A while ago I watched a telly programme that was all about how the brain works. Unfortunately I can't remember what it was called, what channel it was on, nor how long ago it was. It would have been within the last three years. All of which preamble gets us precisely nowhere.
Anyway, the one thing that I do remember is that they demonstrated how little information the brain needs in order to determine the sex of an individual. They did this by putting 5, I think it was 5 lights, on (the same) various parts of the body of a man and a woman. Then these two peopel walked on a treadmill in the dark so you were presented with just five spots of moving light. It was quite easy to tell which was the woman and which was the man.
Which goes some way to showing that we are hardwired to recognise male and female. There are two other things that we are hardwired to notice, faces, whenever we look at a patten we always look for, and see faces, and the next is movement. The programme demonstrated that a lot of this happens automatically with little to no conscious thought. I suppose that the main reason that we are wired this way is to aid survival. We need to find a mate, and we don't want to be attacked, or eaten by a beast, so being able to see faces and movement is a good survival tactic.
It is also the case that most people simply aren't observant, and for the reasons given above, that we are hard wired to survive, we don't need to be.
These are things that I've recently noticed as I've been out and about. People see us, they make an instant judgement and then, happy that there is no threat, move on. If, a number of yards away, someone sees us and they see a woman, then they're happy and don't look again, as, for survival reasons, there's no need to look again to confirm that they were correct. It goes without saying though that we need to be aware of the second survival trait, in that it is natural to seek a mate, so, if on the first look the person sees a female and they are seeking a female and they like what they see, then they will probably give a second, more considered look. And perhaps there is a lesson in this as to how we can present ourselves so as not to promote that second more considered look, if all we are wanting to do is carry on largely unnoticed.
An example of this occurred yesterday when I left the house. There was a man walking up the hill.towarfs me as I walked to, unlocked and got into my car. This is something that would have mortified me until very recently. The idea that someone would see me in a skirt was not something that I could handle. And it's that which kept me inside for such a long time. But, yesteday I was completely unfazed. Now, this man was walking up the hill towards me, he must has seen me, (but did he observe me?), but as he passed the car he didn't look across, he didn't look in, he merely continued up the hill, on his merry way. And that, in my limited experience is all that's required, throw out some obvious signals, don't mix the message and most people will see you but not observe you as their brain tells them that you're not a threat to them, and of course to survive you need to be looking for the next threat, not wasting time looking at the previous one.
And this brings me on to my fear which I outlined above, the barrier that I have now broken down, that everyone would stare at me, eveyone within a three mile radius would all be looking at me. But no, it doesn't work like that, chances are, that many people within a three yard radius of you won't even notice you. So where did this fear come from? Well, this is the new thought that I've had, now that I'm on the other side of this, it comes from us, it comes from within. My experience now tells me that I had become too hyper-observant, I had trained myself to look at everyone and be aware of everyone, and I made that same assumption of everyone else. My fear was that I would be seen and then observed as a cross dresser, so I was looking at everyone to see if they themselves were a cross dresser, and I was assuming that everyone else was doing the same. But, and yes, it took me a long time to realise this, why would anyone going about their normal everyday business even have the idea that someone that they've seen on the other side of the road, is a cross dresser? They wouldn't. Before the idea that the person in the grey skirt is really a man, they'd be having a million and one other thoughts first.
So, all of this brings me to the point that we (well I) worry because I've taught myself to worry about something that in reality largely isn't there. And at the end of the day, if someone does have a problem with a man walking down the street dressed in women's clothes, then that's their problem, not ours.
And the reaslisation of all of that, didn't only stop me worrying about being seen (to me, a passive act), it made me stop worrying about being observed (an active act).
). And I noticed each & every one of them darted their eyes to my legs -- at least once!
But he then did hold the door open for me, too, in a way that was a bit more formal than casual. 
