I’ve been 10months on HRT so maybe it’s still too early to tell but I genuinely believe I won’t pass unless I get FFS, my face was quite masculine before HRT and I think it’s not possible to change some stuff without surgical intervention. I have a prominent brow ridge, my jaw is square and my chin is cleft. No matter how hard I try with makeup, voice, eyebrows and hair, I still get sir’d once people see my face. Sorrowfully without much hesitation. It makes me feel terribly illegitimate to call myself a woman when I look like this.
My dysphoria has lowered a lot since starting though and I actually feel alive for once in my life. But maybe it would be better identifying as a femboy until I can get FFS…
I’m glad that you’ve chosen to separate yourself from what is ultimately a very toxic community of people who have a very, very black and white view of society and gender.
Looking “like a woman” doesn’t mean one specific thing. I know it’s hard to think that way, but gender is a construct as much as it affects our lives. Women, passing women specifically, come in all shapes and sizes. Look all different ways. There is no “shape of a woman” or “face of a woman” or even “voice of a woman”. That’s simply not how human biology works. I say this not to dismiss your dysphoria, but to point out that you’re probably comparing yourself with a very specific construction of womanhood and femininity. Comparing yourself to an imaginary figure in this manner is bad for you. It has direct consequences for your mental health.
Women look all kinds of different ways and still pass. Stop hyperfixating on the specific feminine ideals of beauty that are spread across all levels of society and notice the way women look in your own community. Follow influencers and content creators who do not fit societal conventions of physical femininity and yet are undeniably women.
Passing is possible for us. It’s a combination of many factors, but chiefly among them is self-confidence and assuredness. Gender is socially a performance. It’s a set of behaviors, presentations, and attitudes. What determines whether you pass or not is chiefly how clear your performance is. Hence why people who have bodies very well aligned with social conventions for women can still be misgendered or treated differently if they are gender non-conforming in presentation or behavior.
If passing is something important to you, then it is absolutely something you can do. Learn to do your makeup, get a feminine hair style and take really good care of your hair, start taking care of your skin, wear overtly feminine clothing that makes you feel good, notice the way that women around you talk and move and start to emulate it. It might not be possible to pass literally 100% of the time, but there’s a vast difference between passing 5% of the time and passing 90% or even 80% of the time. It’s not satisfying, and I know, I get it, the desire for it to just happen for you to just immediately be always seen as a cis woman is strong. But that’s not in line with how gender works.
And I’m not saying that I agree with it working this way, I would call myself a gender abolitionist who thinks everyone should be entitled to have whatever body and presentation they want. However, whether we like it or not, that’s how society views and treats gender. If your goal is to pass as a cis woman, then you have to seem like one when someone meets you. Which is more than just your face shape or your fat distribution or so on. Not that those things aren’t factors, but lots of cis women have different face shapes, broad shoulders, narrow hips, and so on. They also perform gender a certain way. And lots of women have all the things women are socially told their bodies should have, and they can still be misgendered when not performing gender the expected way.