Thanks for your comment. I won’t speak to your personal experiences since obviously, I haven’t had them, but I experience this most often when people are not looking directly at me, but I am just kind of “reading” for them as masculine due to my height and presence (and sometimes my voice). I recently read something that says about 2% of what we say and do comes from cognition and the conscious mind and 98% comes from the subconscious. It pisses me off as well when this happens, but in my experience at least, I think it’s cluelessness and just not paying attention (something that younger people are kind of known for) rather than bullying.

I hate that it’s the reinforcement of patriarchal norms that women should be small and retiring and fade easily into the background, but that is a very deeply entrenched thing that only began to be challenged at all in the past 50 years. The other day I was wearing a cute floral miniskirt and a t-shirt that did not hide my very apparent boobs, and a young guy who was unloading my cart at Costco (and not looking right at me) called me Sir. I wanted to say, “What about me looks like a man? I mean really?” But I didn’t want to cause a scene so I didn’t. Maybe one day I will!