Fear of Being "Clocked" as a Trans Person.
Dr. Z discusses the internalized fear of being clocked—specifically for those for whom passing matters. Passing doesn't matter for everybody, it's not a prerequisite or mandatory, but for many it's an internal desire when going through gender transition. Passing essentially means being able to be perceived as the gender you're in alignment with without experiencing misgendering.
This video addresses those who care about passing and have a very big internal fear of being clocked—when somebody communicates with you not through the lens of the gender you're congruent with, but through the lens of the gender you were assigned at birth.
The challenge: fears are a very slippery slope. The more you think about a particular fear, the more it blows out of proportion—like blowing air into a deflated balloon until the balloon is huge and pushes on your environment. By the time the balloon gets really large, this fear has taken a life of its own, and you've convinced yourself without realizing that fear is true, that the fear has value assigned to it, that the fear is actually going to happen. You become so anxious and hypervigilant that you're sending out signals people pick up on—creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Watch to learn how to distinguish objective reality from internal fear and shrink down that balloon.
