Remembering the pronoun preference of a person you know is, of course, an entirely separate issue from knowing how to refer to a complete stranger whom you're talking about, not to.
Regarding the former issue, what struck me is that Sasha's parents had trouble with the pronoun, but not with Sasha's change of personal name. My guess is that the brain circuits that keep proper names and pronouns work differently from each other.
I think the difference that you're seeing is not a generational one, not when the older people involved are those like you or Sasha's parents, or even me, who are open to accepting varying ways of being human. I think it's a difference of age. Younger people's minds are more flexible to rewiring. I find that, while I accept "they" as a way of referring to an unspecified individual, my brain rebels against using it for a specified person. It also rebels against invented pronouns, and I first saw those over 30 years ago. It's not that I think they're wrong, it's that I'm terrified of making faux pas by failing to internalize them. The older I get, the more glitches I make even when not culturally charged. For instance, I'm stunned at how I keep calling the new Gary Oldman movie Greatest Hour even though I know perfectly well the title is Darkest Hour.
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Regarding the former issue, what struck me is that Sasha's parents had trouble with the pronoun, but not with Sasha's change of personal name. My guess is that the brain circuits that keep proper names and pronouns work differently from each other.
I think the difference that you're seeing is not a generational one, not when the older people involved are those like you or Sasha's parents, or even me, who are open to accepting varying ways of being human. I think it's a difference of age. Younger people's minds are more flexible to rewiring. I find that, while I accept "they" as a way of referring to an unspecified individual, my brain rebels against using it for a specified person. It also rebels against invented pronouns, and I first saw those over 30 years ago. It's not that I think they're wrong, it's that I'm terrified of making faux pas by failing to internalize them. The older I get, the more glitches I make even when not culturally charged. For instance, I'm stunned at how I keep calling the new Gary Oldman movie Greatest Hour even though I know perfectly well the title is Darkest Hour.