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#1: Pictures and videos can easily be manipulated to make trans people look passing. I'm not talking about AI or anything like that, just techniques (that ironically enough, real women use too) like filters to hide blemishes/shadows and using angles that are most appealing. I'm talking about most appearances of trans people in my daily life. They do stick out like a sore thumb. The trans-identifying females less so, but I can tell the difference.
"Outing" is unrelated to transgenderism. You can threaten to "out" someone's anonymous identity, for example StoneToss being outed as Hans Christian Graeber. When trans people are "outed", it's usually the reveal of their birth name, or even just making it common knowledge that they are trans and it's acceptable to speak of them as such. The central example that comes to my mind is a trans-identifying man being unwillingly outed to his parents, perhaps because they don't approve of his identity. Were he not outed, he would just be their son to them, meaning he doesn't pass. I'm not sure how passing is relevant here.
#2: Even if I believe this, I think it's negligible evidence and there are other explanations that are more probable. Many forms have standard questions about pregnancy risks even for guys. And doctors may have just adopted a universal set of questions regardless of gender identity because it reduces the risk of a malpractice lawsuit for failing to ask a critical question, but no one's gonna sue them if they ask a man if he's pregnant.
#3: Even if this is true and they pass there, it does not follow that a man on the street in everyday life could pass. People do not usually cosplay as anime girls in real life.
#4: "Transvestigators" are conspiracy theorists by another name and I don't use or endorse any of their methodology. There are obviously many similarities between male and female bodies, but that doesn't mean it's likely that a man can pass as a woman. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
Your position on noticing non-passing trans people seems unfalsifiable. If I don't notice a person is trans, that's them successfully passing. If I do notice them being trans and they are poorly passing, then I'm just cherry-picking because I'm not counting all the successful people. Then is there even a set of observations that could refute the assertion that trans people typically pass, if all can be explained the same way? What if we agree to compare the rates of non-passing trans people with the percentage of the population that trans people are? I notice that in my daily life, the number of obviously trans people I can count divided by the number of people I notice or interact with, is roughly proportional to the percentage of trans people that make up the population. It's entirely possible that I missed one or two trans people who pass extremely well, but I'm fine concluding from my observations that most trans people don't pass.
I will have to admit that I don't know what exactly I would do if I had discomfort for my birth sex, but I would probably seek treatment and not transition due to the surgeries basically being medieval torture. I would continue to weigh the costs and benefits of each option and see if they are worth it, as I have done here.
Does this not literally admit that it's not always obvious to people? If you were correct about them never passing, there would be no need to "make it common knowledge that they are trans" in the same way there's no reason to make it common knowledge that someone is black. Everyone would already know.
Also on that same vein, here's another piece evidence that passing trans people do exist.
The argument about if a person should disclose if they're trans. Completely unnecessary if we assume that they never pass and everyone is aware. You could never possibly have sex with a trans woman without giving explicit consent towards that under your theory.
It's also not possible to just chuck that up to lying trans people and allies either given that the "I want them to disclose" side is going to be primarily people who don't want to be with a trans woman.
Ok explain this one then. I'm in a star trek related discord server and one of the users is an out on discord trans woman who I remember had once offhandedly mentioned they got asked for a tampon by a stranger that day and had to say sorry they were out. It was just an offhanded remark (many of us often talk about random things/post pics/etc, we got a kinda friend group going on). I do not believe it to be a lie, I've seen pictures and videos of them too and they look quite feminine.
Why would that have happened unless they looked convincingly female and the stranger in need did not view her as an ordinary woman? If your theory was true, the stranger should have not behaved in such a way and needed such a deflection.
It does mean that it must be way harder to tell than you might think. False positives are an error too.
This isn't "my position", it's a known logical fallacy. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/toupee_fallacy
It doesn't work to say "ah but disproving this fallacy could be happening is too difficult for me so I wish to ignore it". I've provided multiple affirmative arguments for trans people being able to pass, and your one continued argument is challenged significantly by a known selection bias flaw.
I disagree. I can think of a scenario where a trans person doesn't pass but people don't know that it's okay to talk about their transness, so they don't. Just because people don't bring up the subject doesn't mean that they pass. It's entirely possible for the trans person to think they pass when they don't, if they interpret silence as evidence of passing. If it's not common knowledge that someone is trans, someone can still commit a social faux pas by bringing up someone's transness in conversation unwanted, even if they don't pass. Common knowledge is when everyone knows that everyone knows; everyone may know that someone doesn't pass, but it does not necessarily follow that everyone knows that everyone knows that someone doesn't pass.
