"Passing" isn't necessary to be valued and loved. It isn't necessary to pass to be a man or woman, or other preferred label.

All that's necessary is to be you. Whoever you are.

brave to come out to yourself. brave squared to come out to friends. brave cubed to come out to strangers and work colleagues. brave to the power of four to come out to people who needn't know that you aren't your CAGAB

Passing is often necessary to truly be who you are. Or at least, to truly live the life you want. For example, you won't ever truly get the full experience of being treated as a woman if you don't meet society's standards of what one looks like. Even people who respect your pronouns will subconsciously treat you differently if you don't pass.

This really shouldn't be surprising. Identifying sex among your own species is something every single animal that uses sexual reproduction has to do. Within a fraction of a second of seeing a person, you instantly and subconsciously gender them. There are whole parts of your brain dedicated to gendering people. It's so baked in because organisms need to whether to classify others of their kind as a potential mate, a potential mating rival, etc.

I get encouraging people to not be obsessed with passing, but it's also important not to trivialize it. For trans women passing is the difference between being read male and having people at best try and treat you like a woman, and people simply reading you as a woman and treating you like one.

Even the wokest most supportive person will not completely treat a nonpassing trans person as as cisgender person of the same gender. The reason is that even if you want to be supportive, you're fighting your own subconscious mind. You may recognize someone's gender and respect their pronouns. You may truly want to see them as female and want to treat them accordingly. But your brain is still telling you, "this person is male." Your words are saying "she" while your subconscious is seeing "he." And that will affect how you treat people.

As someone who has been both a passing and nonpassing trans person, the idea that it doesn't matter at all is fantasy. Yes, passing doesn't somehow make you a more valid person. It's not necessary to be valid or loved. But to pretend it isn't incredibly important for anyone looking to actually live a true binary gender role is delusional. You'll never experience full female socialization unless strangers actually read you as female.

I respect that.

However, that wasn't the point of my comment. It wasn't about one's lived experience at all. It was with an intent of saying out loud that anyone at any point in their transition, whether they eventually pass or not, can expect at least some people to love them for who they are, not what they look like. Sometimes I get upset that it even needs saying, so I say it.

Where I disagree is that nobody is able to discount perceived passing in how they treat someone, or how they process their awareness. It won't be easy. It takes effort and empathy to shift from thinking in the binary and weed out those preconceptions and prejudices. But it is possible. And it can absolutely reach a point where it becomes undetectable from the outside. It's likely to do so before reaching a point where it's truly eliminated. At least, until society as a whole changes enough that people grow up with a different paradigm regarding binary perceptions.

In all honesty, I still have residue of it. It does shift how I think, until I get the reins pulled back. When I run into someone that doesn't pass, my knee jerk reaction is to be extra careful to not screw up, to pay extra attention to my thoughts and words. Which is still different from the reaction when I wouldn't be able to tell in the first place. I'm fairly confident that some of that reaction can still be picked up by others, but I'm working on it. What I can say for certain is that it's been a very long time since I've needed to correct a thought using the wrong gender for a given person. Subconscious patterns? Harder to detect and eliminate, but conscious thought usually links fairly close.

I have met people that exhibit no difference in how they treat people at all, and I've met people that if they have a difference in how they think about passing vs non passing people, I can't detect it because there's no outward sign of it.