I’ve heard about this firsthand. When I started my transition, a female family member confided in me about an incident that had really upset her. She’d been out celebrating a friend’s birthday when a man came up to her and said something along the lines of, “You look really good. How long have you been a woman for?” She was devastated. It’s a feeling that I and many other trans women know all too well. She’d never told anyone else because she was deeply embarrassed, and I suspect there are many cisgender (“not trans”) women out there who’ve been mistaken for trans but don’t wish to talk about it publicly.Of course, there are also women who react gamely when other people perceive them as male. At 6ft 2, Jes Fernie decided to roll with “society’s limited parameters of what it is to be female”, as she told the Guardian. To her height, she added a boyish haircut and clothes, and consequently found herself enduring a close escape from violence down a Manchester side street after being mistaken as a transvestite. This is the price people pay for not conforming to society’s narrow lines of what constitutes male or female.The thing is, everybody judges other people. Including me. I’m aware that if I’m walking down the street with someone who doesn’t pass – whether they are trans or cis – they may draw attention to me. And I look at people sometimes and “read” them. I passed a tall woman who had a strong forehead the other day while I was out shopping. She had a lot of makeup on. The person I was with said, “Did you see…” but I cut them off with a frustrated, “Yeah, I don’t care.” Whether or not the woman we had just passed was trans or not was of no concern to me. It wasn’t until I got home that my friend asked me why I’d snapped at them when they were trying to point out a cute jacket to me. They hadn’t even noticed the tall woman. My friend hadn’t been preoccupied with the tall woman’s appearance – I had.I wish I could say that I didn’t care about passing but the truth is, I still do – and North Carolina’s bathroom law debate has only served to remind me of that. If we lived in an ideal world, there would be no stigma attached to being trans. But we don’t live in an ideal world; we live in a world where America is fighting about who is allowed in which toilet, based on how they look; we live in a world where people are being physically and verbally abused in the UK due to their gender presentation.It shouldn’t be “OK” for me to walk down the street because people “can’t tell” that I am trans. It should be OK for me to walk down the street because it’s OK for everyone to walk down the street, regardless of who they are. As Janet Mock points out: “Our safety should not be based on the way that we look.” On this note, I couldn’t agree with her more. So I’m going to try and stop ‘reading’ other people and seeing if they pass "the test". Because no-one – not me, not you and not the tall woman on the street or in the bathroom – should have to pass under anyone else's judgement just to go about their daily business.Continue the conversation with Paris @ParisLees