I concede that if one is particularly unintelligent, or otherwise their judgment is impaired by lust, alcohol, drugs, dark lighting, etc. in a one-on-one situation with another trans person, then a trans person might be able to pass to them. That's a far cry from the definition of passing I would imagine most trans people want.
I can't imagine how you wouldn't be able to tell you're about to have sex with a penised man once he is naked (unless your judgment is impaired by the aforementioned).
Some trans-identifying men do carry tampons. I've heard it helps them feel more like a woman. It's entirely possible for the stranger to recognize him as a trans person and still ask him for tampons under that belief.
Just because some people are so stupid they ignore evidence in favor of a woman being a woman? No, it doesn't. Those people are also biased and motivated (for whatever reason) to go looking for trans people even if they aren't there. Their demand for trans people is higher than the supply. Again, reversed stupidity is not intelligence. In my daily life, I've never identified a person as a woman only to later find out he's a trans-identifying man, or a person as a (trans-identifying) man only to later find out she's a woman.
I know it's a logical fallacy. You can use logical fallacies to argue for a position, but it's still a position that you are holding and arguing for. It being a logical fallacy does not inherently lend more credence to your position.
I'm not saying to just ignore it. I'm saying that your position seems to be unfalsifiable if you are going to invoke that fallacy for every set of possible observations. I've already offered one way of falsification, do you disagree with it or have another way?
And I disagree with all of them.
Why exactly would outing by another person suddenly make it go from not OK to fine for discussion?
If it's obvious in the way you say then it's already common knowledge to everyone. They would know, and they would also know everyone is aware because it's obvious. Unless a great deal of people think a trans person is passing to others, in which case that's evidence passing is a thing.
How often is "enter into a dark room already drunk and banging a stranger" a thing that happens? And even this caveat doesn't explain situations like this where someone only finds out from social media that the girl he was crushing on is trans or this where some guy is dating and didn't know
Ok possibly, this argument actually works for once. There's still plenty of other examples from trans people and their friends/family that would suggest passing exists.
Yes, if the signs aren't reliable and wrongly identify women as trans when they aren't, they aren't flawless signs.
If you're the average person, you've never met a transitioned trans person to begin with in your daily life, yet alone one who is close enough to tell you. It's kinda like saying "I've never met a nuclear licensed submarine operator that I couldn't immediately tell was one", well yeah you've never met one anyway so it is meaningless.
If your whole argument depends on a known logical fallacy and the "I don't know a licensed submarine operator" fallacy I made there combined, it's not very strong. Meanwhile I have presented lots of positive evidence that passing can occur.
Better way to think of this, depoliticize it in your mind and instead think of it as just the toupee fallacy. Would your arguments and logic work for "toupees never look natural to anyone, every toupee I've ever seen is awful"? If not, then make a better argument.
Um, it wouldn't?
No, not everyone knows that everyone is aware. The trans person himself does not know that everyone is aware. In particular he doesn't know that everyone else won't take issue with him being trans. So he doesn't want the subject brought up. Polite people know this and so uphold a social norm of not outing a trans person unless it's been made clear that he is ok with it. If he knew that everyone was aware, and observed that everyone is friendly and respectful to him, there would be little reason not to discuss the subject. One of the very useful things about common knowledge is the ability to freely discuss matters like this without potentially crossing someone's boundaries.
I figure that if one is deviating from sexual norms like that, they might be deviant in a way that makes them more likely to encounter transgender people. Regardless, people discuss disclosure because of the potential legal liability, not necessarily because it's so likely and frequent that a trans person passes to the point they have to think about disclosure. It's the same legal mindset that promotes always labeling "this package may contain walnuts" even if it's very unlikely to happen, simply because it reduces the 0.001% chance it does happen and results in a lawsuit for failure to disclose.
Bad example. The comments aren't even sure if the girl OP is referring to is even trans.
Hard to find an explanation for a random Reddit post when not much detail about the situation is given. Any arguments made would inevitably be smuggling in assumptions. Should I assume OP is an adult? How much dating experience has he had, especially with real women? When I was young (around 13) and didn't know much about the world, I incorrectly identified a girl as a boy, but now having seen more women I don't think I could make that mistake again.
Those signs aren't being used whenever I correctly identify someone's gender.
