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The problem here is that the percentage of MtF who “pass” is vanishingly low. It’s nearly always spectacularly easy to “clock” an MtF - especially once you hear the voice.
I’m actually agnostic about so-called “bathroom bills” myself, but however we end up resolving the issue, “an MtF can enter the women’s bathroom if nobody notices it’s an MtF” is not a solution, because it will lead to 98% of the same outcome as “no man can enter the women’s bathroom.”
The voice is, yes, usually a giveaway. But there are a lot of masculine-looking actual women out there (even some with deeper voices) due to genetics / endocrine issues, to the point where I'd be often be uncomfortable guessing --- certainly from looks alone --- whether a given person is a lucky MtF or an unlucky actual woman if encountered out of context.
Oh definitely. The first trans friend I had, I did not clock him, but that’s only because I assumed he was just a very unfortunate-looking and unfortunate-sounding woman. This was when trans was starting to get public attention but before it was everywhere; if I’d known then what I know now, I think my “trans alarm” would have gone off, but I agree that there are some women out there (“stone butch” lesbians, people with medical situations) who also risk setting off “trans alarms”.
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Are there studies on this or is this anecdotal? If the latter, you wouldn't be able to account for the MtFs you're missing precisely because they do pass.
You can see a distribution of some that pass better than others, and notice that it tails off towards the end of the distribution so the amount that completely pass is small.
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I’m not aware of any studies on it, but my experience is that every single time somebody tells me about a “passing” transwoman, I end up seeing the person and it’s obviously a man. Sure, it’s true in a sort of unfalsifiable way that there could be all of these undetectable transwomen walking around among us, but at that point you’ve reached a sort of Russell’s Teapot, “invisible dragon in the garage” level of claim.
I would kill to see some high quality studies using blinded (I'm not sure double blinding is possible, since presumably a trans person would know they're trans) trials of test subjects interacting with both trans and cis people to see just how common it is to truly "pass." Sadly, the academic political environment makes it so that basically no one who would be positioned to do the research would be interested in having an answer. And even if that were not the case, the number of trans people is so small that getting sufficiently random or representative members of that group seem likely to be impossible.
The way I think of it is that, given how incentivized the current "progressive" trans movement is to present MTF as being exactly the same as females in every way that matters, if there were some fairly significant population of MTF trans people who "pass," there would be quite a few such people who are either held up as examples or who become mini-celebs as activists for the cause. There's certainly no shortage of MTF trans people who obviously don't "pass" that you can find both online and in-person (at least in my neck of the woods around Boston) despite the fact that, again, the number of such people is very small relative to the population. The only person like that who comes to my mind is Blaire White, whom I don't follow, but who I believe isn't on the side of the "progressives" in this.
We need a definition of what passing means before we can test, or even properly argue over it.
Passing is on the one hand used by TRAs to mean "polite people treat me as a woman when I obviously visibly signal that I wish to be treated as such." Which almost everyone can achieve.
On the other hand, anti trans types define passing as "absolutely no outward indication whatsoever of any physical difference from a median/modal member of the target sex." Which no one achieves.
The degree to which someone passes is also dependent on context.
If I saw a tall masculine looking middle aged woman at mass, I would assume she was an unfortunate looking tall woman. Even a slight mustache wouldn't throw me off.
I assume everyone at Pride Night at my rock climbing gym may not be what they appear. The slightest hint of GNC and I'm going to be circumspect.
It would be tough to account for all that in testing.
ETA: Two differing study designs that would likely yield different results, both of which would measure "passing" in different ways.
"You're going to talk to a series of 20 people. Some of them are trans. Please indicate which people are trans on your scantron sheet. The more you get correct, the more money you will receive on your way out."
"You're going to talk to a series of 20 people. After you finish, please write down a description of each person in order."
I posit that very few trans people will "pass" in test 1 unless it's really rigged, and that a great many CIS people would get false positives. On the other hand, under test 2, I think a good number of people would not write down "trans" or "obviously (other gender)" in the description for trans people.
If that's how TRAs use "passing," I've never encountered it, and it also seems like a vapid meaning, because the "polite" in your quote tends to refer to the characteristic of submitting to such wishes.
