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A curious question I was just thinking about that might be unanswerable due to the culture war effect:
Is there any hard data on what percentage of trans people "pass" as their new gender?
I feel inclined to think that the percentage is pretty low. But that may be mostly due to poorly passing trans people being more obvious, while the passing ones don't draw much notice. Most of the pictures of MtFs going around look pretty obviously like a dude in a dress. The FtMs tend to look kind of androgynous. But then you can't deny that Blair White and Buck Angel exist. And those are people who've chosen to be openly trans public figures. How many others are out there who you couldn't tell they weren't what they appeared to be, but don't care to advertise it for whatever reason? I honestly have no clue, and I'm wondering if anybody does.
There's no good definition of passing. If numbers pop up, you have to look at the methods skeptically. It all depends on context.
If a middle aged woman, dressed and styled like a middle aged woman, at mass today looked kind of masculine I would probably not notice it, maybe notice it think "oh, she has an unfortunate face/build," and think nothing more of it.
If a young person walks into the gym I managed on PRIDE Meetup* day, I was very aware of the possibility that any person might be any gender, I can't go off general dress or styling cues. I'm constantly examining people to know how to address them without putting my foot down my throat.
So Pass might mean anything from "Successfully signal in most contexts that they would like to be treated as [Chosen Gender] such that most people will politely do so even if they know there's something going on" to "Zero Percent of people will ever experience a hint of doubt or uncanny discomfort when talking to this person; potential sexual partners would be surprised by what they found in the bedroom." And every person is going to have different perceptions there anyway.
As an example, Amy Schneider** was on Jeopardy every night, and I watched it with my parents and grandmother and wife almost every night. It took my wife and I about a week to clock her, primarily because of subtle LGBT cultural cues, and I just prayed that they never talked about it on the show because my parents and grandmother had no idea whatsoever. It took them actively announcing it on the show, and my parents were fucking STUNNED by this revelation, floored, never would have thought of it. I don't think she does a perfect job of passing by any means, but going back to my examples above: if I saw a woman looking like her in church I would assume she was just unfortunately designed; if I saw her at the gym in leggings on Pride night I'd clock her in a heartbeat.
And that's where the question becomes unanswerable due to the culture war effect. Trans advocates confused the former condition for the latter, though there is an obvious difference between politely playing along or being deeply uncomfortable but not sure why and actually passing. While anti-trans types will claim that no one ever passes because when they look at a picture of a trans person they have been told is trans they can point to cues in the photo that give it away, even though their trans radar is typically set to off and they couldn't pick up on any of that in a normal interaction.
*That they always chose to come on "Ladies Half Price Night" will never not piss me off. Why pick the one time when gender matters to our minimum wage high school student staffers? I had to constantly lecture new hires: Don't be a hero, the extra $9 on a day pass will not matter to the owner, having a controversy on social media will.
**I will brook no slander on Amy, purely because I hated the other big champion that year so fucking much
You're right that there's no clear and objective definition of passing to use. And that passing probably depends at least some on how predisposed the person is to consider the possibility. Still, it'd be interesting to see somebody attempt to study it, which would involve them picking some arbitrary specific definition of passing.
Trying to be as unbiased as possible, I would think that the percentage at "Zero Percent of people will ever experience a hint of doubt or uncanny discomfort when talking to this person" would be relatively small just because it seems to take a lot of money and effort plus some genetic luck to reach that point, and most likely few people will do so.
Oh that was an intentional strawman, I don't think anyone ever reaches that point. Hell, our success at gender identification isn't 100% on a normal basis absent trans people as @ulyssesword points out, worse once you mix in cross-racial identification. If the average 16-25 year old male grows his hair out long enough and shaves, he will get addressed as a woman every now and then by a stranger seeing him out of the corner of their eye. If a young woman cuts her hair short and wears baggie (enough) clothes and a backwards ballcap she'll look like a teenage boy in the right circumstances.
That strawman is frequently presented by anti-trans people as "Trans can't be real unless you hit this absurd standard." Which makes no sense to most trans people or most people who know trans people, because they're able to maneuver through life quite well "as" the opposite sex while clearly not passing 100% of the time to 100% of the people.
The flipside of that is trans people who hang out only in mega pro-trans online spaces, where everyone affirms them because that's the thing you do, confuse "signaling you would like to be treated as X" with "passing subconsciously as X" and then going out in the wider world and finding that something is missing. People are uncomfortable or short with them, people don't want to date them. A lot of trans people were sold a bill of goods by trans advocates, and their rage is misdirected at the rest of the world.
NB: I think all conversations about detecting Liars/Frauds online suffer from genre bias as a general trend. People on Reddit or TheMotte will perpetually claim "I would never fall for somebody lying about going to Harvard!" or "How were these people so dumb that they thought that guy was special forces?" Most of the time people aren't looking for clues because they don't know they're in a detective story yet, when they do figure out something is going on the clues become obvious but until they're searching they aren't important.
Interesting, especially alongside @RenOS's points above. Possibly nobody ever really does. I've seen things like your examples, though that's a pretty momentary thing, and easily fixed once the person moves around a little or faces you. Kind of close to RenOS's picture passing.
I mostly agree with your points on pro- and anti-trans people, though it seems to me that people that pro-trans are very common, and people that anti-trans are pretty rare. Maybe I'm seeing a biased picture, but if there are that many super-anti-trans people around, how come I never see them? I mostly hang out in pretty right/red places, and the most I see is complaints about how they all seem to be kiddie diddlers, not that they aren't "real" because they don't pass to a very high standard.
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