Have you ever mistaken a woman for a man?

Personally, I’m 6ft tall, broad shouldered, I don’t wear make up or dresses but I don’t feel like anyone would mistake me for a man.
Same, though I do wear dresses quite often but I can go weeks without any make up and I have had short hair at times and yet nobody has ever mistaken me for a man.

I had short hair from ~3 years old until puberty and then again in my late teens and early twenties. By my late teens grunge was in and there wasn’t much difference between men and women’s basic outfits. I was regularly mistaken for a boy and then man. I couldn’t care less. I was never challenged in ladies toilets, maybe because my jacket was unzipped then and I have obvious boobs.

Toilets aren't really the key issue. It is much easier in hospital or in prison to determine someone's sex.

And women should have certainty that if they are having an intimate search or examination and they request it is done by a female it is a born female doing it.

I get called sir occasionally, if I'm wearing outdoorsy clothes in town, or boy cut jeans. People realise once they take a second glance though.

I know a few women who, at first pass, I thought of as male. All are women who attempt to look, at the very least, butch. It became fairly obvious they're female when I spent time with them. But I could see that I might be fooled in a bathroom situation.

So I do see this as a bit of a risk.

The thing is, if it hadn't been for the TWAW-and-should-be-welcome-in-women's-loos crowd, the risk of challenge would be much lower as people's initial assumption would be that they were butch rather than male.

A close friend of mine, defiantly female, frequently was challenged in her younger days for going into female lavatories.

She just doesn't conform, it seems, to what some women see as female.

You may think you know who is female and who isnt, but you dont.

Agree 100% with @nyancatdays

Yes this is my experience when people think I’m a guy. They correct themselves within seconds. I’m petite so I’m often a bit taken aback 😆 but there you go

Id rather be questioned than have an actual guy in the women’s bathrooms

It's happened to me twice so far. Once when someone yelled at me for being in the womens, once when someone quietly went to get security. I keep my hair short as I'm physically disabled and can't wash it myself which when paired with my natural build makes me look a bit masculine.

In my experience, only men do this (I’m tall with short hair)

No but have had people think I was a man/boy a few times, the thing is as soon as I turned around and/or spoke they realised immediately that I was female. The first glance taking in short hair and trousers never stands up to a closer look or hearing the voice.

N, I don't think I ever have. There have been one or two occasions where I wasn't sure but as soon as the woman spoke there was no confusion.

I, like a pp, was once briefly mistaken as a man when I was in military uniform, including camouflage make-up, but in that case the person realized his mistake as soon as I spoke.

In nearly half a century of using the women’s toilets, I’ve never seen a single woman challenged in the loos for being a man. I feel pretty sure that if it happened frequently, I might have had some idea about it (and I spent a couple of decades as a lesbian - and though I’m not particularly butch, I never heard of any of my friends who were very butch being mistaken for a man in the loo!)

I only heard about this idea in the last few years from students and teenagers, and from
Tumblr. I think it’s a bit of Americanised discourse that has started floating around here along with the gender stuff.

I have a private theory that it seems plausible to young people who (a) don’t really have any idea or think about the fact that for large parts of the twentieth century, most women wore their hair short and many did not wear makeup or particularly “gendered” clothes, so they have some kind of idea that it is terribly “gender non conforming” to have short hair and not wear all the contouring/long swishy hair/overdone nails stuff they associate with social media-influenced “femininity”. They are too deep in the present moment to realise that many/most women went about all of the 70s, 80s and 90s in jeans or slacks and an anorak and a short haircut and still weren’t assumed to be either men or somehow making a radical statement about “gender”. They simply don’t understand that for most of the postwar period, mostly only very young women had long hair, and married or older women generally uniformly had short hair styles.

And (b) added to that, it doesn’t occur to the same young people to look at their grannies (or any older women), and notice that still most women older than about 60 have short hair and wear trousers. My mum is 72 and sings in a big community choir for older women, and last time they performed out of about 300 women only a handful were wearing a skirt or dress - they almost exclusively wear tops and trousers and have short hairstyles! I’m currently on a walking holiday in the West Country, and nearly all men and women are dressed completely the same in sportswear and hiking gear and identical fleeces and anoraks (can still easily tell who the women are though…)

The “women who are gender non conforming might get CHALLENGED in the loos” Tumblr/Twitter crowd just seem not to actually notice older women, or society around them in practice; nor take a look at what anyone older than about 25 is wearing to realise that very few women over that age are what you’d call particularly “gender confirming” anyway.

So, anyway. Long rant, sorry, but the short version is that I think it’s US-influenced internet scaremongering, by people who don’t seem to take the trouble to actually look around themselves on a daily basis.

If I was guessing yes it would be possible to get a 50:50 call right several times in a row, but it wasn't a guess - I could tell.

Do I think it's possible to make a mistake at first glance/behind/from a distance/in a photo? Of course.
Do I think any mistake would be immediately identified and corrected within 60 secs of actually interacting with that person? 100%.

Or perhaps it is just that 50/50 chance is really good odds.

I remember being mistaken for a man when I had short hair...only by children though!

I think it just highlights the unfortunate issue that many people still have a 'traditional gender norms' view of femininity and masculinity. Just as society was finally starting to overcome this, the onslaught of trans ideology has set us right back to square one.

A video popped up on socials the other called something less rock dude or girl. Brief video clips of the back of someone with long hair wearing a leather jacket. There were several different clips of different people - I correctly sexed them all from a few seconds of looking at their back/ back of their head in a leather jacket (biker style so not exactly form fitting). I don't class myself as particularly observant or blessed with special powers, it's just that men and women are physically different!

I once mistook a trans man for a man, for about a second.

I am reminded of this

I’ve been mistaken for a boy or man at least a half dozen times in my life.
I am naturally quite androgynous featured.

I'm tall and broad, usually in jeans etc, often wear men's shoes (broad feet) and a puffa bomber jacket. When I had short hair I was often addressed as 'Sir' from behind, and, yes, I was challenged in the women's toilets.

But the moment I turned around or spoke, it became immediately obvious to the other person that I was female.

No harm done.

Presumably I don't know if I did.

Dp was really surprised when we had dinner with some friends with 2 adult kids, he knew one had transitioned but thought the one he met was a male who'd transitioned to female, when it was the other way round. Really surprised me tbh but I accepted that I've known this person all their lives and continue to see them through that prism.