Have you ever mistaken a woman for a man?

Yes, when I posted it here before I got the same response.

However, as I said, Missy (her ironically feminine nickname) strapped her breasts & practised a masculine gait, plus women of those days would very rarely wear trousers, so these probs all contributed. As you say, photos give a different impression & black & white ones are less clear.y

That you know of

Solely from that picture, hairstyle and dressed like that my first thoughts would probably be male. But stills aren't the whole picture and voice, gait, body frame/shape etc, would probably tell a different story.

Picture here

Would anyone here mistake Mathilde de Morny for a man?

I'm doing a study of Belle Epoque women- she was a famous lesbian socialite who dated Colette, known for her masculine behaviour. TRAs have tried to claim her but I view this as butch erasure based on the evidence. People of her time often fid mistake her for a man, but she worked hard at perfecting a masculine walk & bound her breasts, plus at that time most French women didn't wear trousers as you needed a permit.

I've never yet seen a trans m2f who I didn't immediately know, in RL or online.

All of a sudden they are concerned about gender non conforming women and transmen. Give me a break

I’ve noticed this. The likes of Jane Fae handwringing about transmen since the SC judgement has been fascinating. The male transactivists were entirely focussed on their own interests until Wednesday. They were happy to trash transmen’s maternity rights so they could carry on using women’s facilities, and still would. Selfish hypocrites. Thank goodness FWS had transmen’s back. The toilet situation will work itself out, though I’m certain there will be unhappy males. Leaving transmen without the rights befitting their biological needs would have been unforgivable.

I had this new line of ‘gotchas’ because it’s so nonsensical when you weigh up the other options.

The alternative to women only spaces being for biological women is for anyone with a ‘gender identity’ of woman - so any man who says he’s a woman. Why is the risk of some masculine women potentially being questioned or having to have beared trans men in single sex spaces worse than having any actual man (beared or not) able to just say ‘I’m a woman’ and we can’t question.

Yes, obviously it wouldn’t be nice for women to be questioned but the alternative is just having to accept any male bodied person at any time without question because we can’t ask who has a GRC so would have to assume they are a ‘woman’.

Yup. Purely because of how tall she is.
I’m fortunate to be only slightly above average and have large breasts. Because if we were being judged on shoe size I would be assumed male (size 9).

The thing that people are missing, is that Trans-Women have behaved aggresively on public platforms to any woman who has questioned them, that they have proved the point about why they might be unsafe in a room alone with women when they are undressing.

JK Rowlings original tweet was reasonable, and the responses were so aggressive that it showed how a lot of men who think they are women are very mysoginistic.

Women simply do not get this behaviour from Trans-Men. They shot themselves in the foot by 1) behaving mysoginistically and aggressively and b) for not stamping that shit out at the beginning. They have allowed the harassment and bullying of women and that is on them.

GrammarTeacher

It’s happened to lots of people. Including famous people including Gwendolyn Christie - who is just really tall.

What?! Even without a scrap of makeup, I can't see how anyone could possibly mistake her for a man!

There are 7 or 8 MTFs in my area and they're all easily clocked. I did get fooled by an FTM once. I was out with two dog walking cronies and as you do, stopped as our dogs investigated "his" dog. "He had a teddy boy style and a luxurious ginger beard.

As we walked away, one crony whispered,

"He used to be a she, you know!"

I'd thought, slightly built, small, effeminate gay man.

You just reminded me of a work colleague who, when we were playing ‘which child / baby in this photo is a member of our team?’ showed us a photo when we were all cooing over her as a baby when she pointed out that she was the teenage boy in the photo. She 100% looked like a boy and apparent was repeatedly told off for going in the wrong toilets

I got mistaken for a man once, I’m very feminine looking (if there is such a thing) from the front but he was behind me.

I know lots of trans people through work, most of them, if I don’t know in advance, I have no idea. Then you get the knobheads who are trying to be edgy and insist on being called they / them when they’re very obviously male / female and the mentally unwell ones who do a very bad job of trying to look like the opposite sex.

