Misgendering - How do biological women handle it?

[SpareRibFem]

I've been misgendered quite often over my life. I'm interested in how other biological women handle it as I'm sure I'm not the only one this happens to (might be a very short thread if I am)

Note. This post is not intended to look at how TW handle it or how we think they should. I'm not deliberating excluding them but there's been plenty written by TW on misgendering and I'm interested in the biological woman's perspective as the problem is not unique to trans women or trans men.

For background I have quite strong facial features and shortish but feminine styled hair, I also have a very obviously female physique - Am I allowed to say that here?

I've been misgendered on occasion since I was a child, (like most children when I was growing up I wore gender neutral clothes) even happened when I was heavily pregnant

Sometimes it's been very deliberate to make the point they felt I was (unwelcome) in a male (work) environment and the intention was to exclude me.

Sometimes it's been rudeness, using gentlemen for example because predominantly men in the room and can't be bothered to adapt for women present

Sometimes it's accidental, service personnel calling me sir when they are addressing me directly.

Sometimes it's patriarchal for example official correspondence that starts Dear Sir because they assume they are addressing a man. Which annoys me.

I've never been entirely sure how to handle it. For service personnel I assume it's accidental and blink slightly as I've been female since birth and don't have a deep voice, Then I go with it and hope they don't get embarrassed when (if) they realise they've made a mistake.

In a group situation where they are referring to gentlemen I sometimes flag that there is also a lady present to make the point that they are being exclusive but sometimes it's just not worth it, I think this is the only time I correct people.

Letters I want to write something along the lines of 'women exist too' and return but life's too short.

To (possibly mis)quote an Alison Moyet song, 'It makes me feel like I'm invisible'. It isn't that I personally feel invisible but I feel like women are invisible

No. All I can think of is that awful "guys" when it is a mixed or even a single sex group of women. But as the person using it is as likely to be a woman as a man I don't suppose that counts.

Your other examples- no, never.

Hmm.

It doesn’t happen to me much in person (although the meetings where someone says “thanks, gents ‘ or whatever are annoying. It happens to me a lot in emails and phone calls as I have an unusual and masculine sounding name. Frankly I use it to my advantage when I can. I don’t correct the person (typically a lawyer on the other side of a case) until they actually speak to me. It’s generally a bit discombobulating for them to have their perception of Mr Drove taken apart. It’s also lazy of them, surely you do a bit of research into someone you’re going to deal with

I especially like saying that no I’m not Mr Drove’s secretary as he’s away from his desk

Tiger I'd forgotten but I've used it to my advantage too. I used to use a more masculine shortened form of my first name on cv's to get past that initial filter

The think is, you can yell that "Women exist too!" but nobody listens because they already know and they already don't care.

Not really (apart from sexist secretary assumptions), but centuries ago (well in the 70s), my mother was going to the hairdresser and didn't know if she'd make it back in time to pick my sister up from school so she asked my grandmother.

Mother arrived in time, unseen by grandmother, and sporting a trendy new short crop and wearing typical 70s attire of flares and shirt. My sis ran out to mother at which point, my grandmother yelled "don't go to that strange man!"

As I recall we laughed about it and I don't think my mother was traumatised - although she may have grown her hair out!

Ive been misgendered when i have had short hair. So has my daughter. It has never felt like a problem. My dd quite enjoys it

It happens to me occasionally when I’m not consciously putting out dressed up lady signals.
I’ve got long hair in a obvious woman’s style but I scrape it back a lot and i wear men’s clothes to the gym and at home a lot (building renovations, all DIY. I suppose I could repoint up a ladder in a frock but seems a bit of a faff).

I have a lot of tattoos, so I guess that throws some people into thinking masculine? I sometimes get kids ask me if I am a man or a woman.

My name is a boring apostolic one and I occasionally get emails addressed to the male version, or people saying ‘oh, I was expecting a man’ because they’ve only skim read my name.

None of it bothers me at all though. If it’s a short interaction I let it slide, a longer one, and they usually correct themselves.

It hasn't happened but I woild hate it. I am not a man. I don't want to be a man nor mistaken for a man.

