Am I Still Being Misgendered After One Year?

For a year, I kept track of every time someone referred to me using the correct or incorrect gender. Here are the results.

The Idea

It all started when I came out as a trans woman in May 2024. I was already “out” as a trans person by then, but until that point I had identified as non-binary. I was using they/them pronouns in English (most of my interactions are in English) and iel in French. It’s quite hard to get people to use they/them correctly in spoken language, especially if they’re not very young. And it’s even harder in France, where hardly anyone knows the pronoun iel. I really empathize with non-binary people dealing with that challenge.

But starting in May 2024, everything was about to change—I announced to everyone that I now identified as a woman and would be using traditional feminine pronouns. Still, I wondered whether it would actually work: would people use my new pronouns correctly, or would they keep misgendering* me?

Since I tend to be pessimistic and focus on the negative instances (i.e., when I get misgendered), I thought a good way to address this would be to track statistics about my misgendering—to observe my progress more objectively.

* misgender: Referring to someone using the wrong gender—for example, by using incorrect pronouns or gendered terms.

Why Am I Doing This?

But why do I even want to be gendered correctly? Why is it important?

The reason is that being misgendered causes me gender dysphoria*. When someone misgenders me, I feel a kind of self-disgust, as if I’m thinking, “Ugh, that person sees me as a man.” To be clear, it’s not that I feel disgust toward men in general, but specifically toward the idea that I might be seen as a man. If you’re not trans yourself, this might sound strange or hard to imagine, but I assure you it’s a very real feeling—one that most trans women and men can relate to (and some non-binary people too).

* gender dysphoria: The discomfort trans people may feel when aspects of their body or how others perceive them don’t align with their gender identity.

Methodology

So here’s what I did for one year, from May 2024 to May 2025: every time someone gendered me correctly or misgendered me, I recorded it. Since I couldn’t open a spreadsheet every time, I created a dedicated Discord channel where I would simply type “CG,” “AG,” or “MG” on my phone, corresponding to the following cases:

• CG (Correct Gendering): Someone consistently gendered me correctly during a conversation—for example: “You’re lucky to be learning with River, she’s an expert in Ansible programming.” But it could also be something as simple as a stranger saying “Thank you, ma’am.”

• AG (Ambiguous Gendering): Someone initially misgendered me but then corrected themselves (either spontaneously or after I pointed it out) and went on to use the correct gender.

• MG (Misgendering): Someone misgendered me by exclusively using masculine pronouns or terms when referring to me in a conversation.

• Transphobia: I also recorded the rare transphobic interactions I experienced—such as when it was clear that someone misgendered me on purpose, insulted me, or subjected me to blatant discrimination.

Note that I only count one occurrence per person per day, even if that person genders me multiple times in the same day.

I also exclude close family members to avoid skewing the statistics. My close ones see me as my correct gender, but what I’m interested in here is how people who aren’t close to me perceive me. On the other hand, if I included my wife, for example, I could record a “free” CG every day—but that wouldn’t be very meaningful for my analysis.

Results

Note: The "correct gendering" (green) curve is consistently the highest throughout the chart.

This chart shows the evolution of the frequency of the three categories using a 10-day rolling sum.

When you transition and start observing how people gender you, it quickly becomes clear that it mostly depends on your visual appearance (and to some extent, your voice).

Some trans people completely change their appearance overnight, but in my case, I made changes gradually—it was too overwhelming for me to do everything at once. So, each time I made a change (like switching from pants to skirts, for example), I needed some time to get used to it before I could find the courage to make another change.

Here is the same graph, but now annotated with the dates on which I changed aspects of my appearance.

Analysis

The spike at the beginning where both the “correct gendering” and “misgendering” curves are very high corresponds to my coming out and the flood of interactions from people reacting to it—resulting in a surge of gender-related interactions all at once.

