Sorry that this is long, hope you are in the mood for reading. :)
But I also sympathize with you a lot and want to give you finer details of where I stand.
> are they trying to be rude or is it an honest mistake?
Obviously I can't generalize but I've been around several types of LGBT people a good amount of times in my life (trans included) and yes, almost always it's an honest mistake. Almost all of us are brought up with a rather binary definition of sexes / genders in mind and any rebellion against that is bound to fail... or at least will need decades, if not centuries, to eventually succeed.
What is my central point boils down to: don't take misgendering personally -- unless it's a crowd of killers chasing you down an alley with knives and bats of course, or people who tell you in the face they'll sabotage an effort of yours because of what you are.
These are the villains. These are the people we as a society must push back against. Everyone else are just people that are there to do an activity with you and to them misgendering is a non-issue.
That's not a malicious behavior and it saddens me when I see trans people furiously arguing that it is (not saying that you do; I've met such however, and I've seen them on Twitter as well). People (a) do an honest mistake and (b) people wouldn't care to correct it even if you told them so you might as well just shrug it off most of the time because the reverse would be a huge drain of time and energy (as I think we both agree).
A fact that a good amount of LGBT people I spoke with find strange: people usually don't are about you at all ("you" being any random person out there, not just LGBT). But start arguing for your cause -- especially when nobody actually brought it up -- and people are likely to side against you. Again, not because they hate you, but because they feel an issue is brought into light out of the blue and especially because the arguers usually try very hard to paint everybody else around them as villains.
Unsurprisingly, people don't react well to that. But that's sadly a much bigger issue that goes well beyond LGBT rights; in many public discourses there are the people that will say "if you don't speak up at all about issue X then you are a part of the problem" which is, of course, where any constructive dialogue falls apart with little hope of it getting back on track. :(
> In professional and personal circles, I'm generally more likely to correct people, because I'm signalling a way to be polite to me, and I've been polite to them, and it's how we establish mutual respect, not "special treatment."
Some boundaries need to be put and respected from both sides. If somebody told me "address me as ze/zir" (random Tumblr example) then I will laugh and I will not feel bad about it. To me that's requiring special treatment, bordering to spoiled entitlement even. On the other side of the argument, if you e.g. have physical manly features but prefer a female pronoun -- I can very easily respect that and remember to do it. Those are my boundaries as a fairly regular hetero guy. Please understand that I don't mean to offend; all my responses are only aimed at informing you how the regular folk feels and thinks about LGBT people. Maybe that can help you and make your life better. I hope.
> In the exact same way, for example, you might feel frustrated if someone intentionally decided to use a semi-mocking pronunciation of your name. In both cases, it signals that a person has decided to be cruel to you for petty and unknowable reasons.
Oh, absolutely. I just figured I'll start ignoring it and my demeanor and way of treating these people (usually cold and professional tone, completely ignoring the joke they were trying to make and quickly getting to the matter at hand that I have to discuss with them) put them right back in their place. To me it boiled down to energy expenditure vs. potential reward; I figured the reward is not worth the time and energy so if somebody tries to be disrespectful by using the mocking pronunciations of my name, I just start being laser-focused on whatever I am there to do with that person. I've made friends that way, paradoxically. Later these people told me "I respect a guy who ignores an obvious trolling attempt and puts things back where they should be". We the people can function in such counter-intuitive ways, for the better or worse.
> I guess my big takeaway is that you deserve as much dignity and respect in the way people pronounce your name as I do for my pronouns, and I hope you can find some understanding/empathy in the parallels between our experiences.
I hope you appreciate my being honest -- I completely agree with some understanding and empathy, yes, but as mentioned above, there are boundaries beyond which the common folk will strongly disagree with you and will even start targeting you. Not ideal, I know. :(
I personally wouldn't target anyone (and I never had) but I too have my boundaries about what I'd respect and what I wouldn't.
A constructive dialogue only happens when both sides are well-represented e.g. many people feel that trans people demand too much. However, the same regular folk will not only tolerate but will also ACTIVELY SUPPORT AND DEFEND YOU if they feel you don't go overboard and are just trying to go about your life without stopping anybody else from doing the same.
In conclusion, I sincerely hope that you understand that my main goal is to provide you with the path of the least resistance into wider acceptance by everyone else. Just telling you how a normal hetero guy feels about LGBT rights. Too often this group of people shoots themselves in the foot by making villains out of the regular people that would never attack them in any way. And these same people can be your dear friends and fight for your rights.
In conclusion, I believe the LGBT group really needs to learn how to make friends. My observation from talking to a lot of people is that most folk out there is tolerant and even supportive.