Passing as male in 1970

[reddon666]

It's 1970 in Los Angeles. The MC is a 23 year old trans man deeply involved in hippy culture who's starting to come out as FTM (in an environment that my late-90s-born FTM self is damn glad he didn't live in

Comments

[syntinen_laulu]

One thing that would help him, is that in the early years of the hippie look everyone was so conditioned to expect clear gender distinctions in clothing, hairstyles and behaviour that many people had real difficulty telling men and women apart when they were all wearing similar long hair, beads, psychedelic prints et cetera. It took several years before this look was normalised enough that people could routinely see the difference.

[okaasan59]

I went to high school in the 70s with someone who I thought was male (short hair, always wore pants with dress shirt and tie) until I happened to see them in the girls' locker room. I didn't know the person well enough to know if they were truly transgender or if she was just a girl who preferred boy's clothing. My school was fairly progressive and laid back but there would never have been any special concessions like permission to use the locker room or bathroom of preferred gender and no one would have even considered using male pronouns. We just figured she was "a girl who wanted to be a boy" and shrugged it off. I think that outside of an LGBT community, that is about as accepting as regular segments of society would have been at that time.