please let me know your thoughts about passing, do you care about it or not at all?

if you want passing tips check this video out https://youtu.be/4SD04jHN_Bg?si=o6F8u0l-avwqKxxT

this is pretty insane because the other day some 40yr old dude just randomly came over to me while i was sitting under the rain, called me his bro, told me to stay safe and left

Nahhh the amount of random men that come up to me and start complaining about their wife 😭😭

dude i work in retail and you get called boss 9 times a day average and its genuinely the most dysphoria relieving experience in the entire world

LOSING your male privilege as a trans woman is equally crazy. On one hand, some guy has just told you ‘go make me a sandwich woman’ and it’s like, oh, so that’s how it feels and on the other hand it’s like, ‘I pass well enough that some guy will tell me to go make him a sandwich’

The "not being seen as queer" thing when you start to pass is so real. If I'm surrounded by straight cis men all day I feel like I'm walking on thin ice, but when I go into queer spaces or meet mutual friends who are also queer I still feel like I'm walking on thin ice. I've had well-meaning gay and trans friends in the past try to talk me out of certain aspects of my transition or poke fun at the way I dress or the things I like for being too boring, too masculine, too straight-coded, etc. Like everyone forgot I literally fought for this?

Dude, the awkwardness of random guys walking up to you is so real

When any kind of "women's health" subjects come up and you decide if you should talk about it or not (if outing yourself is an issue) and then if you do you just get yelled at cause "you're just some man" x_x Thanks but like...I lived about 25 years in that girl box so... :/

Yep. From the other direction: I remember being on E about a year and a half and needing to go into boymode for a flight (san antonio to houston to fort meyers), and I walked onto the plane and there was a young woman in my row, and she visibly flinched when she saw we were sitting together. It was like, "oh, wow, that's right. Forgot how much that sucked."

For me, it hit just before I started taking T.  I was sweeping at the store I worked at.  Some guy came up to me and started asking me for advice about what card to get his girlfriend after slapping her.  

He wasn’t acting like I was dumb and assumed I had something worth saying and referred to me as boss.  I suddenly realised all the times I thought I must be stupid was actually people being sexist.  

And I see the difference too when nowadays people meet me but then learn afterwards I am trans.  Especially men.  I go from being an equal in their eyes to either being someone they wanna protect or they get a confused boner and want me to perish.  

And it got lonely for a while.  LGBT+ used to strike up conversations with me or I could come up to them.  But one day, I complemented a couple trans dudes on their opossum and frog bags/outfits.  And they looked creeped out.  I realised even they thought I was some random cis dude.  I do wnat to pass.  But after that, I started wearing socks/ a pin/bracelet with trans or rainbow colours.  And started acting more gay.  And that fixed it.

im a nonbinary trans woman and i envy that T changes your voice. i pass if i don't talk. men don't really approach me anymore and i get smiles from women. but when i start speaking comfortably with a group of people, inevitably they'll start calling me "he".

cis guy here. One thing I've always noticed and surprised my gf is that when we are at the store as a couple and theres a mom with her kid(s) and the kid says hi or waves or something at us and we smile and wave back, 90% of the time the mom will smile back at us. If I'm out by myself and the same thing happens, I'd say a good 60-80% of the time the mom will just glare at me like I'm a creep.

I'm curious if any of you trans guys here have noticed a change in reaction to stuff like this after transitioning.

I love this video so much. Everything in this video I relate to. I started passing before I even realized I was trans and I would hate it when my family or someone would correct them. I never understood why. Until recently I’ve realized in the last few months that I’m trans. My friend gave me the confidence to come out as trans and now I’m really happy and proud to say that I am trans. I still haven’t come out to family tho. I love your channel and all of the awesome videos you make.

MTF and not passing 100%, but most people assume I'm a woman on first impressions. I have a job where I somewhat regularly have to wrangle rowdy children and drunks, and it is both funny and sad to me that my reasonably femme polite voice doesn't get results, so I instinctively switch to my "man" voice, and people start listening (and getting real confused about what to refer to me as).

