When I was 35 20 years ago I went out like twice a week and thought I passed, I didn't. Now I know I don't pass and I'm ok with it.
When I was 35 20 years ago I went out like twice a week and thought I passed, I didn't. Now I know I don't pass and I'm ok with it.
For the OP; going out fully dressed and 'done up' as you say, is entirely up to whether you feel you can handle the potential backlash you might experience. As long as you make sure to stay safe, and can disregard any ill spoken words about you, I think you'll be fine. Just remember that you'll then be 'out', with all the potential ramifications that might bring as well.Originally Posted by Jennifer Michelle
That said, good luck! Enjoy your time dressed as you wish to be.
Some causes of crossdressing you've probably never even considered: My TG biography at:http://www.crossdressers.com/forums/...=1#post1490560
There's an addendum at post # 82 on that thread, too. It's about a ten minute read.
Why don't we understand our desire to dress, behave and feel like a girl? Because from childhood, boys are told that the worst possible thing we can be, is a sissy. This feeling is so ingrained into our psyche, that we will suppress any thoughts that connect us to being or wanting to be feminine, even to the point of creating separate personalities to assign those female feelings into.
Boy, is that an understated classic! Yes, well, duh.
Jennifer,
I use to ask if I was passable or not but after going out to my first social group meeting a year ago the thought and need fades away. I have had all favourable comments like being called a convincing woman and some have said I'm passable , the point is it really doesn't matter, once you've gone out the door it become irrelevant , try not to act it , I feel comfortable dressed and it makes me happy and that's what carries it off. I don't put on a false voice and don't overdo the feminine movements which isn't possible anyway in some heels.
Last edited by Teresa; 01-15-2017 at 07:44 PM.
im conflicted with this one, firstly how does a female not pass as female.
on the other hand how do you know they were indeed female....
Last edited by mykell; 01-16-2017 at 07:41 AM.
....Mykell
i dressed like a girl and i liked it!crossdressing...theirs an app for that
Not wanting to pick a fight over what may be a stray comment, but voice work is among the most crucial and frequently neglected of going-out skills. I view my two voices as one-real and one-mask. The mask is the one I was pretty much forced to develop as masculine cover. The one I feel is the one I have to remember when I don't need cover.
Few things will destroy a good illusion like a typical male monotone; it can be jarring. It's not easy to find your feminine voice, but it's not an impossible task. There's a threshold of believability that isn't a little-girl voice or something you wouldn't wonder about on the other end of a phone call, but your voice in a different style.
Lots of tips and advice to be had here and all over the Internet, but we overlook it at our peril.
I don't believe passing is a prerequisite to going out.
In my opinion very few people are passable if they are looked at closely. The word I like to use is blending in. If you are wearing age appropriate clothes, venue appropriate clothes and have no obvious male markers like a beard you will most likely blend in. That means that most people will not notice that your anything but a woman.
If you are appropriately dressed then even if your are picked it probably will not matter as most people are respectful. Also remember that there are lots of GG's who have very masculine characteristics. There are GG's with wide shoulders, flat chests, thin hips, deep voices etc,
Last edited by Becky Blue; 01-15-2017 at 11:35 PM.
A.K.A Rebecca & Bec
Acastina,
I've been going out socially for a year now, our group is a mix of TGs and TSs, not one of us puts on a false voice, to most of us it's not an act ,we are comfortable in how we present ourselves. To continually change your voice is impossible people are going to pick up on that and comment . To take Jen at home's point none of us are going to fool anyone , they all know we are male to some degree , besides not all women have high pitched voices. I don't feel in any peril because I attempt to keep the whole situation as natural as possible.
I make money with my voice, I sing professionally. While the hormones have raised it a slight bit (maybe a 1/3rd) it hasn't moved me into the alto/soprano or even close. I have changed cadence and lilt but I remain in a lower register. Also I have several friends who don't alter their voice except to be softer or change cadence. I also have friends who do go to a falsetto and they sound fake. Personally it outs them faster than their body style. One starts the conversation in falsetto then drops to a medium level (and I think more believable) voice. So what I am saying is, I don't think you need to play the voice card unless you are basso profundo. I have met women with lower registers than mine. Several actresses make fortunes with tenor level voices.
People like Jim Neighbors was the opposite and the girl who was in the top 3 of the voice was also, her smokey contralto/tenor wowed the world. So many here focus on nuances, small tells that will often give you away because you over do them...take them to an obvious extreme. If you can pull off a headtone voice and maintain it without sounding fake, great. But my experience is that most can't
The earth is the mother of all people and all people should have equal rights upon it.
