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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?
Passing is mostly used by trans people to refer to "appears similar enough to a biological woman nobody can tell". A (clever) trans interlocutor says - 'woman' does refer to, usually biologically determined and innate - physical and psychological traits, as well as social roles, appearances, ways of dressing and acting, and acknowledging that isn't "transphobic" - it's just that I want to possess those traits! - be cute, feminine, wear skirts, etc. But the entire thing doesn't mean much
Eh, the "nobody can tell" part is subtle given that it also appears to be considered virtuous to be particularly bad at telling. I've had progressive acquaintances react with what seemed like genuine surprise and apprehension when I referred to third parties who in my eyes obviously did not pass as trans (in a non-hostile context; we were having a completely non-adversarial discussion about diversity metrics at our university). When pressed on this, they insisted that they really didn't know and reacted to my reasoning (masculine voice, height many SD above the biological female mean, large hands, impractically feminine presentation (like frilly skirt in a hardware shop setting), uncommon and conspicuously feminine name) in an "wtf, you caused me disutility by planting this pattern in my head" way. It seems to be more akin "passing" as in "passing a college course" - meeting a standard that is itself up to debate, and generally at least in an American setting understood to be ideally determined according to a principle like "as low as we can get away with without causing too many problems".
Not just being bad at telling, the entire gender ideology's concept of gender identity as a purely inbuilt phenomenon that no one can gainsay is making being able to tell irrelevant by stating that what you can tell doesn't actually represent someone's "real" gender.
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