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Notes -
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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