Height plays an important part in being accepted as the sex you are presenting, if you can master female body language and walk then being in the height range 5'4" - 5'9" will greatly help getting you accepted. On the other hand, being within this height range won't help you at all if you don't know how to walk, gesture, sit, stand-up in a feminine manner, and do this consistently and without too much conscious thought. Some people will want to argue that I am buying into stereotypes and that not every woman is feminine in manner. This last part is true, but as we have to try and overcome things that undermine our ability to pass. I think that it is better to be thought as a perhaps overly feminine girl/woman than risk being 'read' on a regular basis. Genetic males/females can afford to occasionally express feminine/masculine behaviours merely because they are genetic males/females. We on the other hand can't.
I have been watching how teenage boys and smallish men move, walk, and express themselves. Many if not all would not pass as a girl or woman even dressed up and wearing a wig. Their gestures are wrong, the body-language wrong and their walk is also wrong, so being within the perceived height range of natal females clearly isn't enough. I find this very comforting. There is a world of difference between the way boys/men and girls/women walk. Females do walk slower than males and they also have a shorter stride. Women even walking fast still take short strides, short rapid strides is how they manage to walk fast, they don't lengthen their stride and march like men do. I'll give you an example of this. When I was at university it took me 25 minutes to walk to the station to get the train into the city. My sister walks to the station and it takes her 45 minutes. You can do a lot to help improve your passing by walking at a pace that feels too slow to you and consciously taking smaller strides - try imaging that you are wearing a tight skirt. Getting your walk right is essential, walking in a male manner will completely undermine everything else. Perhaps this is the reason very passable - in appearance - transsexuals get spotted? They post saying 'I just don't understand it at all. I am 5'6" 100lb with shoulder-length hair and all my girlfriends say that I completely pass, yet I am regularly read as male! I just don't get why I am read so often?' The vast majority of people never give how they walk a second's thought. Of course we are more conscious of such things, but even so it is possible to forget and slip into old male habits without noticing. Oh the terrible flaming hoops that we must jump through to be seen and accepted by others as female/male!
I saw an Australian documentary a few years ago about the South Seas cultural phenomenon of the fa'fafine(sp?). I loved that documentary. It showed big burly Samoans wearing make-up and dresses often very feminine dresses going about their business in the streets with nobody giving them a second thought. Nobody pointed, s->-bleeped-<-ed, or was confrontational. They were cheerfully addressed as 'Miss' by everyone without the slightest hint of condescension. One father told how his son came out as a fa'fafinine ' at 17 he just started wearing his (local costume) like a woman.' The acceptance was amazing, the father was neither angry, disappointed, or offended. There was no dragging her off to see doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, endocrinologists. Neither parent angrily denounced the other 'you mollycoddled him and you turned him into this!'
Freud wrote in 'Civilisation and its Discontents' that modern, industrial society
has to suppress the instincts and individualism to a very large degree for it's very survival. Our 9-5 Monday to Friday existence would collapse overnight if people were allowed full reign to their instincts and individuality. Civilisation makes a 'devil's pact' with its members. This pact is 'suppress your instincts etc, submit daily to external commands that often suit others but not you. In return for this largely colourless, sterile existence we will guarantee you food and shelter.' Too many individuals and our comfortable but lifeless world would collapse. Most people. weakened physically and psychologically by modern life realise that they couldn't cope with a free, colourful life, where there were NO guarantees. so life goes on as it does. Although our civilisation guarantees that no one shall starve to death or die of exposure from lack of shelter, this doesn't mean that everyone eats good nourishing food and lives in accommodation that feeds the human spirit. Think of all those people eating junk food, stodgy carbohydrates, and huge amounts of sugar because they earn minimum wage? Think of those people living in 'hoods, projects etc. The way to avoid all this is through obtaining a good (read high paying) job. This is why fathers and parents in general of mtf's get very worried and upset about us. A father shouts 'if you transition you'll never get a decent job with longterm prospects. You'll be stuck in dead-end shop or factory work.' I am in two minds about this argument. Lynn Conway has a website where she highlights transwomen 'success stories' so some of us are doing well for ourselves. However, if you read the biographies of these women you will notice that the majority of them are either self-employed or they are academics. Owning your own company and being a professor does count as success, but not all of us can do these things. I could go back and do a post=graduate degree but the fees are very high. I wouldn't get a loan as I have no credit history and I am very loathed to ask my mother to dip into her savings. My mother fears that I will end up working in some soulless , dead-end job earning pennies and she fears for my future. I fear being stuck as a man and being treated like a man. My mother's perhaps accurate fears for my future, combined my fear of being a man the rest of my life explains why I have consciously decided to think of myself as a teenage girl, and to quietly live as one. I get to escape having to hold down a job that combines the stress of a neurosurgeon with the pay scale of a video store clerk. I get fed clothed and housed just because I exist,(not exactly true as I am in charge of all the housework) and I don't have to hide who and what I am from an employer or my fellow employees for fear of scaring the horses. I am lucky that my mother has a very well paid(long hours, lots of stress) job and she can afford to indulge me. I am learning programming and studying to be a Linux system administrator so I am trying to beat the odds of ending up in a low paid, deeply uninteresting job. I would rather live with my mother and be a comfortable child for the rest of my life, than live a solitary stressed and penny pinching existence. Or to earn a comfortable salary but live as a man. I have heard that the computer world is trans-friendly and quite well paid so I am aiming to get into that. I am a geek girl and I know it.
Oh why can't we be as decent and as humane as the people of the South Pacific?
