My dog is very recognizable, and very friendly. He's a 95 pound male Bernese Mountain Dog, with very striking tri-color markings. He is only one in my neighborhood, and there is only one other, half his age and definitely smaller, within a two or three mile radius. I walk him every day, usually around 7 in the morning and again at 10 AM - but it could be any time of day, depending on the weather and what else I need to do. Most of the time, I walk him in male mode, but recently I've gone out several times en-femme to take my dog on our daily walk through my neighborhood. Either way, I often encounter neighbors who see me and wave or say hello, and occasionally they actually approach and talk with me. If they encounter me en-femme, I use my female voice and mannerisms, and unless they directly ask if I'm the same person, or unless they are one of the few neighbors who definitely knows both sides of me already, I give them no reason to question my feminine gender.
Well, today I was out with the dog, as a male, and stopped to chat with two neighbors who live on the back side of my block. At first I was just chatting with the lady, and then her husband joined us. They are dog owners as well, and they both loved petting my dog. She introduced him to the dog, and the husband mentioned that he remembered my dog, and that he had recently seen, "a girl taking him for a run." Then he described me as Ceera, passing with my dog, and how my dog had heard him opening a squeaky side door to his garage and the dog reared up on his hind legs and strained at the leash to look around the corner of the garage and see what had made the noise. It was a very memorable moment for him, he said. Yet he gave no sign at all that he had seen the dog's handler as anything but a girl. He clearly thought 'she' was someone else other than me, who occasionally also walked my dog.
