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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 18, 2024

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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."

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.