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Some people have argued that to affirm a trans person is lying. I sympathize with someone who says, "if I call a trans person by his preferred pronoun, it feels like I am lying." If this is all that is meant, then I suppose the rest of this post isn't relevant. To me, the stronger claim is, "if society calls a trans person by his preferred pronoun, society is lying." I never bought that claim, because I never encountered a contradictory set of definitions for sex and gender.
But recently I realized the term passing is actually transphobic according to the definitions laid out.
This is pretty clearly a woman. I can tell because of the hair and clothes. I infer she goes by "she." If I had to publicly address her, I'd do so with she.
People typically speak of passing as a woman. Since I can infer she is a woman, it follows that she passes as a woman. But as far as I can tell, nobody would describe her as passing, because she looks transgender (i.e. male). Based on how "pass" is used, it seems to really mean pass as cisgender. To see passing in this sense, as a good thing, is deceptive. It also seems transphobic. Surely a less transphobic worldview would suggest she passes as a woman because I can correctly infer her pronouns, and that her womanness is just as beautiful as a ciswomans.
Inb4 replies castigating me for just now realizing this: nobody had ever crystalized to me that passing meant to misrepresent a trans person as cisgender because most discourse talks about "passing as a woman"
Am I missing something? Can anyone else steelperson all this?
Disclaimer, while I am accepting of trans people as human beings with rights, I am highly skeptical and in some cases openly hostile to the efforts trans activists to dismantle the concept of gender or biological reality. I'll do my best to explain my perspective on the issue without strawmanning anyone, but given that I don't know your actual beliefs on this, I can only speak for trans arguments I typically see.
It really depends on your definition of "man" and "woman". For hundreds of years in English, and via translation in the majority of historical languages, and still for the majority of the population, there is no meaningful distinction between "woman" and "cis-woman". They don't even use the term "cis", because you can just say "woman" when you mean an adult human female. For anyone who still holds this definition, then to "pass" as a woman means that people to mistake the trans person for a biological female. This is inherently deceptive, because the trans woman is not a biological female, and yet is deliberately causing themselves to be mistaken as one.
I'm pretty sure this counts as transphobic, despite not really being a normative claim, because it ignores/denies attempts to change language that trans activists have been making recently. I personally think all of the "-phobe" words are overused and nearly meaningless, but I usually interpret it as meaning something along the lines of "hinders the trans agenda", which this definitely does.
If you take the opposite extreme, and define "woman" to be purely "anyone who identifies as a woman", and if everyone embraces this definition you end up in circular logic where the word becomes meaningless. Why would anyone care what word they or another person identifies as if the word means literally nothing other than identifying as it. You might as well identify as a "snurxoth". This is consistent, it's just no different from having a name. Someone might identify as "Alex", and it doesn't allow you to infer anything about them at all, it's just a word you can use to pick them out of a group of people with different names.
Under this definition alone, then, it's impossible to pass as a woman or man without wearing your pronouns written visibly somewhere on your person. If gender is purely a construct of the mind and a person's self-identification with no external foundation, then you can't infer that the person you linked is a woman. Maybe they identify as a man and just like that style of hair or clothes. Maybe they're nonbinary. More importantly, why would you think that hair and clothes are associated with women at all? If everyone's gender identity were purely internal, then there would be no reason for all of the biological females, who tend to have long hair and wear that type of clothes, to decide that the word "woman" was their gender identity. If the word doesn't refer to anything physical, then there's no reason for people to divide themselves up into the same two categories that most people are in now. Rather, I would expect most people would identify as random stuff they like like "Dragons" or "Princess", or just their names.
I'm pretty sure this definition is also transphobic from a different perspective, because if you entirely deny the existence of a biological basis for gender, then trans people basically don't exist. Or rather, they're not meaningfully different from cis people. Everyone is just born as a person, has a gender identity, and their physical body doesn't matter at all, so there's no such thing as bodies that men have or women have, because anyone who identifies as a man or woman is equally a man or woman. There's literally no reason for anyone to try to transition or pass, because even if they do, there's no way anyone could know their gender identity afterwards without reading their mind, or asking, same as before. On the other hand, there's no way for this to be deceptive, because claiming a thing is literally all it takes to be that thing. Except in circumstances where someone outright lies (you ask to be referred to as a man but secretly identify as a woman in your mind).
But what I mostly see as the accepted trans activist position is a Motte and Bailey at play. The Motte is the above position, that gender identity is just self identification, the Bailey is that gender identity means a bunch of things that historically it has meant tied to biological sex. Most trans women don't want to be perceived as "someone who identifies with the word woman" or the pronouns "she/her", they want to be perceived the same as biological women, with all of the cultural baggage that that perception has picked up over the centuries. It's only because the majority of the population believe that "women" have meaningful physical and behavioral differences than "men" (a statement which is factually true if gender = sex), that trans women want to be categorized alongside the cis women and trans men want to be categorized alongside the cis men. Imagine if tomorrow all of the cis women decided that they no longer identify as "women", they have a new word, I don't know "snurxoth", and suppose all the cis men decided to go along with it and the word was quickly adapted to regular use and the old one abandoned.
I highly doubt the trans women would continue happily identifying with the word "woman". No, they would want to follow suit. Because at the heart of trans ideology isn't self-identification, it's factual and normatative claims that trans women and cis women aren't meaningfully distinct, and similarly for trans men and cis men. There's no point for trans women to want to pass as trans women but fail to pass as cis women, because it doesn't truly mean anything. Or, maybe there is some point. Other trans activists will use certain pronouns and treat them a certain way because that's what you're supposed to do to be a good ally. But it seems to me the real Bailey is that they want to be treated the same as cis women, and the only way to do that in a society that treats biological males and females differently is to deceive people into thinking you are a biological female: a cis woman.
I guess a society that treats biological males and females differently would be considered inherently transphobic . Your specific question of whether it's transphobic for you to think of passing in terms of passing as cis, conditional on already living in this society, are going to depend a lot on what that word even means for you. Is it more important to advance the trans agenda as a whole by dismantling the gender norms and deny biological differences matter? Or is it more important to help individual trans people try to slip into the existing categories by imitating the other sex? Either could be considered transphobic depending on the priorities of the accuser (which is why I don't think the word has much bite).
All of which just seems like it makes the word 'transphobia' itself, when used this way, utterly meaningless.
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