Given that people are generally inattentive, mostly polite, and can stare for any number of reasons, figuring out whether you convincingly portray your chosen gender seems to be difficult at best and a psychological torment at worst. Going out to a restaurant or going shopping can provide clues as staff are far more likely to use "sir/madam", but there's no guarantee they're not just being polite. So I've been wondering which social environments and situations give the brave an opportunity to find out for certain how they're being read. This is what I've come up with so far:
- using public restrooms. If you really don't pass, this would be quite dangerous, however, especially as you won't know until you're already in.
- going into a clothing store that you know has segregated changing rooms, and asking a staff member for directions. In this situation, even if the employee is trans-sympathetic, they should be much more likely to (gently) let you know that they've clocked you.
- as above, but at the gym or swimming pool - at these places, there's pretty much no chance that the staff will direct you to your preferred gender's changeroom merely because they're sympathetic. On the other hand, it seems like this would be catastrophic if you were read in the changeroom (and you yourself might not be all that comfortable being there)
- walking past a high school during a time that teenage boys and girls are waiting for buses. I'm imagining this is only for the truly thick-skinned!
- a kind of tragic one, but true to my experience... walk into a park where children are playing, and observe whether the mothers there watch you with relentless vigilance. If they don't, they see a woman. If they do, they see a man.
I couldn't think of anything else that wasn't absurdly contrived (go into a wedding store and see if they try to sell you a tuxedo or a dress!... uh, yeah). Any ideas? Anyone been brave enough to deliberately throw themselves into the deep end just to answer that nagging question "do I pass, or are people just being polite to me?"
