If you present yourself in appearance and behavior in line with the cultural expectations of, say, a masculine male and someone for the first time refers to you as 'he', you can't get bent out of shape. I'd also say expectations that people are going to be able to overcome years of neural training to remember not only your name but new pronoun is not very realistic (that is, most people have a hard enough time remembering someone's name after a brief meeting, now you have to remember name+pronoun pairs? It's extra mental resources that most humans just don't have). So for this case, I'm all for the concept of more neutral pronouns. But what I'm not in support of is people being able to present as one stereotype but demand that people refer to them as belonging to another group - because this is basically setting people up for failure. If you identify as an Apple fan but carry nothing around but Windows and Android gear, how would anyone ever know?
I mean, it's sorta one of those instances where it's important to remember gender identity is something you give to yourself. It's your identity, not anyone else's. Me, I don't care if you call me a boy if you saw me out in public and I didn't introduce myself to you. If that's who you think I am, then I guess... that's what I look like? I don't really care. To me, I'm happy enough that I can call myself agender, and no-one can take that away from me. I'd prefer they/them, of course, but I don't really expect that of people, as a general rule. People are often disappointing and unreliable, and I see no reason why they won't be as such when dealing with pronouns.
I think Rolan once said that most nonbinary people don't care that much about pronouns, so I don't think I'm unique in holding such an opinion. It's hard to quantify what proportion of nonbinary people flip their shit at being referred to with gendered pronouns by strangers (it's another thing if it was friends or family), but I don't imagine it to be particularly large. I can't imagine that the people who do get offended are particularly pleasant to deal with. Even if it was people you trust... I don't believe it's worth it to get worked up over such an error. There are better things in life than your pronouns.
I dunno, maybe I'm just a hard person to offend. I'd still recommend trying to respect people's pronouns, just out of decency, but I can see why you'd want to make assumptions about the gender of others based on their looks. It was an easy assumption to make, and frankly, it's still a good assumption to make for most people. Nonbinary people and those whose looks do not conform to their gender identity are a small minority.
Also incidentally I don't think it's possible to have "no" cultural gender. Society has basically put all types of human behavior on the masculine/feminine scale. So you can be somewhere in the middle on that scale, or you can have a mix of traits that span the whole scale, but I don't think that makes you without gender - it just makes you not strongly masculine or feminine. Just as in those personality tests for being extroverts or introverts - you may not be introverted or extroverted, but you still have a personality. So I think you do still have a gender - it just doesn't fit in the nice pulldown categories. It's not "null" - it's "none of the above."
There's a basis of "I don't care, and I refuse to care" when it comes to my approach to gender. It's not that far of a jump for me. In 2016, I fucked up so hard, that I had to tear down my brain and rebuild it from the ground up. One of the things that I identified as "wrong" is that I was a bit of a creep when it came to girls (blame sexual attraction, that uncontrollable beast). So then, I was like "What if I just treated people the same regardless of gender?". So I did. Tore apart any gendered structures, and stopped caring about other people's genders.
And, you wanna know something, it
works. Ignoring gender outright means that you have to talk to people as people. There are a few instances where I trip up because of this. Just last night, some girls called me to borrow my bicycle pump, so I offered to let them pick up the pump at my room. Problem is, I completely forgot they were girls, and that girls are not allowed near the boys' dorms, so then they asked me to wait outside, near the dorms. But other than those few instances, people in general respect you more if you treat them as people, rather than merely things to get attracted to. Eliminating gender is just how I do it. At least, that how I see it. Maybe it's just my better social skills that helped me, and I'm misattributing things.
But if you say "oh, other peoples' gender doesn't matter", then at some point, you have to ask yourself "does
my gender matter?". And that led to me changing my gender to "null", because I refuse to give a shit about gender. The idea of calling myself a man didn't feel right to me, because that would mean that I actually care, which is patently false.
So yeah, I suppose it is a "none of the above" situation, but then again, I refuse to care. I don't like the idea of searching around for a gender that "suits" me. Too boring. There's better things in life. Erasing it and saying "alright, I don't have a gender" is just the fastest way of symbolizing that I don't care.