alt Hacker NewsOne of my favorite examples of this is a transgender woman who worked at Subway (sandwich shop) and wrote about her experience on reddit. Someone posed a question on reddit that was something like "people who have transitioned, how did others treat you differently after the fact." I interpreted the question as how did friends and family react after knowing you previously as one gender and then another, but this trans woman's response on how the general public treated her was much more interesting IMO.
Before she transitioned, as a man she said she'd get lots of compliments and kudos from customers for basically just doing her job at Subway. As a woman, though, people were much more likely to complain and she was rarely complimented, and only if she went "above and beyond" her normal work duties.
The thing I loved about this is that, like the women who lose a lot of weight, she basically "acted as her own control". When it's different men and women you can argue over whether or not people behaved differently, but it's harder to do that (or at least it should be) if it's the same person.
Replies
Indeed. It is not quite the same situation, but I experienced differences when I transitioned from slovenly geek to well dressed consultant. Cut my long hair, lost some weight and started dressing much nicer. People treated me with more respect, taking me more seriously. More random people wanted to talk to me, and not just flirty people. People were more curious about me as a person.
Biases exist. You see it when your personality stays the same but visible aspects of you change.
>Before she transitioned, as a man she said she'd get lots of compliments and kudos from customers for basically just doing her job at Subway. As a woman, though, people were much more likely to complain and she was rarely complimented, and only if she went "above and beyond" her normal work duties.
Highly relevant: Norah Vincent's <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Made_Man_(book)>
Vincent later committed suicide. She found from writing the above book that being a man was so difficult that it caused a breakdown. <https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/18/obituaries/norah-vincent-...>
I can definitely attest to this as well. I transitioned during the pandemic and one of my coworkers, who hadn't seen me below the face for three years, did a physical actual double-take after saying hello to the cute stranger as they walked by — and then began creating a hostile work environment, trying and failing to exert power over me, and so on. It turns out their belief system required them to exercise automatic authority over women, and so years of cooperation pivoted — within just a couple days of saying hello to me a different body — into years of hostility and repeated attempts to exert unwarranted authority beyond their scope of work. It was a truly excellent control/experiment outcome, and I suspect these sort of stories are a factor in why so many people are so hostile to trans people being listened to: it reveals two-faced behaviors and biases, just as GLP-1 with its rapid weight loss does, and those stories and their accompanying studies such as this one carry significant weight in societal development away from bias.