back in 2019 when i was doing research for my thesis, i read Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People (2000) by Vivian K. Namaste and around page 145 in that book, there's a description of a 1978 study that was done on sexed physical characteristics and how quickly people assume sex from these things, and what the study showed was that even when presented with abundant and obvious female-sexed characteristics (e.g. long hair, soft face, breasts), several of them were required without contest for participants to be confident sexing a subject as female, but if a single male-sexed characteristic (e.g. facial/body hair, square jaw, penis) was present, participants would overwhelmingly sex the subject as male with much more confidence even if there were contradictory female-sexed features. crucially, the presence of a female-sexed feature did not inhibit their confidence in sexing a subject with otherwise exclusively male-sexed features as male to nearly the same degree. the conclusion of the study, in Namaste's words, was that "interpretation of sexed bodies [is] overwhelmingly skewed in favor of masculine referents." surely this documented bias has no implications for the way people perceive or respect trans women, and surely when it comes to character design decisions or vacuum-assumed assertions that "clothing has no gender," ignorance won't be functionally interchangeable with malice. now to just take a big sip of coffee and