Aspects of Passing - What matters?
A breakdown into what actually matters when passing as male or female
Written as part of inkhaven, day 2/30. I am erring towards getting my thoughts out and sharing early - in order to iterate and make things get done.
Before we think about how to optimize things, can we break down the what we want to optimize most? What are the most important aspects of passing?
breaking it down to the 5 senses
Everybody knows the 5 senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste.
We can break down how important each of these are to people’s perception of you, How much do each of these matter for passing?
By default, people basically assume 100% sight, and don’t think about anything else.
This is partially true for interactions where you don’t interact with people much, and instead only just are seen from the distance or only for a few minutes, or if you are in public spaces. But most important interactions in our lives are not only this.
For any extended interactions with people, people will hear your voice.
And vocal aspects are extremely dimorphic to the point of almost no overlap in range between untrained male and female adult voices.
The other senses: smell, taste, touch, are not given much weight, partially because people don’t get to weigh on them that much, and partially because they are handled by default with hormonal treatment.1
breaking it down more specifically
Let’s break it down further. There are some aspects of yourself that combine sight + hearing in an unclean way, that i will combine to call “behavior”.
So, I would probably break it down further as:
Hearing = voice
Sight = body + face + styling
Behavior = motion + speech style + social aspects
Which gets further broken down to:
Voice = pitch + resonance + prosody + speech style
Head = hairline/frame + facial hair/shadow + face shape + skin + smaller details
Body (coarse) = height + overall size + age read + broad silhouette
Body (finer) = shoulders + ribs + chest + waist/hips + hands/feet + body hair
Styling = hairstyle + makeup + clothing + accessories
Behavior = movement + posture + clothing + mannerisms + conversational style + name/social framing + other subtle things
Which is a lot of dials that influence how we are seen. This is too many things to think about at once, but we can try to think about how these things interact with passing.
how do these things interact with passing?
A lot of these traits act pretty differently.
And passing is mostly a continuum.
Some traits act like priors. They don’t fully determine how someone is read, but they set the starting assumption. Height/general body scale is a lot like this.
Some traits act more like vetoes. They can override a lot of otherwise favorable cues. Voice is the clearest example. Facial hair or beard shadow can also work this way.
Some traits mostly act as validators. They make the overall read feel stable and coherent. A lot of face and body traits work like this: clothing, hairline, face shape, facial surface, torso contour, and so on.
And some traits mostly matter once someone is already uncertain. Hands, movement, neck details, knee shape, and so on, work more like tie-breakers for people who are really into the details, than first impressions.
One can think if “passing” as being a scale.
On one end, there are old people who haven’t interacted much with the young ‘uns and think you are a girl if you are young and have long hair. On the other end some will instantly clock you based on the slight difference in shape of your knees.2
passing is not one or two signals
One “mistake” that people often make when they don’t have much knowledge on trans things, is that they maybe think of like a couple most obvious signals that are high sexual dimorphism (for example, breast shape + clothing), and assume that swapping these aspects is sufficient to “pass”.
Upon switching these two properties, one may often find it slightly jarring because other things are still missing.
I personally like to think of the “gendered properties” as being sliders. Most people live on one extreme for all things on the sliders. But if one changes one or a few aspects to one extreme from the other, then it becomes quite jarring. This matches with anecdotes I have heard from people who go out and wear pretty androgynous clothes and pass, but wear gendered clothes and get misgendered.
I think one can apply the axis of “masculine” and “feminine” to basically most attributes, even when the degree to which it matters is quite different. One could consider “kiki” and “bouba” to be more masculine and feminine respectively, but it’s not a strong effect.
some other notes
For some traits, it’s not possible to start on one extreme and end up on the other with current technology. Some hope ends once you start undergoing permanent changes under puberty.
That being said, there is a lot of variation in these traits even among cis people, and technology has gotten quite good, so you may get to a pretty good state even despite some traits. A lot of it is dependent on genetic luck. Some other require a lot of wealth. But for many, doing your best to optimize each of these traits will get you pretty far.
If you want to “fully pass to most people”, I think you kinda need either some combination of:
[mostly passing visual] + [androgynous voice] or [mostly passing voice] + [androgynous visual]
But it’s a sliding scale and depending on who you are interacting with, people may be completely clueless or clued-in.
I leave more detailed analysis until tomorrow’s post
If you don’t shower enough, or apply perfumes or deodorants, there are some things to think about with smell, but we mostly ignore that for this post.
I still can’t reliably discern knee shape differences, and nobody cares.