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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.
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