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Notes -
Even to the extent that someone might have encountered a trans person in their lives pre-2010, it was fairly uncommon to know they were trans, especially if you weren't good at clocking people. The framework of this as equivalent to the Witness Protection Program -- completely cutting ties with one's past life and community, moving across the country -- isn't exactly what was going on, but it was present enough to get pushback as recent as 2009. Transitioning-in-place was much less common, especially in rural and suburban areas, due to the relative difficulty of medical practitioners doing these services, the physical difficulties involved in many of them, and a variety of economic pressures.
It's probably also worth mentioning the vastly increased prominence of transmen qua transmen. The relative paucity of them as a group sometimes reflected data gathering problems -- most studies depended on that required legal name changes and/or bottom surgery that remain less common among transmen even today -- but it was pretty common for people, even people much into the broader queer or gender-nonconforming world, to not really have consideration of the category as a possible thing until the late-00s, barring very specific communities.
The vast majority of people vastly overestimate their ability to figure out "mysteries" like this irl because they don't go through life thinking anything is a mystery. It's only after you are tipped off to examine things that a mystery appears.
Prior to trans prominence, there was rarely any reason to doubt anyone's sex, and so you could rely on the most gross and simplistic shortcuts. Long hair, dress, makeup -- that's a woman. Perhaps an unfortunate looking woman.
One of the great tragedies of trans prominence is the way it leads to false-positives on "clocking" people. It's the most obvious demonstration of how trans prominence reifies gender norms. Forty years ago a middle aged woman with masculine features would never dream that she had to worry people would think she had a penis.
The same way that gay liberation did a number on close male friendships (ie made them more difficult to cultivate and maintain), trans emancipation has been strictly negative for masculine women (who of course greatly outnumber MtF transsexuals)
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