Tucker Lieberman
2 min readAug 25, 2024

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True. I guess that's related to cis-passing privilege. Being assumed to be cis isn't a guaranteed product of someone's physique and dress — it also depends on what the other person expects and is prepared to see. It's a chicken-and-egg circle: Someone who passes for cis becomes invisible, and someone whose gender is invisible to start with (e.g., due to lack of awareness that trans men exist) is more likely to pass for cis. Breaking out of that invisibility cycle might involve — I don't know — wearing a trans pin? Like: I bet you think I'm a guy! Yes, but I'm a TRANS guy! But even that assumes that my neighbors (the ones who recognized the trans flag to begin with) could figure out I was identifying myself as a trans man and not a trans woman. And what I'd want my neighbors to do with that information is yet another aspect of the question.

Anyway, yes, I think an individual's gender socialization (past and present) influences their tone and how they show up in the world. If I grow up absorbing that "nice girls talk like this," and then the world suddenly expects me to talk like "a man," while an alternative possibility of "living an openly trans life" remains invisible even to me, more so to everyone else — that gender situation will affect all my interactions. It's tricky, I confess, for me to imagine exactly how I'd think, speak, and act if I'd been gendered differently all my life. But the way I think is undoubtedly a product of my gender experience.

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Tucker Lieberman
Tucker Lieberman

Written by Tucker Lieberman

Cult classic. Author of the novel "Most Famous Short Film of All Time." Editor for Prism & Pen and Identity Current. tuckerlieberman.com

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