To want to hear more from transmen - do they pass better than transwomen?

[loveyouradvice]

I'm curious....

I have seen very very few transwomen who pass.... and agree with everyone who says that women have "antenna" for male bodies/behaviour given that we are trained from very young to be wary of men and are on constant alert when out alone at night etc

But I am seeing films of more and more transmen who do seem to pass - is this because I'm less good at spotting the transition (i.e. if I was a man, I would see them differently) - or is it actually easier to pass?

I would really like to hear more transmen's voices - the whole debate is dominated by the opposite sex..... and the challenges they face...and those of their families

And I'm not talking about the huge number of teenage girls who have started to identify, but those in the 20s and 30s once there is greater clarity....

(Teens are a whole other challenge, given the rapid escalaton and that it is so complicated to work out who is actually trans and who are facing other issues... but that is not the subject of this thread)

Oh I realise I should add this... which I have just watched....

Transmen auditioning -

ps I do not think they are right (as in I believe in much wider casting and in women playing male roles in Shakespeare etc)... but it is a very good video!

Young transmen do seem to pass better or at least have an edgy androgynous appearance but at the risk of sounding i kind I wonder how the look ages compared to biological men.

Interesting... Having seen Glenda Jackson play King Lear I was gobsmacked how "old" women and men do not look different, if you remove the accessories.....

Though of course there is the intermediate age....

I think misogyny is one of the reasons why trans men pass more easily. Women are generally held to higher standards than men when it comes to their appearance and the expectations that they will be a particular kind of feminine. Men, broadly, have more freedom from judgment about their looks. These attitudes affect trans men and trans women just like they affect cisgender men and cisgender women (apologies to anyone who doesn't like that term - I'm not using it perjoratively or in reference to anyone in particular, but rather as a descriptor).

Trans women often describe the feeling that they need to perform femininity in a particular way in order to be accepted. Being a masculine looking trans woman is seen as being less authentic. Just like cisgender women are often viewed as less worthy of respect, time and admiration if they aren't conventionally attractive, trans women are views as less genuine, and less real, if they aren't conventionally feminine. For trans men there is less scrutiny because there is less scrutiny of men generally.

Sexism is the reason we don’t hear as much from transmen.

I've had partners (and still have friends) who are transmen and I think overwhelmingly, transmen continue to identify as queer and often want to remain connected to lesbian spaces and identities - so we hear rather less from them in terms of wanting to be taken and treated as men and have men's spaces adapted for them. (I also think that this is often connected to their having been socialised as female and therefore conditioned to "not make a fuss"; unlike some transwomen who expect to retain their male privilege of having things arranged to suit them.)

If you saw the transmen I know in passing, you'd assume they were men: female features can be masculinised with male hormones far more easily than male features can with female hormones: you can't do much to change the musculoskeletal traits that testosterone leaves transwomen with. Up close, you'd probably notice that most transmen are shorter, slighter and more boyish-looking than the average man if their age - but whether you'd question it I can't say (probably not.) I agree with previous posters who've said that the sexist standards placed upon women to look a certain way are part of reason transwomen find passing more difficult.

I wonder if to some degree there's more biological variation in men's appearance as well, henpecked. I can think of very few women I know who actually look masculine, even though lots of my friends have short hair and wear clothes like shirts and dungarees. But I think several of my male friends could look quite feminine if they were clean shaven and grew out their hair - not to the point where people would mistake them for women, but they do have quite 'pretty' features, IYSWIM. So perhaps trans men are more easily able to pass as feminine-looking men than trans women are as masculine-looking women, because we're more used to seeing the former to begin with.

I mean to take one obvious example, biological women (almost) always lack facial hair, whereas men don't always have facial hair. So seeing someone with a beard automatically marks them as biologically male in the vast majority of cases, but lacking a beard doesn't automatically mean someone is biologically female. On seeing someone who has a full beard, most people aren't going to even consider that they might have XX chromosomes, even if their other features are quite feminine.