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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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