I think once I was in high school - I had boyfriends and stuff like that, but I think when I was younger, I went through a period where I looked like a boy, and people thought I was a boy.
When I was a kid, I was always mistaken for a girl.
Too often, when transgender people die, family members or funeral homes will end up dressing a body of a transgender person in the garments of the gender that they were assigned at birth instead of their gender identity. They're often dead-named and misgendered.
My husband used to shout at my mother, 'What is wrong with your daughter? I'm married to a man.'
'Clocked' means someone sees you for being transgender.
I'm very often referred to as 'Sir' in elevators and such. I think it has to do with being this tall and not wearing much lipstick. I think people just can't imagine I'd be a woman if I look like this.
I've been harassed. I've been stalked. I've had every public pre-transition photo of me compiled alongside my deadname with the purpose of never letting me be my true gender.
I see myself as quite feminine. But many people seem to think differently about that; sometimes people mistake me for a man. In Paris I often hear 'bonjour monsieur'.
Some people aren't satisfied that I'm a gay man in a woman's body and swear that I'm secretly a real boy.
When a trans woman gets called a man, that is an act of violence.
I was really sensitive because people would say they thought I was a boy or call me a boy and stuff like that. I always had my hair back and, like I said, baggy clothes. So it was kind of sad. I didn't know what to do about it, and I didn't know what I was doing wrong because I was just being me.
When I walk down the street in a dress, people think I'm transgender. The issue isn't that I'm embarrassed to be thought of as transgender: the issue is that people treat transgender individuals so violently, especially if they think it's male to female.
All my life I have faced this awkwardness, as I almost sound like a guy. In fact, whenever I would call my friends, their dads would say, 'Hold on son.'
Hedi was and is still misspelled 'Heidi,' and my perception of genders ended up slightly out of focus from an early age.
Most of the books call Her a He, but I am able to ascertain what is meant, despite that semantic error.
I'm Southern, I'm gay, I'm little - I get Ma'am'd a lot on the phone.
A lot of people think I'm a chick. It happens the most at airports. The flight attendants will always say, 'Have a nice flight, Ms. Borns.' It must be the hair.
People kind of have a misconception, because when someone calls me Theo and I correct them, say, 'No, my name is Malcolm,' they think I have an attitude about it and I don't want to be associated with the show.
If someone says 'she' or 'he,' and it's unintentional, I can tell if it's coming from a place of love. It's only when someone misgenders me on purpose that it becomes hurtful.
You always get that one customer that decides that your name is boy. Or something. It certainly reinforces a respect I already had for people that are in the hospitality industry.
No matter how much makeup I wore, people just kept saying "Yes, sir! Would you like tea with that, sir?" "Yes, I would like tea. Why don't you put it on my breasts?" "Certainly. Tea for this man's breasts! Anything else, sir?"
When I was opening my first bank account, the person at the counter thought I was a girl.
