Quote from: ImagineKate on March 23, 2015, 11:03:38 AM
And yeah, I get the part about bad hair, no makeup, walking the dog kind of clothes... to an extent. But to me "passing" is a spectrum. "Completely passing" is another but I think that is an impossibility.
I agree with this. If you make someone deliberately look for even the smallest cues for cis/trans, male/female, then I am sure many cis women would fail to 'pass' as well. e.g. have 1 trans woman stand in a queue with 10 cis women or 1 cis woman in a queue of 10 trans women, and ask which one is trans or cis, and I am sure many will goof up. It's just that most people do not even think about all these things on a day-to-day basis.
Our problem is that we are predisposed to look for these small cues, more in ourselves than in anyone else, and then keep beating ourselves over it.
After being here and on other sites with trans related info, I now know how chins, hairlines, eyes, eyebrows, cheeks etc are different for men and women and I might now look for these differences more deliberately. Earlier, I may have been subtly aware of it but not so much, and I come across many cis women every day who have some of these masculine features that we talk about here and yet they don't get mis-gendered simply because of their presentation and attitude.