QuoteLiving stealth is showing the world who you were meant to be perceived as to begin with, it's showing the part of you that used to be hidden.
The whole question of "stealth" takes on an entirely different perspective when you know a child who was mis-assigned at birth and has lived as herself since she was around 3-1/2. She's almost a teen now, and has never identified as a boy, or as transgender, or trans or...well, anything but a girl. As far as she is concerned she just has a wrong body part and will need medical intervention at puberty. The whole concept of "stealth" itself gets flipped upside down & inside out and becomes meaningless when someone has never *had* to live as anyone other than themselves. It's no longer living stealth any more than cis people live in stealth.
I sometimes, often, don't pass; my daughter always does. I completely, painfully grok the concept of "passing" and long to be stealth but I realize that is because it was denied me for much of my life so far. That longing and insecurity is part of my experience of the world. She has no idea what I'm talking about the few times I've mentioned it on the advice of a child psych (note: very few child psychs 'get' trans, much less 'get' trans kids, and much, much less 'get' trans families). But all I can do is live as myself; that's what other people who happen to be cis people do, day in and day out. And I've found that the more I do so, the more people accept me for who I am and who I identify as. The closer to stealth I become.
In the end, there are people in this world who will get hassled or far worse for being of certain bloodlines, for having certain social or political views or just for being different, or insisting on being "trouble" (read: not accepting the status quo). If not for how some cis people treat trans people out of ignorance and ego, there would be no need to worry about being stealth. In the right crowd, the author of the piece could have said, "when I used to get my period" and the conversation would simply keep flowing. That tells me "stealth" is not about us. And that in turn indicates me that perhaps there is no such thing as living stealth. Maybe it's just living authentically, as much as safety will allow, and keeping private things that polite people don't discuss anyway, be they trans or cis.
