Have you ever mistaken a woman for a man?

[Moltenpink]

I’m seeing a lot on Twitter & TikTok about how the new ruling means that women will be challenged in bathrooms if they present as masculine.

I just don’t see it happening. I know women of all shapes, sizes, heights, muscle tone, haircuts. I know butch lesbians and women who have lost all their hair from chemo. I never see them as male in appearance.

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.

I'd rather be questioned than have an actual guy in the women’s bathrooms

Cosigning this declaration. I said as much when someone last assumed that the large musical instrument outside the cubicle meant a man inside it. I was more annoyed that the interlocutor lacked the imagination to consider that women might play something big.

Have I ever mistaken...

•a butch lesbian for a man? Never.

•a woman who has lost her hair due to chemo or breasts due to surgery for a man? Nope.

•a black woman, or a woman 'from another culture', for a man? No.

I've seen these crop up as likely scenarios on X since Wednesday and the last one is particularly gross; black women's womanhood used to be cited as some kind of gotcha when transactivism first gained the kind of turbo-traction which has landed us where we are today: "Transwomen are just another category of woman, like... black women! See, you wouldn't exclude black women from women's sports and spaces, would you!?" Misogyny and racism rolled into one.

When I grew up, one of my mum's friends had a full, chest-length beard and moustache, never wore make-up, smoked a pipe and wore blue overalls. Not once was I uncertain about her sex.

“There were several different clips of different people - I correctly sexed them all”

Say by “several different people” you mean around 5 people.
If you decided to choose male or female by tossing a coin, you’d still have a 1 in 4 chance of getting them all correct.

The focus on toilets is a red herring. I don’t care if we all use the same public toilets. I don’t want men in women’s prisons or refuges, or men committing crimes and skewing stats by claiming to be women.

But I wasn't guessing, I could tell which were male and which were female, shoulder shape alone was enough but that is just one of many subtle differences between male and female that enable us to distinguish someone's sex.

If it was that hard to tell how come not a single one of the many, many hookups brought back to my student house share (some women, some men, some gay, some straight) resulted in 'ooops sorry I thought you were a guy/girl'. Between the 7 rooms for 4 years that particular coin got tossed many times and no one got it wrong. Clare didn't have to go straight for a night because she was too embarrassed to tell a guy she thought he was a woman, Dave didn't run screaming from his room because the 'girl' he brought back turned out to be a man. As a species we are pretty good at sexing each other.

No. Doesn't happen. It's scaremongering.

Females have wider hips (whether teeny tiny size 4 or much larger)

Females have different jaw lines, brows, foreheads
Different hair distribution.

We can pretend. But 9 times out of 10- a trans person doesn't "pass". We know.

I got mistaken for a man once when going into a public toilet. It completely knocked my confidence then. I had long hair, make up on and was wearing jeans, trainers, a plain top and a leather jacket. I am quite tall but also have hips and giant boobs.

I stopped to hold the door for a woman a few steps behind me. She then proceeded to tell me that she was glad I did that because she was just about to call security to report a man going into the ladies toilet. She saw my confusion and decided to give me some more detail: how I looked so manly in my manly clothes and was sooooo tall. 8 years later, I still remember every detail of this delightful chat.

I sometimes was mistaken for a boy when I was younger. I had very short hair, no make up and lived in jeans and baggy tshirts. I'd get called Son but as soon as someone properly looked at me they'd realise I wasn't.
I have sometimes been unsure when I've seen photos of people.There was a display of photos of the board at my local.hospital and one woman looked ambiguous. But when I saw her in real life it was obvious she was female.
In recent years I've noticed the 'fashion' for many women and girls is a somewhat exaggerated pornified Kardashian type look. Very heavy make up, nails, extensions, lip fillers, huge fake lashes, revealing clothing..When I went out with women from work I may have looked masculine next to them.
I never wear makeup up these days as when I see myself in the mirror I feel like I look a drag queen. I probably don't but that's my perception.I don't doubt that some women get challenged in toilets but I find it hard to believe that once they spoke or interacted, people would continue insisting they were male. But I'm sure it happens occasionally.
I'm also sure that the current hysteria about how women are now going to get challenged in toilets is another TRA tactic.
All of a sudden they are concerned about gender non conforming women and transmen. Give me a break

I'd be too embarrassed anyway. Unless the person was OBVIOUSLY a man (like they had a beard or I saw a pee-pee), I daren't challenge them. OK a few men might get thru but not as many as under the previous rules.

I've been mistaken for a male before. I really, really don't look anything but female. Breasts, hips, hair, voice, size of hands and feet. I couldn't tell you if I've made a similar mistake, because I never corrected people who called me son or sir. Not that there have been many, but it's not zero.

There were also only 3-4 people on it if it is the same one I saw!

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.

That person sounds like a weirdo.

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.

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.

Isn't it 1 in 32?

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.

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).

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.

Me too

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.

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.

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.

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.

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