I am unsure if the unwanted physical touching is because I am female-bodied or because I look androgynous in an attractive sort of way.
I have been yelled at by strangers on a bus for wearing shorts without shaved legs. I refuse to go to swimming pools because women will actively say, "Eeewww!" and worse, because of my sasquatch legs and unshaven armpits.
My body odor is mysteriously masculine. A lot of otherwise straight women will sniff me and go, "Mmmm." But I have, in more than one workplace, been told to bathe more often and wear deodorant. In fact I do both, and unhostile observers find that I smell 'man-lite' and significantly less strong than male co-workers. I just don't smell like a woman.
When I worked in a factory assembly line I was laid off. I said to the manager, "I see the numbers, I know I assemble more parts in a day than anybody else in my position on the line, so why am I laid off when people who don't perform as well have been retained?" She said, "You don't make this a fun place to work." I assume what she really meant is, "You do not fart around with the girls giggling and talking about 'Ally McBeal' (a television show that was popular at the time) nor do you fart around with the boys giggling and talking about women's butts."
When I worked doing computer stuff, I was harrassed into quitting shortly after the business owners decided to allow clients to visit the shop. I am certain they didn't want their customers to see my weird-looking self.
I have very long hair and slick it back with pomade and braid it tightly. The patent-leather result is androgynous yet formal, it's quite common among both male and female members of the philharmonic, not to mention Stephen Fry. But when I first started at my current job my boss told me my hair was greasy and I needed to wash it more often. For quite a while she kept staring at me as if trying to figure out why I, someone she percieves as a woman, don't look quite right, and every couple of weeks she would take me aside with some bizzare complaint about my appearance. This was rather insulting, as her brains seemed inevitably to translate "looks odd" to "is dirty." Or informal. Once she told me that my clothes were 'a little too casual' and I was quite puzzled, because I wear a uniform that's the same as everybody else's -- the only difference is that my surgical scrubs are in subdued solid colours rather than bright pastels or prints of flowers or cartoon cats. Now that she's used to seeing me all the time, my boss has stopped peering at me with that amusing-yet-annoying confused expression, or mentioning how I look.