I admit I'm not the average person. I wouldn't be saying trans people don't pass if I've never actually seen a trans person in real life. But I have, many times, likely due to life circumstances I won't divulge here. I've met them and talked with them and know a lot about them. They are easy to clock.
My argument does not depend on any logical fallacies.
I still disagree.
I suspect that if I counted the number of noticeable toupees I've seen and divided it by the number of people in my daily life, it would not be proportional to the percentage of the population that wear toupees. Though it's probably hard to empirically test this when I've noticed zero toupees. Either way, I wouldn't argue that toupees look awful.
Then what use does it have? Outing would have absolutely no value if it doesn't change anything.
If it's "obvious" to everyone then there should be no reasonable liability to be had here. Engaging in sexual acts with a trans person could only be done with explicit consent, and any argument that they were "tricked" would be laughed out. This only works if you don't believe it is obvious to everyone and people have to be told. And nobody would even care to do things like putting it in law or trying to call it rape or whatever because they would understand that exact thing if it was so blatantly obvious.
Why does it matter what you personally use? You aren't making a claim that you alone have this power, you're saying that it's obvious to "everyone". If there's a whole bunch of people who can't do it accurately, then that is enough to debunk.
Do you disagree with the toupee fallacy being a fallacy then? Or are you just saying "nuh uh" because you have no response to it?
Well duh, since when do people change their mind on the internet? They'd rather just go "nuh uh" even to known and documented logical fallacies.
Interesting.
So there's two perspectives here: One from the trans person themself, who thinks they pass. One from everyone else, who sees that they don't pass. If someone "outs" them, it doesn't change anything to other people, but the trans person now knows that they don't pass -- i.e. the trans person now knows that everyone else knows that they are trans -- and if they didn't want to be outed then they might fear being attacked by transphobes. So because people recognize this, and because people don't want to cause trans people to fear for their lives, there is a social norm that we don't talk about someone's transness and potentially "out" them unless we know for sure they are comfortable with it. That's where "outing" comes from, and being able to "out" a trans person doesn't mean that they pass. That's what I mean when I say that trans people (especially trans-identified males) stick out like a sore thumb, but people are too polite to talk about it. If I'm being uncharitable, "outing" has value to people who want to bully others and make them fear for their lives, and this can still happen even when a trans person doesn't pass.
Has any "I was tricked" argument actually ever been used in a successful case? The closest I'm aware of is the so-called "trans panic defense", but every single murderer who has used it has still been prosecuted and sentenced for murder.
I'm having a tough time imagining a successful argument that someone was "tricked" based on this. Let's say you're both adults, you're both around the same age, there are no weird power dynamics going on, you're both mentally and physically abled, etc. and you're both sober and not under the influence of any substances. You're only attracted to natal women and you don't want to fuck men or anyone with a penis. You see what you think is a woman and she wants it too so you take her home. Your room is well lit. You both get naked and then see that actually, "she" is a man with a penis.
At that point, what reasonable person wouldn't just say "no" and stop the sexual contact entirely? If you still continue with sexual contact at that point, I'd argue that it's entirely your fault. If you come back later and bring suit or a police report alleging rape based on being tricked, I'd expect you to be laughed out of the room every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
I consider myself a representative sample of reasonable everyday average people. Just because there are some lizardman's constant amount of people who are so stupid/motivated to ignore contradictory evidence doesn't mean that it's not obvious to everyone. Am I not allowed to even say "It's obvious to everyone the sky is blue" when there exists a mentally ill man high on fentanyl who thinks the sky is purple? Should I qualify it with "it's obvious to most people"?
I think the toupee fallacy is a fallacy. I don't think that you citing the fallacy means you have a slam-dunk argument. I think that you citing the fallacy is just you making an argument that supports your position. I still disagree with your argument and I have provided counter-arguments to your counter-arguments. I am not just going "nuh uh" and refusing to elaborate, I am providing specific details and arguments that match the shape of your arguments.
Interestingly enough, in this comment, you haven't addressed my responses to the toupee fallacy in specific detail beyond reiterating that it's a documented logical fallacy, which I didn't ever disagree with.
How so?
Ok let's try it in a simple way.
I take the argument that all wigs are easily spotted as wigs.
I say that everyone can tell someone is wearing a wig except for all the wig wearers who think it looks natural.
Maybe you point out that lots of people who wear wigs get comments that imply others think their hair is natural. Maybe a bald guy said "you're lucky you still got your hair" to one or something.
