#i have twitter blocked rn so i have to bring my rants here... feel free to scroll on by...

[fidgeting]

apropos of nothing, i think one of the reasons why the concept of “passing privilege” is the source of so much intercommunity strife is that, by using a “privilege” framework to speak about the phenomenon, “passing”/”nonpassing” become solidified as static or consistent categories that have to do with an inherent quality or individual truth of a given person’s identity, when in reality passing is a constantly-evolving, always-precarious process that can apply to the same person in different ways on the same day, let alone within their lifetime. none of my thoughts here are particularly new to The Discourse, but i’ve been mulling it over lately as i’ve seen more mentions of the idea of “straight passing” in recent weeks than i have in a little while.

re: “straight passing”, these conversations usually revolve around discussions of existing in public with a partner and the way that someone’s sexual identity is perceived as a result. to use the classic examples, a bisexual person in a crossgender relationship may present with queer or gender-nonconforming signifiers and be read as gay/lesbian while on their own, but be seen as straight while in public with their partner. on the flipside, a gay/lesbian person who displays little to no signifiers of gender-nonconformity in public life may not be read as gay/lesbian until they are seen with their partner. much blood sweat and tears have been shed online over attempting to hash out whether either one of, both, or neither of these hypothetical people can be said to have “passing privilege", when, in reality, existing as a three-dimensional human person is almost always more complicated than these flat strawmen can be understood. the signifiers that affect how a person’s sexuality is read by strangers are complex enough to extend to the neighborhood in which they live, the job/s that they have, their hobbies, how vocal they are on political/social issues and what the content of those beliefs are, etc. it’s essentially impossible to make an external judgement on how the “people” (who aren’t real people but intentionally one-dimensional rhetorical constructs) in these examples would actually be read on a day-to-day basis.

even if there were no other factors that could determine these people’s passing besides a) physical presentation and b) relationship status, how coherent a categorization of an individual’s overall embodied experience of life can a descriptor be if it pivots solely based on whether or not they’re seen in public with a partner? what happens when someone is single and celibate? i’m not trying to argue that being seen with a partner doesn’t affect the way someone’s sexuality is read by strangers, but rather that this specific line of questioning is ultimately just one aspect of the variety of factors that contribute to their public perception and the types of discrimination they’re exposed to, and the act of describing another person as passing/nonpassing when you’re not exposed to the intricacies of their private life requires a lot of confidence in your external judgement of the way they move through the world. i think this is why the label chafes so strongly on so many people when it’s given to them by others.

obviously, identity in general (in the sense of one’s position vis a vis binary privilege/disprivilege states--straight/gay, white/nonwhite, etc) is always constructed and conditional and contextual blah blah. but the whole concept of “passing” is about the kind of individual encounters that happen many times a day. “passing” as a state of being doesn’t exist outside of the moment where you fall into one side or the other in the eyes of someone else based on a variety of factors which may change continually on an even hourly basis. (the line between passing or not passing for a trans person could literally be “having a chance to shave that morning”, frex). the state of “passing” or “not passing” doesn’t exist as an individual truth for anyone outside of very direct encounters with the public in circumstances where the question of passing has to do with whether or not you are going to be targeted for discrimination or aggression. because that’s what passing means; it’s literally just a denotation of whether or not you are recognizable as an “other” along certain grounds while in public space, in the context of whether or not you will be actively confronted with prejudice or just immersed in it in the passive way that a member of a privileged group is surrounded by ambient social hatred towards disprivileged groups and individuals. just as people absorb homophobic or transphobic social messaging and sustain psychological wounds that way before they know themselves to be LGBT, even the most consistently “passing” person is being exposed to the __phobia of society to a degree that causes more profound harm than it would for a straight, cis, etc person. passing isn’t protection from that, even if it can be protection from a variety of very real, material dangers.

on that note, i don’t mean to deny that there are a variety of pitfalls and dangers inherent in being “visibly __” in any given situation--being closeted, being stealth, etc wouldn’t exist if not. but i think a lot of the resentment and frustration that comes out of labeling people/being labelled by other people as “passing” comes from the precarity and unfixedness of that experience, as well as the way it’s so incredibly specific to a given person’s context. the way the designations are often given operates on a much less porous understanding of the division between public and private spheres than is actually accurate for most people’s lives. to the degree that the concept of passing has utility, i think it’s largely around a) individuals speaking about their own lived experiences of discrimination or lack thereof, rather than other people applying that descriptor to them from the outside and b) kept specifically to discussions of the ephemeral moments we experience as we move through the world, rather than being treated broadly as a thing that a person “is” or “is not”.

i’m speaking as a white bi trans person here, so my thoughts are more applicable to the concept of “[not/]passing for straight” as well as the variety of trans experiences on the spectrum between “backpassing [intentionally or not]”, being “visibly trans”, and being stealth*. i can’t speak for people of colour re: the experience of being (or not being) white passing; happy to have feedback one way or another on that score or others.

(*these concepts/categorizations in the context of transness are especially fraught and reductive but are relevant to the overall discourses/rhetoric i’m trying to address here.)