And lots of men can’t see makeup at all until someone points it out, simply because they don’t look for it.
My brother says (jokingly) that he’ll never forgive me for having taught him how to tell whether a swimsuit model has pantyhose on; I once was approached by several male classmates who’d been arguing about whether I had a bra on or not (strapless bras were a mystery to all of them except the one who happened to have three sisters)…
Sometimes what people see is just what we happen to be expecting to see.
I read this book because I came across this thread and was intrigued. Vincent addresses this point in her book. She reveals herself near the end of her interactions with different people, mostly. There’s one situation where she doesn’t. Point being, she does say that maybe more people knew than they let on to her, but all she could report was what they’d told her, which was that they tended to suspect she was a gay man, not a woman.
I think that, if you weren’t looking for one of your guy buddies to suddenly come out as a woman, you wouldn’t think to be suspicious of the new guy.