I counter with "well that's because everyone is just being polite and they're all pretending to not know it's a wig"
You point out "then why would revealing someone is bald be a thing"
I say "well it was obvious, it's just that no one was willing to talk about it until they got the wig snatched off".
You say "well what about all the people who think someone is wearing a wig and then turns out wrong?"
I say "They don't matter, I can tell if someone is wearing a wig and I've never been wrong (how do I know that?) and wigs are obvious to everyone"
Now imagine this is done in a world where roughly 50% of the population doesn't like wigs as a concept and something like 10% or whatever thinks wearing wigs is a sin. One where some people with wigs who are actually obvious report being stared at or insulted in public, while others with wigs that look like more like natural hair report being treated like natural hair.
Imagine this in a world where politicians in some places even made laws saying that wig wearers had to disclose their wigs or else it was rape, despite my claims that it's obvious they have a wig on to everyone so non consensual sex with a wig wearer is practically impossible.
Doesn't that sound silly then? Yet this is the arguments and logic you are using. It justifies the "all wigs are obvious to everyone" viewpoint just as well. I have sparse evidence presented that all wigs are obvious to everyone, and there's tons of reasons to believe that some wigs do look natural and my only defense is actually everyone is just super polite and nice about this specific thing despite society being made up of tons of assholes who do stare at some trans folk/visibly disabled folk/etc other rare oddities. Wig wearing is the one thing and this one thing only where no one is a jerk (except for the times they are).
Firstly, I have to point out an important disanalogy in that making a wig look natural is much easier than making a man look like a woman.
Secondly, I have to stop and ask if this actually happened. With a quick search, I could not find any laws mandating that trans people must disclose their transness to avoid rape charges.
But continuing on, you seem to have tortured the analogy and stretched it beyond its limits to fit trans people. These arguments would be silly about wigs, if we were talking about wigs in our world, but then you introduced to this hypothetical world a social stigma against wearing wigs. And if there was a social stigma against wearing wigs, in the same way that trans people (claim to) face social stigma, I would expect the same social dynamics to apply. People would want wig-wearers to feel protected, so they would enact social norms where wig-snatching is prohibited, even when it's really obvious that someone is wearing a wig. So that is why...
...assuming these reports are accurate, they are perfectly explainable by the above social norm. If obvious wig-wearers are stared at or insulted in public, that's because they're in a space where that norm is lacking. If they get treated like they have natural hair, that's just the norm being upheld.
People are not a monolith. Different social norms apply in different places. Just because a trans person would be immediately outed if they walked into an evil alt-right Nazi bar doesn't mean that they would be outed if the same exact trans person walked into a gay bar in San Francisco.
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I've met MTF trans that are able to pass, generally those fortunate enough to have an already feminine, petite and neotenous racial background. Admittedly that may be my ignorance, as for instance I can probably recognize say 50% of Thai ladyboys on sight and my friend's Thai girlfriend can bat at 99%.
I've also met FTMs who pass, but generally it's more through the 'nobody really cares about this short round dude beyond the first glance' way than in the 'attempting to perform peak feminity way' that MTF aspire to.
Nonetheless the majority are easy to clock, especially outside of Asia.
Knowing a single trans person IRL is already an outlier, knowing multiple is an outlier even among outliers that would mostly occur among people who seek it out in some way like going to a LGBT group.
So are you sure you're not just having false positives where you think "that person has gotta be trans" and then take it as as true without verification?
That does happen, I gave a few examples of people being harassed by false positives after all. There was even a school board member in Utah once who falsely claimed a teenager was trans or this Walmart employee labeled trans because she was tall. And considering just how statistically rare it is that you've actually met multiple meaningfully trans people IRL, the explanation of false positives is pretty strong.
Statistically, yes if you just go by raw numbers. But since Trans people are not uniformly distributed across the country, ones exposure more likely hinges on ones exposure to high concentration of prog politics. I know multiple trans people IRL. I don't seek them out. I just exist in a more progressive area and have hobbies that MTFs and Non-Binary people are biased towards. Which increases my statistical exposure to trans people.
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I’ve definitely met and confirmed multiple trans women in person, and they do look different. Of course I can’t say that I’ve definitely clocked all the trans women I’ve seen, but it does seem like there’s a bit of discontinuity between how trans women, at least, look and how natal women look; it doesn’t seem like there’s a spectrum from not obvious at all to very obvious, especially if you look at someone in daily life rather than someone in curated photographs.
