girl and was referring to him as ‘she’, and the gay guy didn’t correct him. I was hoping that my word choice was not noticed, but the other guy started using masculine pronouns after I said it. It doesn’t seem to have hurt anybody yet, they are still talking and the gay guy started saying ‘he’ in reference to his boyfriend, until the supervisor came over to talk, and went back to gender-neutral phrasing.
I kinda feel like an ass, I will probably apologize later for the slip of the tongue.