Post #1942981

@eljojo when I have short dyed-blue hair, I get recognized as part of a different category than when I had long blonde hair and dressed more femininely. It's not "man" exactly, but it's still a social group I am recognized as being part of - "blue hair and pronouns" or queer or countercultural or whatever. I like being seen that way, so I keep the short hair (sometimes blue) and dress/accessorize in a way that people often recognize as queer. In the past I tried harder to be more what people expect "straight cis woman" to look like, and I was never super great at it, and the styles I wore felt slightly wrong to me; I was never all that comfortable when I tried to wear what I thought was expected of me at things like formal family pictures or a fancy dinner. I feel better when my style is more 'me', and I feel less like I'm wearing a costume of what a woman is supposed to be. I prefer feeling that way! You could say that is changing my appearance, but it's not like I was born wearing a 20-sometings adult woman's fashions, accessories, and hairstyles - I picked all that stuff out over time, too, and tried it for a while, and now I pick other stuff. Changing how people treat me isn't really the goal for me, it's feeling more "me", but the result is similar (though often somewhat subtle): people assign me a different category in their head without thinking about it, even if we're not directly interacting. I get slotted as "queer probably-woman, maybe they/them" instead of "straight cis woman". Or on the odd hardware store trip, I get called "sir", or maybe "sir uh.. ma'am?" and all that is fine with me, really.