On being sir'd while showing boobies (cleavage).

[Dee Marshall]

this topic just made me want to say I <3 boobs, well other peoples, mine can go away haha sorry to take this off track

I'll send you my address in a tell and you can mail them to me. I'll find some use for them. 

[jussmoi4nao]

It depends on how otherwise femme you are, really. Boobs aren't going to make or break you. Even as a gay boy,  I was flat chested (obvs) and i'd wear tight shirts and still get gendered female.

By contrast, if a big, hairy deep voiced FtM showed some boobage I would still prolly gender him male.

Face, voice, mannerisms etc make the biggest difference in passing.

[swatch]

Either way I still don't get it misgendering in the face of actual cleavage.

Extreme caricature here, but "his name is Robert Paulson".

[TerriT]

IDK, some of the men at work have bigger boobs than I do though.

[Ryan55]

I'll send you my address in a tell and you can mail them to me. I'll find some use for them. 

lol if I could, I would

[MacG]

I can't always bind, and with a large chest, I still get sir'ed almost as often as when binding. Though I'd prefer sir over ma'am for myself.
I dress in guy clothes.

[Adam (birkin)]

It's happened to me simply because the cashier doesn't even look up and from there peripheral vision sees that I'm tall and gender me male. One morning i was dress in a tight turtleneck showing off my boobs, long red hair tied very feminine in the back and passing 100%. I was at Dunkin'Donuts and the woman cashier didn't even look up and called me sir when taking my order. (She never looked up once.) The woman (who was tall, but not as tall as me) next to me looked at the cashier like she was crazy. I looked at the woman next to me and just shrugged my shoulder like WTF. The woman next to me responded the same way. Then when it was her time to order, she did it again calling her sir. She looked at me and said that we must all be sir today or something. Then the next woman in line had pink hair and she gets ma'amed. The person handing us our order call us both miss, but it certainly left us wondering how much this cashier was paying attention and we both just laughed it off.

This has me thinking. I stopped getting misgendered in May 2013, and was never called ma'am after that...except once (maybe twice)...but the one time really stuck out to me because I was seen as 100% male for the past 6 months and then got a big fat ma'am. I was waiting at the counter, looking down at my stuff, and the woman said "I can help you here ma'am." Totally cut like a knife and I got into it with her. But I wonder, if it had more to do with my height. If she just saw a short person, and mostly the top of my head, and that led her to think ma'am when she wasn't really looking.

[Carrie Liz]

Just to show that boobs don't necessarily matter in terms of gendering... just take a look at the character Robert Paulson from "Fight Club." Gigantic boobs, still looks completely male. (Probably gets stared at a lot, though.)

I've found from personal experience that the most important aspect of gendering someone is hair, second most important is clothing, then body frame/size, then face and clothing, then other things like voice if you still can't tell, which can override them all. Women with short hair get misgendered a lot. Men with long hair get misgendered a lot. Tall women get mistakenly read as trans sometimes. Women with large builds are sometimes misgendered. And guys with very slight builds can indeed be mistaken for lesbians sometimes. It happens.

[JaneNicole2013]

I would agree with Carrie...hair may make a big difference. I was out the other day showing my lady bumps (tank top and loose fitting shirt) but no wig (used a bandana to cover my bald spot) or make up and I'm still trying to find my female voice and I got sir'd. It was disappointing, but understandable since I was going for a more andro look than anything. It's probably the whole picture and probably a more sub-conscious thing than anything.

Jane

[beren_ts]

It depends on how otherwise femme you are, really. Boobs aren't going to make or break you. Even as a gay boy,  I was flat chested (obvs) and i'd wear tight shirts and still get gendered female.

By contrast, if a big, hairy deep voiced FtM showed some boobage I would still prolly gender him male.

Face, voice, mannerisms etc make the biggest difference in passing.

This. You can have the biggest boobs, but if the rest is out of proportion like abbyxo mentioned, you will still gendered as a male. And some trans women are just trying to hard. Like hip swinging. I mean unless you have hips naturally don't walk like that. I think thats the biggest giveaway.

[beren_ts]

Thats what i mean :

[Carrie Liz]

Thats what i mean :

Sigh... yet another video about a trans person that speaks as if our femininity is all completely from surgery, barely talks at all about dysphoria, and thus perpetuates the myth that our femininity is "fake" and just for the purpose of getting attention...

(To be fair, I think it's possible that the filmmakers deliberately asked her to dress that way and walk that way, and staged the videos of her shopping and strutting around just to give them the footage they were looking for. Judging by how they framed this story, doing the stereotypical "sensationalizing transition" and "focusing on the most stereotypically frivolous aspects of her femininity" angle, I wouldn't be surprised.)

[FalseHybridPrincess]

Sigh... yet another video about a trans person that speaks as if our femininity is all completely from surgery, barely talks at all about dysphoria, and thus perpetuates the myth that our femininity is "fake" and just for the purpose of getting attention...

*sigh*

maybe some people do it for attention...I guess though they must have other issues...

[LittleEmily24]

Speaking from the other side of the discussion (not related to passing): sometimes you'll just run into people who are overly critical and will notice features about you that will instantly identify you in their minds as male. and as a result they will have this ignorant and stubborn unwillingness to acknowledge your true female nature and will literally rationalize that they are forced to "sir"  you because it defies their very nature.

I have cisfemale friends who have been sir'd because a guy was CONVINCED that if a girl has any sort of facial peach fuzz, SHES A MAN! Some people are just effing idiots who can't be bothered to be respectful because some arbitrary or insignificant self-morality "doesn't allow them" to acknowledge your true gender; or to put it simply, they're full of Bull-manure.

So while there are other things besides boobs that = passability, sometimes people are just inexplicably and unwavering in their ability to be dim-witted or narrow-minded. I cant for the life of me imagine how I was able to go out with smooth shaven legs, flowy hair, dressed casually female, full makeup, even with a female voice only to have the waitress INSTANTLY "sir" me without even so much as looking at my face. Its like... really?

Hell, to some people its impossible to believe that any woman could ever be taller than 5'3" so I guess a trip to Germany would cause cardiac arrest in them.

I'm sorry, im rambling now lol