I also don't get men doing "hur hur women amiright?" bits at me anymore, which I don't miss at all.

I'm pretty sure I'm just a cis dude; I'm mostly here trying to listen and appreciate people's experiences. At around 8:25 you mention complex feelings about not being "seen" as queer, and I was reminded of something Jose Esteban Munoz wrote in Cruising Utopia. "Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality."

If I understand Munoz' intent, queerness can be understood to include people pushing boundaries or norms toward living in a more inclusive, egalitarian, free society. Queerness as a complex mass of individual vectors, each unique, but all pushing to expand the horizons of identity.

I hope you never feel your experience is invalidated or estranged from others, but if you ever do, I hope Munoz' words reassure you as much as they do for me. Nobody chooses how they are born, but you are committed to pursuing your authentic self, and sharing your experiences to help others to feel more comfortable pursuing theirs. You're like a... lifeways astronaut, spacewalking on the frontier of human experience, chasing an existence you're building a working definition for! That's remarkable, and inspiring.

One last thought: the world often changes slowly, and the soil we depend on for food is made prosperous by the comings and goings of worms that poop. Each of us can be forgiven for feeling small, and our lives mundane - but we must remember that the repeated actions of many small things accumulate to make the world. That is to say, uhm... keep worm-pooping. You're doing great.

Best wishes, be good and be well.

the passing as younger thing oml. i was at homecoming the other day and someone said "i thought you were, like, 10" when i said i was a senior??????
can't wait for T🤞

over a decade on T here, and it is wild the social changes when you start to pass. i also face the problem of unintentionally passing as an average cis straight dude, though i'm gay and trans. my friend always jokes that when we go to a bar, i just need to write "i'm gay" on my forehead, and i just realized that that's pretty much what hashtags are.

some pros i noticed: i transitioned and started passing right before switching colleges, and i went from "can you do the art" to leading every team i was on. i definitely feel like i was heard more, and didn't have as high of a bar to be taken seriously. no longer felt like i was gonna get hate crimed on the bus, walking the street at night, etc.


some cons: walking down the street at night, i'm avoided. riding the bus, women are hesitant to sit next to me. i totally get it, but i still feel terrible about it. and few people seriously check in on an emotional level anymore. oh, and the big one. i was NOT ready for the unfiltered locker room talk. i was stopping for lunch alone once early on in my transition when i just started passing, and this guy sat next to me and proceeded to talk about this random woman across the food court in the most graphic way possible. i regret that i failed to call him out then, but i have gotten used to calling them out now. it is... awful, what some guys will say to you when they think you're also a cis straight guy.

5:00 As a cis guy, I found this really funny because that's not just you, oh yeah, we experience that whole performative masculinity a ton too.  Very few guys are the "ideal" masculine guy.  Welcome to the club!

Also, with the whole male hierarchy and scary dog privilege thing, the straight forward way is to look bigger and stronger, but there is a hack, and that's to NOT look that way and give the impression that the whole game just doesn't apply to you.  They don't necessarily think you're threatening, but they are also not going to mess with you either. My vibe from your video is that you're that type of dude.

Boss validation is real. Had a guy call me boss today and it made my whole week

ya know, when i was fem-presenting i didn't really experience the amount of street harassment that most women report and i still don't know if that's because vancouver is a pretty safe place, or i've just been lucky (what i thought when i was like 20), or that my autistic ass completely doesn't notice a lot of the time when people are trying to be rude to me, or if people haven't always gendered me as a woman. since i've been presenting more masc i have found that cis men are like....confused and threatened by my existence? i've had 2 try to pick fist fights over literally nothing in a very obvious pissing contest. like, the idea that someone is gender non-conforming short circuited something in their brains and they had to test if they were above or below me and my autistic ass is just like "naaahhh" staring at them like they grew a new head