For analyzing these data, it’s actually more insightful to focus on the “ambiguous” and “misgendering” curves (the two lower ones), rather than the “correct gendering” curve (which is the highest). That’s because many people who know me gender me correctly every day, creating a kind of constant “flow” of correct gendering. On the other hand, people who misgender me are often strangers who base their choice of pronouns entirely on my appearance.

Wearing a headband across my forehead starting in July 2024 was a major change in terms of my gender dysphoria. For me, it made all the difference between seeing a man or a woman in the mirror. Later on, I underwent a hair transplant surgery to get hair on the top of my forehead so I could stop hating my appearance when I saw myself without the headband.

It’s also important to consider that my face gradually changed due to the effects of feminizing hormones. Here are a few photos showing my physical evolution over the same period as my analysis:

May 2024 / July 2024 / May 2025

But to be honest, the most striking pattern is that wearing a skirt changes everything. As soon as winter started and temperatures dropped to 0°C, I stopped wearing my short skirt and switched to pants—and suddenly, I got misgendered much more frequently (that red spike in October on the chart). Later, I found a long, warm skirt that I could wear in winter (sometimes with pants underneath when it was below freezing), and just like that, the misgendering dropped back to nearly zero. It really shows how deeply ingrained the idea that only women wear skirts is—but hey, I can use that to my advantage!

So, why am I still being misgendered?

I’d say that the few cases remaining at the end of my transition mostly fall into two categories:

• Legacy: People who knew me before my transition and don’t see me often (so they still hold an outdated image of me), or who might not even know I transitioned. This is a problem that will probably fade away with time.

• Transphobia: Some people intentionally misgender me as a way of expressing their political views. This issue is particularly widespread in the United States, but thankfully very rare in Canada. In fact, although about 95% of my interactions are with Canadians, half of the transphobic incidents come from Americans or French people!

The Top 5

I live in an environment (Toronto, Canada) where transphobia is very rare. So, for me, misgendering is mostly the result of unintentional mistakes, not deliberate malice. The whole strategy, then, is about giving people the “right intuition” when they look at me.

Unfortunately, things like pins, badges, or necklaces with my pronouns seem to have very little effect and are largely ignored—except by people within the LGBTQIA+ community. In my experience, wearing a skirt is far more effective in signaling that I’m a woman than having a big “she/her” written on a name tag.

In general, anything that changes my visual appearance has a strong effect. I’d say that the “Top 5” things that have helped people gender me correctly are:

1. Wearing skirts

2. Wearing clearly visible makeup (e.g., colorful eyeshadow)

3. My headband (awaiting the results of surgery)

4. Laser hair removal/electrolysis to eliminate the beard shadow on my face

5. Having my hair dyed purple (yes, in our culture, purple is very strongly associated with femininity, and dyeing one’s hair in general is also more common among women)

It’s worth noting that there are things trans women often do to “push people’s intuition in the right direction”—but that I don’t do:

• Having very long hair (In fact, my hair is quite short compared to most trans women, but I like this style.)

• Having bangs (to hide the hairline, which tends to differ in shape between men and women)

• Feminizing their voice (I’ve actually done this to some extent, but not enough for my voice to be perceived as feminine—just less masculine)

The Future

I made most of these changes primarily to ease my dysphoria—when I see myself in the mirror or in photos—and they had the bonus effect of reducing gendering mistakes. Being misgendered also triggers dysphoria for me, so even changes that only influence how others perceive me bring an indirect benefit in helping to manage my dysphoria.

As I write this (May 2025), the new hair from my surgery has finally grown enough that I no longer feel dysphoric when I see myself without my headband. This marks a new milestone that I’m just now reaching.

"Passing" in the strong sense isn’t a goal for me. By “passing” in the strong sense, I mean being seen as a woman without anyone realizing I’m a trans woman. That’s especially important for trans women living in hostile environments, which thankfully is not my situation.

In my case, I want to be seen as a woman, but I also don’t mind people knowing I’m trans. I’m proud of it, and I hope that by being visible, I can help show that trans people are just regular people—people you can live with, befriend, or work alongside like anyone else.