Service personnel using "sir" to your face seems bizarre.

As a tattooed shaven headed woman I am misgendered constantly. This hateful violence has triggered me several times to suicide myself.

I was frequently misgendered as a child ( 1970s) and also had my gender presentation policed by local children via the use of homophobic slurs. I remember sometimes feeling inadequate and ugly (‘not a proper girl’) which continued on and off for many years, although declining the older I got. Couldn’t give a fuck now.

But I also remember more often thinking that the girls who were doing this were mean idiots wearing stupid impractical clothes, who couldn’t have any fun and tbh I still think this now of women who hobble themselves in silly shoes and so forth. But yes personal choice blah blah blah. Interesting now I think back that it was mostly the girls doing this, not the boys.

I always felt completely comfortable and happy that I was female and that being female was a damn fine thing to be, and had sod all to do with external markers such as clothes and makeup and so forth. This was thanks to a staunchly feminist mother and growing up amongst lots of ‘alternative lifestyle’ people.

It hasn't happened to me in years in real life, but it did happen when I was younger. As a girl, I had a boy's haircut, and only ever wore jeans and t shirts. I was chased out of ladies toilets on occasion. It was a bit embarrassing, a bit funny, a bit confusing.

Another incident I remember was on a train platform, after I had kissed my girlfriend goodbye and she got on a train, and a group of lads said "wahay lad!" in an aggressive manner. It was a horrible experience as they then got on the train with her and she had an awful journey home. Obviously that was homophobia, and the concern over our safety had nothing to do with feeling offended by them 'misgendering' me, more to do with our vulnerability of being physically intimidated or attacked.

I do think it's an interesting thing to take offense over. In my family and my husband's family, someone being a bit wet is called 'a big girl's blouse' which is often shortened to 'a big girl'. It's not an criticism directed to either males or females exclusively, but it is a phrase I discourage because it's got such negative gender overtones.
So for most people, the understanding is that the insult in misgendering a man would be accidentally calling him 'she', because of the perceived slight on his masculinity. The same for the opposite with a woman and femininity.
But TRAs find the insult in people using the sex-appropriate pronoun which is kind of the other way around.

I realise the contradiction in my post above - I guess what I’m trying to explain was that I was happy with being female and that being female wasn’t about external markers or presentation, but that sometimes the social pressure to perform femininity was difficult and a) I felt pressure to conform but b) wasn’t very good at it.

and i wear men’s clothes to the gym and at home a lot

What do you mean by "men's clothes"?
On the recent school uniform thread several posters were insisting school trousers were "gender neutral"

This is not getting at you but there is a bit of inconsistency on this board about clothes. Posters will post about how gender non conforming they are because they spend all their time in "men's clothes" yet when threads like the school uniform one appear clothes then become gender neutral.

I was misgendered as a teen fairly often as I was mistaken for a younger boy - it didn’t bother me in the slightest.

I am regularly assumed to be male on the basis of simply being ‘Dr.’ Rather than Mrs/Ms. Followed by either embarrassment, or sometimes disbelief (seriously) when I turn up in person.
THAT is annoying and that I always pick up on it, because that is inherently sexist.

It’s only once been a serious problem - is booked flights with a fellow Dr. Labelled Woman and we had both been entered into the booking system as male but this hadn’t shown on the booking details we had. We were nearly refused the flight. The airline tried to say it was their new booking system but I simply can’t believe that - surely it’d have been picked up? We got the flights anyway in the end, but that was fairly stressful.

I’ve had a similar experience to you, OP. I assume it’s because I’m almost 6 feet tall, but it’s been happening since I was a child.

The first time I can recall was when I was a young teen and held a door open for an elderly woman. She said, “Thank you, young man.”

It’s happened to me in person several times. I’m often initially offended but can’t help but find it funny as the person realises their mistake. On reflection, this could have contributed to my preference for wearing revealing clothes in my 20s.

I wear short hair and what are considered "masculine" clothes (jeans and tee shirts mostly), so it happens to me all the time. And I really, really don't care what sex a stranger thinks I am. I don't see why it matters. Feminism has taught me that I am a valid and real woman, whatever I look like and however society judges my appearance.

