A lot of the time passing comes with safety benefits and the benefit of people not reflecting our bodies back at us through speech… but I would say that if you have only external validation of your physical body to steer how you feel about it then you are pretty much fitting my rubric of not experiencing an internally reaction to your own body. Your experience of gender is only external. That flexibility might be a feature of the human body naturally having two modes of development you go down. If you swapped body phenotypes and nobody cared or noticed how do you think you might react?
For us a lot of us trans folk part of our journey involves recognizing how our bodies alone outside of any external influence makes us feel. A lot of us spend a lot of time experimenting in isolation. When I am in front of a mirror when I am alone the last thing I am thinking about is how other people feel about my body. I bound my chest in the privacy of my own home long before I went outside with it, but the reason I did it privately was because I got the benefit of the lack of stimulus from it. I wasn’t practicing for social use later. If I was isolated for the rest of my life from the interaction with other humans I would still want things like a deep voice, weight distribution changes, facial hair and what not because at it’s core those things are for me alone to enjoy.
What happens when someone misgenders me is a reaction that is first and foremost a reminder to myself that I have or don’t have that physical feature. The social considerations and implications are secondary and belated. Lack of peer recognition is a component of binary transness that is a deep feeling that your preferred gender is your tribe. Our social astrangement is generally blamed first to how they react to your sex characteristics… But interestingly enough most cis people do not feel this deep sense of social tribalism either.
A lot of the time passing comes with safety benefits and the benefit of people not reflecting our bodies back at us through speech… but I would say that if you have only external validation of your physical body to steer how you feel about it then you are pretty much fitting my rubric of not experiencing an internally reaction to your own body. Your experience of gender is only external. That flexibility might be a feature of the human body naturally having two modes of development you go down. If you swapped body phenotypes and nobody cared or noticed how do you think you might react?
For us a lot of us trans folk part of our journey involves recognizing how our bodies alone outside of any external influence makes us feel. A lot of us spend a lot of time experimenting in isolation. When I am in front of a mirror when I am alone the last thing I am thinking about is how other people feel about my body. I bound my chest in the privacy of my own home long before I went outside with it, but the reason I did it privately was because I got the benefit of the lack of stimulus from it. I wasn’t practicing for social use later. If I was isolated for the rest of my life from the interaction with other humans I would still want things like a deep voice, weight distribution changes, facial hair and what not because at it’s core those things are for me alone to enjoy.
What happens when someone misgenders me is a reaction that is first and foremost a reminder to myself that I have or don’t have that physical feature. The social considerations and implications are secondary and belated. Lack of peer recognition is a component of binary transness that is a deep feeling that your preferred gender is your tribe. Our social astrangement is generally blamed first to how they react to your sex characteristics… But interestingly enough most cis people do not feel this deep sense of social tribalism either.