My partner is female, as am I, and we have a daughter who recently started school. DP has always had the odd person be confused about her gender, but when we got together there was a big surge in people assuming she was a man, and when DD was born, even more so. DD is nearly five now, and I still find people glance at DP and assume she's a man. I'm posting because one of the school mums - and DD goes to a tiny rural school so there are only a handful of us - has still not clocked that DP is a woman. I was at the school gate chatting and she asked about my husband, so I replied my partner's a woman, and she clearly didn't know what to say.
I find it frustrating because, if you actually bother to look at DP, you can see she's a woman. She always wears jeans or trousers (but women's jeans or trousers), and usually a shirt or a hoodie. Sometimes the shirts are from the menswear section, but the hoodies are generally Seasalt women's. Her hair is short, but so is mine, and no one ever mistakes me for a man. She wears unisex doc martens, but so do lots of women. She's all of 5'8 so not exactly a towering masculine height.
I am aware people misgender her mostly out of kneejerk, unconscious bias: they see one woman (me) and another person, and they automatically decide the other person must be a man. Or they see me and DD and decide the other person must be the dad.
But it's really starting to bother me, because DD is getting old enough to start wondering about what people say, and she is trying to understand what makes someone a man or a woman. She is getting a clear message that her mum is doing womanhood 'wrong', and that people don't think she is a woman, and she's started asking us why. I don't know what to say - and I don't know how to respond to people misgendering DP in a way that is still friendly, but does get across that it's not ok?