Chief Joseph
Nez Perce
“Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.” - Fred Rogers,
I have seen real woman out there who do not pass as a female.....lol. Just go out and enjoy yourself and do the best you can with what you have.
I believe people appreciate someone who tries to pass.
vicky again conflicted, see post #55
....Mykell
i dressed like a girl and i liked it!
Do what makes you happy, so long as you feel safe. Since my guy is just a guy in women's clothing, passing isn't even a goal. Neck down, he could easily pass, but he's got a handsome face and short hair. Still, he looks incredibly cute dressed and, more importantly, it makes him visibly happy. Let them see your joy more than your gender.
What is the difference between a crossdresser and a transsexual except in the mind? It's true that the transsexual may have had body parts added or modified, but these things can't normally be seen when the person is dressed.
As for passing, there is passing and there is "passing". When I was a teenager, my friends and I had old cars. We would judge our cars by how far away you had to be for them to look good. You might have a ten foot car or you might have a thirty foot car.
Passing is the same. A crossdresser might pass walking down the sidewalk to someone driving by in a car but not pass sitting down in a restaurant with bright lighting. A crossdresser might pass in a bar full of drunks but not in Home Depot or the library. And of course, there's no way to know if you passed or not. If someone tells you you passed, you didn't. Your best indication is if you don't get any looks, jeers, etc.
Maury Povich used to have contests on his TV show where "women" would come out and the audience would guess if they were really male or female. They got fooled many times.
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I can't recall ever seeing a female who didn't pass (assuming you mean pass as a female). I did have one encounter with a person in a business where I couldn't tell if it was male or female. That is one time in many, many years. FDR was president when I was born.
Teresa, that whole matrix of things we lump together into the concept of passing doesn't have a lot of relevance within TG social/support groups; you all already know about each other. My point was that, out among the general public, a typical male voice might as well be a flashing red light over your head, and it truly is difficult to alter the way we speak. Many people, for example, are surprised (and sometimes dismayed) by how they sound when they hear a recording of themselves. As males, we are (sometimes brutally as we're growing up) conditioned to strip emotion from our voices, unless the emotion is something like anger or cheering for one's team or singing, and that flat-affect delivery is uncommon among females, so it's a tell.
I'm thinking of a TG musician who frequented our open mic events for a period of months. Her appearance was everyday passable, very good, in fact. But she made zero effort with her voice, so everyone knew she was TG. Not that it mattered. Everyone liked her because she was polite and friendly and so forth. Her musical talents were mediocre, in part because she sang like a guy, not even like an androgynous person, let alone anything like even a husky-voiced female vocalist. We don't judge the mediocre harshly, so the whole gang of regulars was fine with her. I'm just saying that in her case it was a glaring tell on something she was otherwise doing very well with publicly. If she's comfortable with that, I'm fine, but it may well cause issues in certain circumstances.
And I take issue with two words: "false" and "fool". I think they degrade what's going on. Is a mother's scolding voice "false" while her nurturing tone is true? I developed a second tone of voice, which includes intonation, accent, inflection, gestures, and the conscious incorporation of freer expression of emotion, to set my presentation apart from my cover-mask male persona. You live 24/7 as a female for most of a decade, you get a lot of chances to practice, and you pick up a lot of cues when it's not getting the job done. And I don't see passing/blending as "fooling" anyone, It's persuasion, tipping the balance of perception in the direction we want to achieve. "Fooling" connotes deception, fraudulence, and that cheapens our sincerity needlessly.
It's a LOT easier to put on a good physical look with clothes and accessories and makeup and hair, to be a Krisi's twenty-foot woman (nice concept, Krisi; I've had a couple of cars that I'd cleaned up to where I felt they looked pretty good from across the street...), than it is to develop a presentation that is believable enough for everyday use in the real world. We can't change our basic physiological basis of pitch, but, within our comfortable vocal ranges, we can craft a more believable tone of voice. It's hard, because it's something most cis-people never give a thought to, and if anyone doesn't feel it's important or necessary, absolutely not my problem. To me, it's important, and an accomplishment I'm proud of. The OP was about passability.
