I love this response thank you!! I relate so much to how you describe yourself and how you are received by others. The confidence really can shine through.. and youre right, I don’t mean necessarily that people saw me as a man because I was confident, but that people respect folks who embody traits that are viewed as masculine and assertive in society. Which unfortunately includes confidence because of sexist stereotypes. If that distinction makes sense. But I think you are right to draw that distinction and I will be careful about how I frame it in the future, youve given me a good reminder on how to be precise about it.

I am also glad you brought up attractiveness. I have a friend (a cis woman) who says I probably got the privileges I have received all my life because I am attractive. And that a combo of conventional good looks and confidence can mean you dodge a lot of the worst of sexism and transphobia both. I think she is probably right. It definitely feels like I have a buffer or a protection spell around me and always have. Even the things a person might expect to go along with being conventionally attractive, like sexual harassment, was not a huge problem for me -- I think because harassment is about power, and having pretty privilege is itself a power that scares a lot of harassers off. But hard to untangle this variable from everything else.