Randomly holding other people’s children.

They see me as safe. I’m middle-aged, put together and usually knitting. Many times I’ve been traveling and the opportunity to support a harried parent arises. Most don’t even think twice before gladly accepting a hand.

If my boyfriend were to try even cooing at a child he’d be accused of abducting children or similar bullshit. I’ve seen people get weird if he smiles without me nearby That completely infuriates me.

“Girls” and “men”. 😒 The word you were looking for is “women”.

Girls can’t buy alcohol but adults can, both men and women.

Trans woman that lives in a big city here. After multiple scary encounters and one requiring pepper spray, I don’t walk outside at night by myself anymore. It’s amazing that when the world saw me as a guy a decade ago that I could wear headphones and not be even slightly concerned. That’s just not the case anymore.

I can (and do) cosplay as characters of both genders at times. I say this because I noticed that while we can cosplay as male characters, a guy cosplaying as a female character automatically has connotations of non-binarism for some reason.

In girlmode I can compliment women on their attire, hair styling, accessories, etc and it’s not taken as a declaration of sexual arousal.

Some good ones have already been covered, so I’ll add that, if I were to break down crying, other women would come over to ask if I’m okay etc. (I’ve held a complete stranger while she sobbed in the middle of a store, after she lost everything in a fire) unfortunately men still face a very weird gender bias that society in general still believes - you never show your emotions.

My husband sharpened a friend of mine’s meat cleaver for her. I knew I’d be seeing her at the library later, so I folded it inside cardboard and put it in a reusable shopping bag for her. At no point did I worry about anyone stopping me, and if they had, I would have expected them to believe me about what happened.

Everything went according to plan and I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, if my husband hadn’t been so surprised that I gave her the knife in public.

Oh hey I’m AFAB but more or less NB at this point and let my gender presentation flux with both people’s perceptions and whatever seems to be working best in the moment, especially career-wise so I actually have a LOT of thoughts on this. A looot of this discusses societal stereotypes on gender, so while I think it’s shitty, the fact that a lot of people (wrongly) perceive trans people as their birth sex is of relevance to my perspective on this discussion. So, trigger warning: prejudice / transphobia.

Background:

• I’m AFAB so most of my upbringing was femme oriented

• I also come from an autism / ADHD HEAVY family so I still missed some of the social aspects of gendered upbringing

• my parents WERE fundies however, so my attempts at more feminine presentations (makeup, heels, etc) resulted in a lot of sex-shaming from my parents, but there was also a looot of pro-birther nonsense and everything about pregnancy just freaks me out. There’s probably a looot to unpack there as to how I wound up nonbinary, but ultimately I am what I am now, so it is what it is.

• I spent the first few years of my career working on a psych unit for criminally insane men so the formative years of my young adulthood were spent learning how to speak from my chest and not look like a target

• my current presentation is that sort of “no gendered features” / look like a clean shaven young man / lesbian (vs the beard AND boobs / “aaaall the gendered features” look). The only surgery I’ve had is my tits chopped off + tubes out. So I don’t look ooobviously trans, but a lot of people also can’t really tell what genitals I have at a glance which some people find …distressing. for some reason.

• I’m also white which I think lets me “get away with more” than others.

Thoughts:

• I usually use the women’s bathroom. Sometimes I bring a she-wee to work but all the unit bathrooms are singles so it’s more just because I work with animals (male and female) who don’t know how to put the seat up when they pee standing / squatting. This is mostly because whether it’s reality or trauma based (see above work history) I don’t trust most men around me with my pants off vs women will be socially awful but I likely won’t have to come to blows over it. I do get some weird looks though, and some have stopped me, but then they just get this really confused / uncomfortable expression and ultimately leave me alone. But as far as your question goes, I do think I would get less backlash as a AFAB going into the men’s room than an AMAB gets doing the reverse, so there’s definitely an aspect of my vagina being inherently less threatening in vulnerable contexts… somehow?

• sexually, I can be a top or a bottom (penatrator OR penatratee) and pussy vs bussy doesn’t matter too much to me other than that fitting things in the backdoor takes a lot more prep work (but I’ll talk more further down about how that flexibility is convenient for me personally). As far as gender relations go, I feel like I get more “girl power” brownie points for strapping on and pegging my male partner vs how men who receive anal penetration are perceived despite the fact that I’m essentially letting him do almost the exact same when he fucks my ass. I even typically use a “strapless” strapon (they still realistically need a harness to stay in) so I am actually being physically stimulated by the act, it’s not even (necessarily) a dominance thing.

• work / patient care: I work high-acuity psych so every patient has to have their skin checked for injuries and contraband (particularly weapons). I usually count as female for the purposes of keeping things same-sex. As far as your specific question though, it’s also usually fine for me to count as female when searching men, even if the other person is also a woman. I usually try to have a male staff member with me as well, but nursing is pretty female dominated and I’ve noticed both in terms of patient comfort and working policy, two women searching a man is NOT as frowned upon as two men searching a woman. Do with that what you will. Same also goes for care / cleaning of genitals / breasts when patients require that.

• In terms of responding to violent patients: it depends and I’ll change my demeanor as needed. If a patient seems like they’ll respect a man more I’ll stand taller, drop the pitch of my voice / speak from the chest, and be more directive. If I think they’ll respond better to me being more gentle / nurturing I’ll do that (although I’m not as good at it) but again as far as your question goes, I don’t think an AMAB person would be trusted the same way were they witnessed going back and forth like that.

