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Notes -
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.
Related question: what percentage of cis people "pass" as their gender, using whichever standard you choose?
I don't think I could get better than 99.9% correct, but I'm quite confident about reaching 98% given reasonable amounts of data.
That's an interesting question as well. Particularly if you include some of the other things pointed out in this thread - if you're more primed to think about trans-ness for whatever reason, it's probably more likely to identify actual trans people, but you would think that also corresponds to a higher chance of perceiving cis people who happen to be somewhat marginal as trans when they aren't.
I think it's also affected a lot by the evident desire of most people to clearly and obviously be the gender they were born as. If you got a bunch of candidates to all wear the same shapeless coveralls, get the same short haircut and shave any other body hair, and avoid any makeup, presumably it would be rather harder to tell. Probably a number of people who are on the spectrum of trans-ness but don't want to get actual medical procedures already voluntarily do things like that, or try hard to dress as the opposite gender.
There also seem to be a lot of differences in how people move. I've observed a few times that I can usually identify somebody's gender from a great distance, much too far to see any facial features or details of clothing, just based on how they move. It's hard to explain what the actual difference is, but it seems to be real.
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