How Not to Be Seen

So, I spend a lot of time wondering how people are gendering me. Because it's so hard to get masculine speed-reads out of people (most clearly demonstrated through clerks and waitstaff who are required to use a gendered honorific), I tend to get obsessed with it and try harder and harder.

It gets to the point where getting dressed is just a grind of despair and I don't even really have an interest in butching up a lot of days, it's just a habit to try (while knowing it will make jack-all difference). This is dull and annoying and takes a lot of mental energy. I feel disconnected. I really do want to do all the gender presentations, but usually the "but what if today is the day I get called sir" stops me, which is gross.

So I shaved my head, which has a lot of gendered stuff tangled up with it (I have a Sinead O'Connor skull, which increases my feminine signaling, but shaved heads are Usually A Guy Thing, but...). Because it increases my self-perception of feminine cues, I took the opportunity to get my ears pierced and paint my nails. I have been wearing my big show-off-my-assets bras lately for back support; I haven't bound in two months because it is a migraine trigger and I've needed the physical self-care. I am trying to relax into a while of "people will just read me as female (like they always do) and since that's my deliberate signaling that is more okay than usual."

arjache got me a purple knit hat with a white bobble and pink highlights[1], which I've been wearing to keep my head warm, so my standard public presentation right now is leather jacket with lavender bobble hat, breast shape fairly prominent.

The other day, a customer ahead of me in line said, "I'll just get out of this gentleman's way." I pitched my voice way the hell down and ran with it, and then privately squeed with the barista because what the HELL.

I don't understand. It seems totally random and I just don't even know. I don't know how often people are reading me as ambiguous or masculine from various angles. Since incidents like this imply that it's COMPLETELY RANDOM, I keep trying to bring myself to just dress how I feel right in the mirror and screw what people read, but the only reason I change my social cues is so people will see them and it's all just a tangled mess and argh.

I realized recently, when making up Dr. Who self-insertion fanfic (a lifelong hobby of mine), that I was going to have an awkward pronoun conversation with him at this point, and I don't know if even the automatic translation circuit could fix pronouns for me since I don't even know what pronouns I want a lot of the time. So I'd end up having to have this big complicated conversation and maybe a character development arc where I either get to go to a placetime where they have a gender framework for me and I can internalize it and get on with considering everywhere else an alien culture, or maybe just get a wearable perception filter that I can use to force people's gendered perceptions (as locally applicable) to match how I want to be read.[2]

God, that latter one would fix a lot of things.

But I'd rather be facing down daleks than having that goddamn conversation again, even with one of the most understanding people in the multiverse.

This has been thoughts.

[1] The pink spells out 'THEY/THEM' wrapping all around the hat. (It's the topmost hat here.) If people make out the words at all, the first assumption is that I'm a TMBG fan, but I am a TMBG fan, so that works out, and it's a nice internally pronoun-affirming security object.

[2] Not to change how people think I look. I'm fine with people thinking 'wow you're really femme.'[3]

[3] On his Monstrous Regiment tour, Terry Pratchett related a historical anecdote about people's willingness to take presentation on faith. A secretly female sailor had to take off her shirt for a flogging. The only comment was, "Tom's got awfully big tits for a man." That would work for me JUST FINE.