Quote from: warlockmaker on July 21, 2017, 12:45:08 AMI now have recognized that in other societies the need to pass could be a life or death situation (mabe too dramatic). Passing is not just looks, its our behavior, movements, speech that are most visible. Being evaluated for passing by other TGs is not realistic, we are way too critical especially on the looks. I find so many cis with male featires that are never misgendered.
Yes, passing is all of these, and yes it's the gestalt presentation that matters, not any one particular feature. Most women don't have any masculine features, and a whole lot have one or two (including social features), but if even half of your features are masculine you will get clocked.
But in many parts of the US, passing goes beyond even this. Because in the US, with so many parochial people (who really believe the world is only six thousand years old), there is only the gender binary, and it's believed that one's genitals at birth determines "who you are" in a permanent, eternal sort of way. All of which to say is that even the
story of having transitioned can lead to misgendering... and other terrible consequences, besides.
So, there isn't even a way to ask for evaluation, because as soon as you do you're no longer passing. Not that there aren't a lot of very kind people here, who will sincerely do their best to help, but it's still not actually going to elicit the necessary feedback... which for me had to be gleaned over the long term anyway, as my path (not everyone's path) is be gendered female 100% from everyone I know or will know.
QuoteI think Devlyn hit it right, own the space you occupy, own the room you walk into with confidence as to who you are. No amount of surgery alone can help, but I understand that to own this space you need to feel confident. So have the surgeries but learn to act.. behave and mentally be a female or female tg.
Confidence, of course, yes. Absolutely crucial.
Learning to act, behave, and mentally be female is easier said than done, especially if transitioning after one's well into adulthood. A lot we have picked up subconsciously over the years, but there are some situations that we only learn through first-hand experience.
One (the most important, imo) is where we're in female-only space. The social dynamic of women without the presence of any men is different, and to learn this dynamic takes being in female-only spaces
as female (which necessarily, at least in the US, requires narrative non-disclosure). I find these social spaces to be much more relaxed, empathetic, and egalitarian on the whole. Not to say that women don't establish hierarchies among ourselves (because we do), but even these will have their own structures, not the structure of male-dominated spaces.
The other situation is how to "be" in a romantic relationship. A man who is alone with a woman he's romantically involved with is not going to behave as he does otherwise, and sometimes it takes a while to let go of some instincts that were accrued way back in the past. Even more difficult, I think, is being in a lesbian relationship, especially if we're older. Lesbian culture
is its own culture, and one of the trickiest things to absorb is that lesbians grew up in a culture that encouraged them to mate with men, and discouraged mating with women; lesbians tend to grow up repressed, and that's what they've had to overcome. We generally had the opposite experience, and so it can take some time to translate our own experience of repression (from a different vector) into one that makes sense in this social space.
I bring all this up because the admonition to have confidence can have an unintended consequence, namely that if you buy into that confidence completely, you might not have the humility to recognize what you still have to learn.
