Really need people to understand that being on HRT for three years and getting top surgery and dressing only in clothing from the men’s section has not actually made anyone stop gendering me as a woman in public.
This is a frustrating piece of my reality that I find people make incredibly incorrect assumptions about, no matter what the topic is.
Had a friend yesterday going on about how they regrettably feel there’s no point in pursuing physical transition because they will ‘always look like a woman from the neck down’ due to her body shape, in comparison to my body shape. I had to shut it down both because A: not a healthy reason to avoid pursuing transition and I love them and want them to pursue their own joy, however that meaningfully looks, and B: I do not get gendered as anything other than a woman. The implication that my body shape being less hourglass-y than theirs would mean that unlike them, I am able to transition out of the woman assumption, is an implication that hurts both of us.
They were surprised to learn that I do not get gendered as anything other than woman. Not over the phone, not in person, not at the Wendy’s fuckin drive-thru. I have never once been misgendered as a man—only ever a woman. I have never once been gendered correctly by a stranger. They said, but you don’t look like a woman, which… I told them I appreciated their perspective, but they are not the majority cishet society, and they are demonstrably wrong in matters of the public. I still look like a woman to every stranger I meet. I still sound like a woman to every stranger I meet. I am not suddenly able to avoid or opt out of experiencing misogyny and sexism—if anything, for me, that’s gotten worse. I get misgendered harder because what people see is an ugly female rule-breaker.
The idea that all transmasculine people, or even just all the skinny white ones, can just simply start passing with HRT and surgery, and additionally, that anyone who isn’t thin, or who has wider hips can’t expect to pass, is as laughable as it is insidious. This belief was literally being used to bolster up my friend’s own internalized transphobia. To prevent them from seeking joy in transition. This friend of mine who is barely even out as anything—because, as they say, if they let themself think about it, they will get incredibly depressed over what can never be.
I love them dearly, but their assumption cut both ways—it was a defensive move for them to avoid having to think about the reality where their own trans joy is possible, leaving them only with the comfortable, familiar pain of dysphoria with no possibility of relief; and it was an offensive assumption that presumed that my own dysphoria was able to be relieved and that my own trans joy was only made possible by virtue of sheer dumb luck of the draw on body-type. It’s a deeply damaging assumption—because again, I have never “passed” for a guy a single day in my goddamn life (never mind actually passing as genderqueer, something that isn’t possible)—that would have been leading them to draw damaging conclusions about my relationship with gender, with trans joy, with dysphoria, with society, with transphobia, with sexism, with misogyny.
Too many of you spend so long looking at other trans people and other gender traitors (affectionate) that you have this fucked up idea in your head of how majority society views people’s gender, and you mistakenly apply your own understanding and recognition of nuanced and complex gender expression to a conversation about majoritarian society. You can look at me and probably come close to the right conclusion (probably nonbinary, possibly trans man?), but you have got to understand that when I walk outside and meet people on the street or at my job, they are not you. They do not see the nuance. They look at me and they make a very very simple conclusion: woman.