The way I understand it, the "test" that's being "passed" in this context is essentially the trans Turing Test (Turansing Test? Turans Test? Trunsing Test?). Now, obviously there are many tiny nuances and details of what qualifies as passing the Turing Test, but broadly, I think the idea is that, after interacting with a trans person, you can't tell that they're trans, then they "pass."
There are likely multiple ways to measure something like this. One theoretical study I imagine, blinded test subjects would interact with a group of people, some trans, some not, and then answered what sex each person they interacted with was born as. If a trans person had >50% of people answer as the opposite of their birth sex, that person would "pass." Another option would be to have test subjects interact with pairs of people, one trans and the other cis, of opposite sexes and the same gender, and if the subjects can correctly guess the trans person at >50% rate, then that person doesn't pass. Could also adjust it to be 1 trans and 9 cis, and if the rate is >10%, or any variation of this, I suppose.
The context also certainly matters a lot, but that can be both controlled for and also studied, to see how people's ability to "pass" change in different environments. What I'd personally love to see is correlations on the type and length of interaction. If you're just talking to someone, does their chance of "passing" go down or up as time goes, and is there some inflection point at which the "passing" rate suddenly skyrocket or plummet? What about if you add hugging to the mix? What if you're in a group setting, where all the other test subjects are confederates who have been instructed to treat the trans person like they do/don't "pass?" What if activities involving physical strength or severe emotional topics are involved?
It'd be fascinating to see some break down just what specific characteristics and interactions maximize and minimize the odds of "passing." It could give birth to a sort of "trans-o-sphere" equivalent of the "man-o-sphere" where trans people optimize on the traits that allow them to "pass" most effectively and efficiently, following a sort of "passMaxxing" strategy, if you will.
That's absolutely what's often cited as the experience of "passing." "I went outside, everyone referred to me as a woman, and no one called me out as trans, ergo I passed." Tbh, if anyone thought I was trans but never brought it up out of politeness, how would I know? My experience would look exactly the same on the day to day: I go outside and act like a man and people treat me like a man. Maybe some people are uncomfortable with me or don't like me, but who knows, maybe they're Cowboys fans who cares?
But that's not what real life looks like, which was my point about context. In real life I don't walk around suspecting people's genitals might not match their presentation. So the moment you ask people to identify trans people from a group, you've radically altered their normal calculus! The moment you bring up "trans" you've radically altered their normal calculus. You see this a lot with people talking about true crime stories, "oh how did no one suspect, there were all these clues!" But the people didn't know they were in a mystery, they weren't looking for clues. If you tell people that the sex of the person they're talking to is a mystery, they'll seize on all kinds of clues. If they don't, they'll slide right by the clues. So the moment you run a study on the basis of "spot the tranny" you vastly alter the odds compared to baseline.
Hell, the moment you tell people they have to make a decision one way or the other, you're throwing off what passing means in reality. Because non-passing can also mean something like "Idk, she makes me uncomfortable but I can't put my finger on why..." Uncanny valley stuff. So what do we do with that? Where does that fit into either a day-to-day understanding of trans life, or into a Turing test?
Passing is, weirdly, vastly harder in queer spaces than in non-queer spaces, even if queer spaces are much more likely to hug-box trans people about how great they pass and bend over backwards to avoid mistakes. It's not odd at all for me to see a middle aged woman with a whispy little mustache at church, I wouldn't think she's packing a cock under there just has unfortunate hirsute characteristics.
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It's also dependent on the level of interaction. Passing to a friend or coworker is going to be harder than passing to someone they interact with as a bank teller or cashier. In the context of public restrooms, this would be the easiest place to pass, in that they're only spending a few seconds dealing with strangers who probably aren't paying them much attention.
And the urban myth of Boys Don't Cry or the Trap, a trans person who passes so well that they get all the way into bed before the genitals are discovered.
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Hunter Schafer would be the one I think a lot of people would point to as the pinnacle of “passing trans”. I won’t go so far as to say that Schafer looks “obviously like a man”; rather, Schafer is in a weird sort of androgynous zone. Certainly not someone I would ever see as an attractive woman, but I can imagine not clocking Schafer if I passed him on the street.
Schafer is closest probably but even she probably drops a point when the photo is candid and unstaged.
Then again, I do know she's trans so...
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Is 98% of the same outcome not a solution? It’s a solution that comes down hard on one side, but a solution nonetheless.
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