A friend has hormonal issues that cause a deep voice and excess facial/body hair that needs to be shaved (but that leaves stubble). She gets mistaken for male/trans pretty frequently and receives a fair bit of abuse for it, so yes this absolutely does happen.

Many years ago I had a friend (CIS female) who was constantly mistaken for a man. I even had a girl once approach me to ask me to pass her number onto ‘him’. Ironically I’ve wondered since if she ever transitioned to male. I think that she was the perfect example of someone born into the wrong body. She didn’t identify as male (this was decades ago) but she looked male, walked like a man, sounded like a man, dressed like a man.

It’s happened to lots of people. Including famous people including Gwendolyn Christie - who is just really tall.
The poet Joelle Taylor who is a butch lesbian discusses this happening as well.

Me too

I have occasionally met people who I couldn’t guess the sex of, but I’d never challenge them on it. And I also couldn’t care less if all toilets were gender neutral as long as they had lockable cubicles. Gym changing rooms though, woman’s refuges, prisons etc, those are the places that matter where a woman is in a very vulnerable state and certain males are trying to manipulate that. Also woman’s sport.

I was looking for an update on the re-training of facial recognition AIs to allow for transgender identities. Nothing much reported: the software does what it's supposed to do, which isn't affirming human subjective self-perceptions. In fact, these systems have very high success rates (around 80%) when analysing just bodies without faces.

Anyway - "You can't tell" is obviously bollocks. The differences between the sexes are so clearly defined that a computer can correctly evaluate them in most cases (their failures are mostly attributable to racial bias in training). The reviews I read kept linking back to studies of the human ability. There's a good summary here; I thought some of you might like it.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6396056

Adults and children can rapidly and accurately determine the sex of adult faces (Burton et al., 1993; Wild et al., 2000). Moreover, infants begin to discriminate human faces based on sex information between 3 and 12 months of age (Leinbach & Fagot, 1993; Quinn et al., 2002).

When I had a shaved head I was addressed as "sir" a few times.
My daughter has often been addressed as "young man" or "buddy" she rarely corrects them. She was waiting in the barbers with my son once and the barber asked "young man, what are we doing today?" She asked for a fringe cut!

We've had one really horrible incident at a hotel swimming pool changing room when a woman quite aggressively said "how old is he, he shouldn't be in here. My young daughter's here". I said "SHE's 11." She obviously didn't believe me, as she went off to complain, the leisure club manager stopped me on the way out to ask if one of my sons had come into the women's changing room with me (they hadn't they were with DH in the men's). I explained what had happened -dd utterly mortified and upset by this time. All because she has short hair and swims in shorts and a rash vest.

So yes, as others have said, it's not uncommon and we will see a rise in gender non-conforming women being made to "prove" they are women.

Isn't it 1 in 32?

Not yet,

But my newborn gets misgendered all the time.

And my 2 year old often calls she’s - he’s. And pointed to my partners nipples this morning and said you feed baby? 😂

However I think that’s a lack of grammar and understanding about the human body. If we are looking at books, characters or people and I check his understanding by saying incorrectly: that’s a nanny/ grandpa/ mummy/ daddy. He’s very quick and insistent to go ‘nooo, that not x, that y! that’s Silly’.

I think it’s pretty innate actually.

I once directed a woman to the men's loos. As soon as she set off to follow my instructions, I realised my mistake but it was too late to correct myself. I hope she got to the right place. She needed the door further on, not directly after the double doors.

There's also a woman at work who identifies as a man and she is very convincing. Very slim, no boobs, covered in tattoos, facial hair, bit of a swagger. I really do struggle to see her as the woman I know she is but, I feel drawn to her in the same way I am to women so make of that what you will.

That person sounds like a weirdo.

As a very shy tomboy-ish girl with short hair I was petrified to use the women's loo in case someone asked me why I was in there. Happened only once if I recall correctly. But people routinely referred to me as male. As a tall adult woman with short hair and no make up I get called Sir a lot, usually by people who are only half looking at me.