(Of course there could actually be a spectrum and my brain just pattern matches to one or the other so readily that it only seems discontinuous, but that is my experience. I don’t see people who “barely” pass.)
Trans men I’ve definitely seen one or two “real” examples (eg excluding ones with “they/their”, neopronouns or ones that feel like a man one day and a woman the next, only counting the ones going from one binary to the other and making an effort to actually pass), but I’m less sure I’m clocking all of them due to the sheer effect of testosterone. That said in my milieu I don’t really see many of either trans men or gender lunatics to begin with.
If you knew they were trans in person you were looking for features with confirmation bias. Lots of people without that before knowledge don't and can't always tell a person is trans. Easy and quick evidence, just go look up internet posts from people finding out someone they're dating is trans like this one.
Or hell just go look at some of the older Jerry Springer episodes about guys who didn't realize they fucked a trans woman and got upset after it was disclosed.
No, I clocked them as extremely obviously not natal women and then got confirmation in one way or another afterwards. What did you think I meant by “confirmed”?
That seems absolutely nuts. How the hell does that happen? The texture of neovaginas is, like, not going to be anything close to a real one. Even just the lack of proper lubrication for one.
I’m sorry but your insistence that trans women are actually generally passing reads as massive cope to me. That some lizardman’s constant worth of interactions suggest otherwise is not relevant in this case -- I've been clocked offhand as a woman previously during a period of my life when I had long hair by people who weren't paying too much attention, and I was not trying to present as a woman and definitely wouldn't appear female to anyone actually looking.
So are you saying that you're in the outlier of outliers for having known multiple trans people IRL? This might be true, but "liars on the internet" is multiple orders of magnitude more common so you'll have to forgive me if I have doubt you're that special unicorn.
Are you also the rare unicorn to have banged a trans person who has surgery (unlike ya know, the people on the show who literally did), or are you just saying it to say it?
I don't know the rates, and I'm not pretending to either. I'm not the one making grandiose claims that "everyone can tell" and that people can't meaningfully pass, despite tons of evidence to the contrary.
Yeah, so you're even saying that there's overlap even when you aren't trying.
Now imagine that but with feminizing hormones causing feminine fat distributions, skin thickness, breast growth, etc and a person actively trying to look more female. If there's already overlap for many, then it should be the obvious and easy assumption that active effort with feminizing hormones makes it even more effective.
You'll have to take my word for it, but for various reasons including profession, social circle and upbringing I do know more trans people -- either professionally or otherwise -- than the modal person. I'm not even saying that it's impossible for a man to pass as a woman (and I in fact concede that women may well pass as men -- I can imagine at least one trans man who I've met who I think would've passed as a short and stubby guy if given androgens), but I think the rate of truly passing trans women is really very, very low, edge cases aside (e.g. vanishingly small number of truly passing trans women, small number of people who legitimately have a poor sense of sex differences, etc). I certainly don't know of one and I know upwards of five trans women (and a few more in passing both personally and professionally -- I once recommended Wandering Son to a trans person who hadn't heard of it and never met her again).
(edit: that said, now that I think about it, potentially the reason I'm able to recognise trans women is because I have seen more of them than normal. Perhaps I am not the modal observer either.)
That isn't me "passing", though -- they recognised the error when they looked more closely. And I think for the majority of cases that is also what is happening to trans people getting clocked as women -- people don't look very closely when it's actually only in passing, +/- when they clock that something's not quite right they're too polite to say otherwise. I'm also honestly stumped by the idea that someone could have sex with a trans person and not realise, unless they've never had sex before. I doubt a trans man would be able to fool a natal woman either -- last I checked neopenises weren't very convincing at all.
I suppose this really depends on what it means to "pass". I would categorise someone as "passing" if under more-than-incidental observation someone still mistakes the trans person's natal sex. Under a looser definition of "pass" that might not apply. I imagine morbidly obese people might also have an easier time passing due to all the fat obscuring the frame. But there are still other non-visual tells...
I'm not even a conservative who's dead set on denying that trans people exist or something -- I have great sympathy for the transmedicalist sort of trans people, and if there was a button that magically transformed men into women (and women into men) I would be all for people to press that button if they really wanted to. I think that the greatest insult and harm that the tucutes and recent "trans activists" have done is to transmedicalist-trans people themselves. I can't speak for other people, but to my eyes it's not accurate that even a significant minority of natal men, even with great effort, can generally pass as natal women with current technology. It's a sad situation.
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