Today, I went on a nostalgic trip back to my old university. The girls today look just like they did back in 2005, except that the fashionable colour for trousers is a sort of artichoke, plum wine colour teamed with Converse shoes. In my day it was skinny jeans and ballet flats.
However, that is not what I wanted to talk about. Today I got a painful reminder of just how much the mind can be a false friend and deceiver. As it was cold today I wore a pair of boots(male), this made me look and feel totally unfeminine. I must have been at least 6'5" tall with those big manly boots on. I noticed on the way to the toilet two girl students looking at me, and on the way out one said to the other 'He's massive". Then and there I realised just how other people see me, and it is quite a bit different from how I see myself. I must have been 14 inches taller than those girls and about 60 - 70lbs heavier. That comment made me feel about as feminine and girly as a Sasquatch!
I realised then just how much my mind has played tricks upon me. Women and girls often smile at me in the street, and they often go out of their way to help. E.g. on Monday I was looking for an address in a town that I was unfamiliar with. I went into a council office and two very kind women helped me find the address. One looked up the building on Google Earth while the other actually phoned this place to get directions. I am often shown kindness like this by women. I had always believed that they could sense my femininity etc and that women were nicer on the whole than men. It now turns out that they probably helped me because of some sort of instinctual biological attraction to me. My sister and other genetic females have told me that height in a man is something that women appreciate and admire and in fact height can cause women to overlook a lot of less desirable qualities.
There is no doubt a scientific, evolutionary explanation for this. Height in a man says to women ' this man possesses good genes and any children he fathers will be strong and healthy'.
When a conversation/meeting with a woman in a shop or office etc went well I always believed that they knew despite everything else that they were talking to another woman. My mother always denied this saying that they just thought that I was nice and friendly and it never entered their head for a moment that I was a woman. I used to poo-poo this idea. I was convinced that they understood the truth. Now I know that my mother was right. The cis-gendered think about us as often as you think about blind people.
