Quote from: Joanna Dark on April 21, 2014, 10:13:57 PM
The reason it doesn't make sense is because it doesn't make sense. You can look 100 percent cis but not pass because you don't have confidence? I'm sorry that line doesn't work for me. I have very little self esteem and yet pass all the time. Every time. I mean to believe otherise is to belive that there is an inherent difference between cis women and trans women and that a trans woman can never look as good as a cis woman. Therefore, a cis woman can have low self esteem and never be called a man, but the second a trans woman flinches, she's clocked...sorry the whole notion just hurts my head. It's spinning in circles. If you pass, you pass. That simple. If you voice doesn't pass, and you pass, you may no longer pass. if both your voice and face and body pass, you pass and can grab your crotch and say suck my fat one and people will laugh. I once told the police I was adjusting my testicles not hiding drugs and they told me to watch my crude little mouth. I wasn't even trying to pass yet passed. Go figure.
The thing is, Joanna, that not all of us do pass completely visually. We might be more in the middle, and people can't necessarily tell whether we are women or men by first glace. And then confidence and other gender cues do become very important.
It goes in a heirarchy. First people look at you. If they can't tell what gender you are from that, that's when they start to look for other cues like how we walk, how we speak, our mannerisms, our voices, etc.
There were many times where I was looking at an extremely butch police officer, and couldn't tell whether she was a man or a woman, and it wasn't until she opened her mouth to say something that I mentally said to myself "oh, okay, she's a woman."
So you're right, for those who pass as cis visually, it is nearly impossible to not pass through mannerisms and other things. You may seem abrasive or weird, but people won't question your gender. But again, a lot of us, and just about everyone who is early in transition (which are generally the people we're giving advice to in the first place,) do not have that privilege. We have various body features that probably make people question us, and therefore they're looking for secondary gender cues in order to determine what we are. And in that early-in-transition state where you don't visually conform to the gender norm, confidence is EVERYTHING.
For example... I did not conform to the gender norm as a middle schooler. And people ripped me apart because of it, because I was a sensitive kid without self-confidence. And therefore when people teased me about my appearance, I was emotionally-fragile, and so people knew that they could get away with it. And everyone quarantined me as a weirdo, and I was not accepted. In college, however, there was a girl who basically you could NOT tell what gender she was just by looking at her. She wore long basketball shorts, baggy t-shirts, and huge shoes all the time, kept her hair short, and had no visual body curves. It took me almost an entire day to figure out what her gender was. (She does still identify as female.) The thing is, though, unlike me, she wasn't sensitive about it. She had more of what I'll call the "gay attitude" of always having some witty remark to give back to people who questioned her, and very much a social presence of "this is who I am. My lack of gender conformity doesn't matter to me, why the hell should it matter to anyone else either?" She was just so confident, so completely not caring what other people thought about her. And with that kind of mindset, it basically became impossible to say anything about her appearance and mannerisms, because you knew that she wouldn't care.
So yeah... although it won't change how people are seeing you, it will DEFINITELY change how they treat you. If you're sensitive and lack self-confidence like me, people take that as a free invitation to mock you and treat you like a weirdo. If you're like my college friend, though, people won't give two cares about it, because they'll accept that it's just who you are.
