But again, my point is that our unconcious mechanisms for deciding other people’s gender are only very partly under our control. And also, at least at an unconcious level, gender is very important to us. So our unconcious works hard at, and is usually pretty good at, identifying gender. And we don’t like it when me get it wrong much as we don’t like doing incorrectly other things which our unconscious usually handles well, e.g, drinking (which we usually do without choking or spilling or getting it up our nose).

Recently I was visiting my sister. She has two kids and at the time the younger was still not weaned. She had just moved him out of the nursery into a bed in his brother’s room to free up the nursery for me so that I’ld have a private bedroom. She explained to the kids very clearly that when the door was closed that meant I wanted privacy and they weren’t to come in. This didn’t take, so the youngest busted in just while I was putting on my swimwear—itself a unisex garment. He stopped in his tracks, staring bemused at my naked chest and said, “Why do you have those?”. Then he asked if he could nurse. I told him no and explained again that “door closed” = “don’t come in” and eventually ushered him out. Nonetheless, I found out later that he had been using the masculine pronoun to refer to me during the rest of my stay. My little nephew was born this century and I don’t think he is full of the prejudices of the 50s. There is something about my way of interacting or my general deportment or my overall appearance that was more significant to him than even my breasts when he was deciding what my gender was.

Back in the 70s I had hair to my shoulders, a sort of post-hippie look; I didn’t think I was being so very androgynous, but I was often mistaken for a woman. I found it interesting, and never minded it. But then, after about three years I got tired of taking care of the hair, and my hair is fine and kind of brittle, so I went back to relatively short. So it wasn’t something I had to deal with year-in, year-out, as you do.

My point is that you don’t have to go very far to break gender rules. I guess it’s awkward for people to make the mistake, and it’s very nice of you to care about their embarrassment (you’re clearly a much nicer person than I am), but really, four decades of change and people still haven’t gotten used to the changes of the 60s.

I never mind being called sir. I know I’m breaking gender rules, and I’m fully prepared to accept the consequences. But I do mind other people feeling embarrassed on my behalf. It’s so awkward.

I never feel offended just because I’m mistaken for a man. I think that there is some part of our brain working very hard at gender identification. A lot of this work is done no more consciously than, say, calculating the trajectory of a ball we want to catch. Once, I was entering the woman’s bathroom at a queer dance. As I was entering, another woman was exiting. We both did a double take, she clearly thinking “Should I tell him he’s entering the wrong bathroom?”, me clearly thinking “Is that a man and am I entering the wrong bathroom?”. Then, we recovered our respective poises and went about our business. We must both have been sensitive to the issues; that didn’t keep us from making the mistake.