Lorileah, I've never heard of HRT actually raising pitch at all. When you say a third, do you mean a third of an octave (singer-speak...), and does that mean your useful range shifted upward? I knew one TG whose trachea shave was apparently overdone and deprived her of a lot of her vocal ability; she was really bummed by it. I also understand that efforts to surgically tighten the vocal cords generally fail to accomplish the desired result, and at best yield an unnatural Minnie Mouse tone. The FtM guys get lower pitch from their T, but E does nothing to raise ours, and FtMs who are singers have reported serious degradation of their tone.
My range is basically low tenor, although I can go deep if needed, and I have a strong, clear falsetto when I want that, but I'd never try to speak in falsetto. I agree, that would be "fake". But, as you correctly say, we can change "cadence and lilt", and that's my point.
Last edited by Acastina; 01-16-2017 at 03:25 PM.
I've always believed that it's not about "passing" so much as "presenting".
Very few of us have the bone structure and other characteristics that would make us indistinguishable from a genetic woman to the majority of people we encounter.
When I go out I know that many will not see me as passing, but the way I "present" myself to the public I feel is more important. I display myself as a woman, dress appropriately for where I'm going, carry myself with dignity and "own it". By that I mean that I am confident that I belong there as much as anyone else and if I am seen as other that female then so be it. I don't try to hide or be a wall flower. I am confident in who I am and where I am. I feel that that is accepted by most and is more important to them than the fact that they recognize I am not female.
I don't wear women's clothes, I wear MY clothes !
I've met a couple of crossdressers with natural speaking voices that could pass as female or male. Practicing (or not) the art of speaking like a woman is a personal choice. I would probably develop a more girly drawl if I dressed 24/7, but I haven't done much dressing in public at all.
It would be interesting to hear audio clips of those using a female voice wouldn't it?
"You're the only one to see the changes you take yourself through", Stevie Wonder
I posted last year that while out a young GG saw me sitting in the car dressed, came over and told me "You look amazin'". Well by deduction I can't be that "amazin'" as I was read. I guess what I do is not draw the attention of the casual observer. My "presentation", (this is a word that's going to gain momentum here) is such that (I think) I blend into a crowd. That is all that all but the very blessed can hope and expect to achieve. The trick for anyone teetering on the edge of going out is to realise that being read is not the show stopper you think it is.
As for voice. A couple of years ago I sat and chatted to a GG who was a voice coach. She told me the very worst thing to do is talk falsetto. Sing the note doh at your natural pitch. Go up to Ray or Me. Somewhere around there is what you aim for but speak in a softer tone. It's not so far from your natural voice that you're straining and if you do fall back the change isn't so noticeable. It's also very easy to practice.
Who dares wears Get in, get out without being noticed
A "do-re-mi" drill is probably a very useful exercise in raising one's speaking pitch within the natural range. It will sound different to your own ears but not be unnaturally out of your own pipes' sound capacity. That's one of the ways I monitor my second voice; can I hear the difference?
I consider myself as a plausible woman, I could be a woman just don't look too close. As far as my voice goes I have recorded my own voice, I sound like Mr. Rodgers, close enough.
I enjoy being a boy, being a GIRL like me!!!
Jaymee,
"I consider myself as a plausible woman". I like the term "Plausible". Perhaps the definition of "Blending" should be "Plausible Presentation". Works for me!
Last edited by Helen_Highwater; 01-17-2017 at 07:56 PM.
Who dares wears Get in, get out without being noticed
This is one of those occasions when I want a 'like' button, rather than having to type a few lines just to say that I agree entirely with Helen. 'Plausible' is the word, where plausibility increases with distance! At 100yds I'm plausible as a woman; at six inches, not so much!
Yes, plausible, absolutely. There are seven billion of us, after all, no two alike. All we're trying to do is nudge anyone who stops to ponder which flavor we might be in the desired direction. Plausibly we go.
To me, "dressing to blend" means "dressing to hide". I can hide at home and dress anyway I like!
U can't keep doing the same things over and over and expect to enjoy life to the max. When u try new things, even if they r out of your comfort zone, u may experience new excitement and growth that u never expected.
Challenge yourself and pursue your passions! When your life clock runs out, you'll have few or NO REGRETS!
It is defiantly presentation. When we are out and about. Act as feminine as you can and people will look at you as female and call you mam. But try to present as well as you can. it works wonders. Also be kind and social.
Part Time Girl
OMG. "Presentable" is the word I've been meaning to use! That's exactly how I want to dress for going out in public. In the past, I've been using the word "appropriate", which is close, but not as accurate. Thanks for that.
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