Last time I was misgendered was in a pub, when the young woman behind the bar said to my friend "Sorry, but boys aren't allowed after 9pm", pointing at me. Then she did a double take and screeched "Oh my god I'm so sorry, you're a lady!". It was after playing football and I do look like a teenage boy in my football kit even though I'm 44. We all fell about laughing.

I have alopecia. People get my sex wrong a lot because they expect bald people to be male. I think so few balding women go without wigs or other head coverings that it seems quite unusual. I find the bigger problem is people assuming I'm some kind of criminal thug though if I shave it off rather than having a patchy mess. I don't like being followed around shops by security guards and treated rudely by staff; misgendering is usually polite and I don't find it upsetting or particularly triggering by comparison!

Lass, I mean clothes I purchased from the menswear section.

It doesn’t happen to me in person these days. It did occasionally when I was younger with short hair and dressing in a way to hide my shape. I don’t recall it bothering me but then I didn’t want people to notice my body at all.

It has happened a lot online, especially in the earlier days of the Internet when more spaces were primarily male. A fair few people told me that I ‘sounded’ male because of the way I wrote or the things I wrote about. Found this a fairly sexist presumption, but it didn’t upset me, I used to laugh at it.

I've been misgendered a lot over the years.

When I was a teenager (in the 80s) I was often mistaken for a young adolescent male.

In work, via email, as my email didn't show my first name. Also quite often by foreigners who even if my name is written down often seem to perceive it as a male name.

Occasionally misgendered in person by foreigners, usually people who's first language doesn't have gendered pronouns.

Pretty permanently online, Mumsnet is really the only online mainstream space where there is an assumption that a poster is female.

It's never been intended to be offensive so I have never been bothered. Sometimes I would correct in a work environment or when I was heading into a single-sexed environment eg toilet. Interestingly I only ever got the "wrong lav, love" on my way in, never when I was in the room.

These days it only happens rarely in person, the occasional duff mailshot letter and when I get people ringing to check my washing machine/computer virus check.

I'm also misgendered when online gaming and I have learned not to be "out" as female. It's almost the only time I 've been maliciously "correctly gendered" - called female as an insult because they think I am male.

I don't need to deal with it because generally it doesn't bother me. The "dear sir" type of stuff irritates me but doesn't cause me any personal distress.

What do you mean by "men's clothes"?

I assumed the poster meant 'garments-marketed-towards-the-male-sex-which-can-in-reality-be-worn-by-either-sex-and-yet-which-are-distinguishable-from-garments-marketed-towards-the-female-sex-by-virtue-of-pattern-design-features-and-merchandising'

Trousers are 'gender neutral', and have been for over a century. But it doesn't take a forensic scientist to distinguish between trousers intentionally marketed towards women and trousers marketed towards men. Designers do have a tendency to signpost who the trousers are 'supposed to be for' using cues like cut, colour, pattern, pockets, buttons, etc.

Noting that a garment has been 'gendered' through features and merchandising and rejecting that implied gender rule by wearing it as a member of the opposite sex is consistent with being gender critical.

To be honest, when a gender critical poster writes about mens' clothes or hairstyles I just assume they haven't bothered to add the inverted commas, knowing that most readers won't wilfully misinterpret their meaning.

I don't think "Gotcha!"

I am with RuPaul on this: "You can call me he. You can call me she. You can call me Regis & Cathy Lee; I don't care! Just as long as you call me."

Really? Baracker. I got several very nasty comments on a thread when I said I don't wear masculine /men' sclothing ."Whatever could I mean? "

It seems saying "I wear men's clothes" is g
fine and laudable, what a great gender critical feminist that makes you but saying "I don't wear men's clothes" gets you treated like an idiot.

So actually it is "gotcha" There is a great deal of hypocrisy on this board.

*To be honest, when a gender critical poster writes about mens' clothes or hairstyles I just assume they haven't bothered to add the inverted commas, knowing that most readers won't wilfully misinterpret their meaning.

I don't think "Gotcha*!

Likewise.