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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.
Why are you talking about this like it's a hypothetical? This space arrived years if not decades ago. Like some sort of weird bizarro-world version of rule 34, if you can think of some trait or activity which is even remotely gendered, you will find an online community of trans people tearing their hair out because they aren't "doing" it properly and/or a guide on how to do it more effectively:
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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.
I wouldn't characterize such a statement as conforming to that definition of "passing," though. It appears more like just jumping to conclusions, that the absence of people bringing it up is proof of the absence of people noticing, which is what determines "passing."
I mean, I can take your word for it, that some TRAs do use the term that way, but that seems clearly very different from the way people use the term when discussing CW issues, and not in quantity but rather quality. When people talk about "when trans person X passes," I don't think they tend to mean "when trans person X only interacts with or notices people who will treat them in a certain way," but rather "when trans person X presents in such a way as to meet some sort of threshold in how others perceive their gender."
We can design studies to make the true measure obscure from the participants. This is a common enough problem in such studies that it's fairly standard practice, and there are many ways to accomplish it, including just lying to the participants about what the study is actually about. Of course, it's questionable how effective such things are and they're all imperfect, but, also of course, all models are wrong, yet some are useful.
This seems quite possible to test as well, though likely quite difficult to do properly. One can measure physiological signs of discomfort, and one can also get assessments from test subjects that don't involve making decisions one way or another, but rather just the sense that they get. It's possible to quantify such things and then compare how they differ between different populations. There are many pitfalls to such efforts, and I certainly wouldn't trust the current academic apparatus to carry out such studies with enough rigor to draw any meaningful conclusions, though.
In my mind "passing" is normally used to refer to some mix of:
Strong Passing: your average observer can't tell that the person is trans.
Weak Passing: your average observer knows the person is trans, but its close enough that their existence isn't uncomfortable, their intention is obvious, and most polite people will treat them as the target gender.
My point about trans people experiencing passing is that there's no difference between the two for a trans person going about their day. When I work with the public, I run into trans people who pass weakly, treated them like their target gender so as not to make a day out of it, and moved on. If I ran into a person who passed Strongly, so that I had no idea they were trans, I would have treated them exactly the same way, politely treated them as their target gender and moved on. From the perspective of a trans person, these two things are mostly indistinguishable until you get to a problem like "getting a date" or something like that.
From the perspective of the observer, these are very different experiences.
Where conflict results is from people trying to motte and bailey the definitions and lived experiences against each other.
This seems fair enough, and I'd characterize it as that a trans person's experience of passing is indistinguishable from not passing within certain environments and contexts, particularly ones where everyone around them decides to treat them as if they pass. It's the difference between passing a test because you legitimately got 70% of the questions correct and because the professor decided that you deserved a free 50 points on top of the 20% you got correct. You can argue that, technically, the latter fits the definition of "passing," but I don't think that's a very useful definition for the way people normally use the term. For one, it implies that one viable strategy for passing tests is to manipulate every professor you have into giving you a free 50 points, which would subvert the entire purpose of what "passing" a test is meant to signify. I don't think when people say things like "if the transwoman passes, I'm okay calling her a 'she' and having her go into the women's bathroom," they mean that they'd be okay with it as long as they've been bullied, coerced, or otherwise manipulated into treating the transwoman as if they're female regardless of their own subjective perception of the transwoman. Rather, I think they mean something about how an ignorant stranger would perceive the transwoman.
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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.
Laverne Cox gets my vote. Of all ethnic groups, black women tend to be the most androgynous looking anyway, which probably helps.
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Schafer usually gets cast as trans characters, so I wouldn't say they're the "pinnacle of passing", because they being noticeably trans is part of the point.
I'd probably go with someone like Ángela Ponce: if you already know, you'll find a lot of tells, but they clearly resemble more an attractive woman than a man.
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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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