• That said, this raises the most important advantage to looking / acting masc - the high violence patients who respond better to gentleness are fairly few and far between. Patients who perceive me as more masculine are far, FAR more likely to cooperate with me being directive when I need to be. It’s also in most cases not a fear thing in that they perceive me as stronger / more powerful, it’s that they perceive me as more equal and worth listening to. I’ve had (usually boomer age) dementia patients in particular who gave every female nurse before me absolute hell for every single part of their treatment plan including the stuff the nurse has 0 control over but just went along with me saying the exact same things, then halfway through the shift they tell my coworker that “oh yes that nice young man has been so helpful!” It happens a lot actually, and I have a muuuch easier time with the sexist patients than most of my female coworkers. I recently did have one patient with homosexuality related delusions who targeted me a little, but that’s pretty rare (they commented on him mostly going after men in report last night and I was like “hey he came after me the other night!” and one of my coworkers actually turned to me and was like “I don’t think that counts as him targeting a woman…”)

I guess my ultimate statement on it is thus: my particular combination of transness (including my race) is highly favorable considering, and I’ve heard that’s often true for transmascs which I think is highly reflective of societal prejudices based on birth sex. I still get the weird looks and called mean names, but I’m sitting in exactly the least taboo combination where most people can assuage their prejudices by categorizing me as a “tomboy.” People also often assume I’m a lesbian which is a little less favorable, but much more favorable than being trans (which is closer to the truth, I’m surgically confirmed and actually tend to prefer men).

I’ve actually arguably been able to use my gender presentation to avoid violence in many cases, which almost universally cannot be said for transwomen or AMAB NBs or men or any other AMABs who find themselves with any kind of femme aspects in their gender presentation. I’m also fortunate that the dysphoria I did have tended towards removing gendered aspects vs adding them because that also gets a lot of backlash.

I’m also almost entirely uniquely fortunate in that I don’t have any dysphoria that causes me inherent distress based on how others perceive me or how I’m personally acting outwardly. That makes my ambivalence an asset almost, since I can just do whatever seems to make any given situation go smoothest, and I don’t experience any emotional distress from doing so. I’ve noticed that lack of omnipresent dysphoria is almost unheard of in trans communities, especially for someone who got surgery (to the extent that I’m often actively unwelcome for expressing my unusual combination of lived experiences; I’ve actually felt far less welcome in trans spaces than pretty much anywhere else; and that includes on lemmy, a lot of my comments like this get removed with transphobia cited as the reason).

Anyway that’s my garbled post 12-hour-night-shift stream of consciousness that I wrote and re-wrote a couple times on the bus ride home. Hope it was interesting but imma tap out and go nap before I have to go back tonight.

Ask for help. I have a sketchy knee that gives out sometimes and i need to have one hand on the stair rail just in case. If I’m carrying something that requires two hands at work, I have no problem asking someone to grab the other side of it on the stairs. My husband would not ask for help unless it was something really heavy. He would put himself at risk to avoid admitting he needed help - it’ll be fine. Well sure, it’s always fine, until it’s not.

Woman, not girl. I’m an adult and expect to be treated as such.

I feel no pressure to respond to aggression with physical violence. I recently sat through two friends (men) talking about how they feel too old to fight but if a strange guy were to roll up to them under certain conditions, they would have “no choice” but to physically fight them. I have never felt the need to physically fight a woman who disagreed with me. I would consider it a win and a good reflection on me if I could deescalate or remove myself from the situation.

Most other things I can think of are a double edged sword. Like being seen as a “girl” instead of a fully functioning, self-sufficient woman is usually a negative, but I can twist it in my favor to avoid things sometimes. I see other people commenting about women being able to interact with children without being seen as a potential pedophile, but that only comes because society expects women to do all the child-carrying.

Mostly things that fall under the category of women not being able to be a threat/dangerous. Especially white women, which im usually read as.

This includes everything from talking to children in public to actual minor crimes like shoplifting.

ETA: this is in fact a prime example of how sexism is mean to everyone. Women are not dangerous because they’re weak, men are dangerous because they’re strong. Neither is generally true.

Have any introverted traits. It’s okay for a man to be quiet or get hyper focused on a task. That can be either taken as he’s creepy or the strong/silent type. But if a woman does this then she’s labeled as a cold uncaring bitch. Sometimes I just want to get through a task without taking 20 minutes emotionally propping someone else up as expected.

I lived the first part of my life pretending to be a man, and then I wised up. I’ll just name my most recent moment of acknowledging that particular distinction in society.

If a pair of suburban mothers saw a car pull into a nearby space, and watch a man get out of the car leaving the door mostly ajar and walk around to the passenger side of the car, grab a small grocery sack, and walk it to the nearest trash can and back… they might say something or keep an eye on him. But if he absentmindedly were to have also left the radio on loud enough for you to know he was listening to the building up of a particularly spice scene of a romance audiobook and … there would be some discomfort.

But if they saw a woman in the same scenario, who only made it about halfway to the trash can before realizing, then make eye contact as they ran to turn it off embarassed… well they just giggled and asked what author that was.

Putting on makeup in public; specifically thought of refreshing lipstick at the table in a restaurant while waiting for the check.