That’s something I’ve had to sit with a lot during this process, and it’s the main reason I’m just now finally committing to the process after finally coming out to myself three years ago.

Let’s start with the fact that I’m tall.

This is going to wander off into statistics nerdiness here, so buckle up.

If you look at a chart of height distribution by gender, you’ll find that that chart basically tops out at six feet for women, which is the 99th percentile — meaning that less than 1% of women are over 6 feet tall, or, put another way, if you’re a woman and six feet tall, less than 1% of women are taller than you.

The equivalent male height is 6’4″. If you’re a man and six foot four, less than one per cent of men are taller than you. If you look at the whole population, that number is half, so really it means that a man who stands 6’4″ is in the tallest half-percent of humanity as a whole.

When you start to hit the 1% ranges, it’s hard to compare two figures — if, for example, you’re a trans woman who’s 6’4″ tall, it seems misleadingly like you’re in the top 1% of women and also the top 1% of men — in other words, it’s just as rare to be a 6’4″ woman as it is to be a 6’4″ man. So you have to start looking at things like “how many in 10,000” or “how many in 100,000” in order to get a better idea.

Looking at this dataset from CDC, which consists of 433,323 questionaire responses, it seems like 6’4″ is more like 2% for men, and for women it’s 0.029%.
This means that in the city where I live — which has about half a million people in it — there are 161 women who are taller than me. We’ve got a WNBA team, so probably eleven of those women are playing for them — so fully ten per cent of the women taller than me where I live play professional basketball!

According to the above data, there are (probably) 4257 men taller than me in my city. Even so, it’s pretty uncommon for me to not be the tallest guy in the room. Earlier today, I ran out to get a couple of bottles of champagne — it’s New Years Eve as I write this — and the security guard at the liquor store was probably seven feet tall. Also, the guy standing in front of me in line was an inch or two taller than me.

That’s so unusual — to see two other people taller than me in one place — that I was actually goggling a little bit, feeling like something weird was going on. Like seeing two unrelated people with pink hair walk into a restaurant in a row.

Approximately .6% of Americans identify as Trans — that’s six tenths of one per cent. 6% of 4257 is 26; so adding that to the number from above, that’s 187 women in my city taller than me; so fully 14% of the women taller than me are trans women.

Doing the math as I write this, that number is actually quite a bit lower than I expected it to be; I had assumed that it would work out that a majority of women over 6’4″ were trans. So maybe I’m ever so slightly less conspicuous than I feared.

Still, though, passing is about verisimilitude: The first step to making someone believe that you’re a woman is to not give them a reason to suspect that you’re not. So the height basically gives the game away: As soon as someone sees me, they’re going to start looking for other signs. My hands are huge. My feet are huge. My shoulders are broad for a guy; when I played football in high school, I was a lineman.

All this is to say — choosing to transition is choosing to be more and more conspicuous in my gender non-conformity over the coming years. I know people who have managed to slide into their preferred gender like it was a glove that had always fit that they hadn’t been allowed to wear before; it’s not going to be like that for me.

After some amount of time taking estrogen, my insurance will cover facial feminization surgery, where they’ll shrink my nose and soften my jaw line and probably bring my hairline down. I’m actually quite looking forward to it. I just wish there was a way to shrink the rest of my body along with my nose.