Sep 5, 2023·edited Sep 5, 2023Liked by Doc Impossible
I still get misgendered all the time. I feel pretty good if I get ma'am'ed more often than sir'ed over a given week, and I live in Seattle, where people know how to override their heuristics for trans people. I'm hoping FFS can improve that ratio, but I've resigned myself to always being visibly trans. The one place where I consistently get gendered correctly is over the phone, where the only available information is my voice and (maybe) my name.
My (cisgender) wife *also* gets misgendered all the time and has since she was a child. She has a very short (but femme) haircut, and she tends to wear bulky clothes. That's all it takes for her.
There absolutely is some sort of cultural context to this, too.
I just moved from Austin, TX to the PNW. I have pretty much stopped getting misgendered entirely (aside from on the phone, i always forget to turn on the lady voice when I answer the phone).
People look at me and just say "that's a she/her", I'm pretty shocked. I've stopped really trying to pass, I wasn't even consciously aware of how much my caring about passing was just "I want to be safe and I don't want to be misgendered"
"When in doubt, people tend to guess 'man…' ". I found unconvincing the social psychological explanation for this pattern. A decision that the brain makes in 100 milliseconds sounds like it is based on processes that are deeply hardwired, and resistant to cultural conditioning.
One could test the hypothesis by looking at gender-guessing behaviors across different cultures and age groups, around the world or even within the US. Does the tendency to assume male as the default ("when in doubt, guess 'man'") vary between Saudi Arabia and San Francisco? Between Swedish children and the elderly in rural Alabama? One would check whether the degree of current or historical female exclusion from public spaces serves as a reliable predictor of the degree to which people tend to assume 'male' as a default.
My guess: such a study would *not* find much difference in gender-guessing across cultures.
Such a finding would tend to undercut the social psychological explanation -- that gender-guessing behavior is learned, and culturally passed down. A finding that gender-guessing behavior is common across the species would tend to support the alternative claim that the associated calculations are deeply hard wired, and go way back in the common evolutionary history of our species.
One would then look for explanations that depend, not on learning culturally passed down, but on behaviors that convey an evolutionary advantage. The idea would be to explain the observed behaviors in terms of the relative costs, or risks, of different types of errors.
For example: suppose we take it as a given that men are more dangerous than women. (A reasonable assumption with lots of support.) When guessing a stranger's gender, it is therefore *safer* to guess that the stranger is male, then to guess female, all else equal. A false positive -- "I thought this stranger was a dangerous male, when they were actually a less dangerous female" -- is a less risky mistake than a false negative -- "I thought this was a less dangerous female, but it was instead a more dangerous male, who attacked me, so now I am dead and deleted from the gene pool".
In this evolutionary story, our guessing strategies would settle to an equilibrium in which the relative costs of different types of errors (failure to recognize threats, missed opportunities for mating, trading, friendship, etc.) would settle into some semi-optimal balance. For example, men might be more likely to default to guess a stranger is male because, in the tribal system, they are assigned the role of monitoring and maintaining the tribe's defensive perimeters.
I see at least one big problem with any such evolutionary theory. In the ancient prehistory of our species, I suppose that encountering *any* strangers would be relatively rare. Nearly all the time, the only other humans you saw would be the other members of your own tribe, whom you would know well. You don't need to gender strangers until you are running into strangers. That probably didn't happen much for humans until around, say, 10,000 years ago.
Is that enough time for evolution to exert pressures that select for certain gender-guessing strategies over others? I don't know. I kinda doubt it. This argument would tend to support social psychological explanations that see gender-guessing behaviors as culturally-informed and transmitted.
I have often said that it is amazing just how much dysphoria one can store in one's eyebrows. Great article, as usual!
I still get misgendered all the time. I feel pretty good if I get ma'am'ed more often than sir'ed over a given week, and I live in Seattle, where people know how to override their heuristics for trans people. I'm hoping FFS can improve that ratio, but I've resigned myself to always being visibly trans. The one place where I consistently get gendered correctly is over the phone, where the only available information is my voice and (maybe) my name.
My (cisgender) wife *also* gets misgendered all the time and has since she was a child. She has a very short (but femme) haircut, and she tends to wear bulky clothes. That's all it takes for her.
There absolutely is some sort of cultural context to this, too.
I just moved from Austin, TX to the PNW. I have pretty much stopped getting misgendered entirely (aside from on the phone, i always forget to turn on the lady voice when I answer the phone).
People look at me and just say "that's a she/her", I'm pretty shocked. I've stopped really trying to pass, I wasn't even consciously aware of how much my caring about passing was just "I want to be safe and I don't want to be misgendered"
This is really good, thank you for writing it.
Great piece and lovely read, thanks
Very interesting piece.
"When in doubt, people tend to guess 'man…' ". I found unconvincing the social psychological explanation for this pattern. A decision that the brain makes in 100 milliseconds sounds like it is based on processes that are deeply hardwired, and resistant to cultural conditioning.
One could test the hypothesis by looking at gender-guessing behaviors across different cultures and age groups, around the world or even within the US. Does the tendency to assume male as the default ("when in doubt, guess 'man'") vary between Saudi Arabia and San Francisco? Between Swedish children and the elderly in rural Alabama? One would check whether the degree of current or historical female exclusion from public spaces serves as a reliable predictor of the degree to which people tend to assume 'male' as a default.
My guess: such a study would *not* find much difference in gender-guessing across cultures.
Such a finding would tend to undercut the social psychological explanation -- that gender-guessing behavior is learned, and culturally passed down. A finding that gender-guessing behavior is common across the species would tend to support the alternative claim that the associated calculations are deeply hard wired, and go way back in the common evolutionary history of our species.
One would then look for explanations that depend, not on learning culturally passed down, but on behaviors that convey an evolutionary advantage. The idea would be to explain the observed behaviors in terms of the relative costs, or risks, of different types of errors.
For example: suppose we take it as a given that men are more dangerous than women. (A reasonable assumption with lots of support.) When guessing a stranger's gender, it is therefore *safer* to guess that the stranger is male, then to guess female, all else equal. A false positive -- "I thought this stranger was a dangerous male, when they were actually a less dangerous female" -- is a less risky mistake than a false negative -- "I thought this was a less dangerous female, but it was instead a more dangerous male, who attacked me, so now I am dead and deleted from the gene pool".
In this evolutionary story, our guessing strategies would settle to an equilibrium in which the relative costs of different types of errors (failure to recognize threats, missed opportunities for mating, trading, friendship, etc.) would settle into some semi-optimal balance. For example, men might be more likely to default to guess a stranger is male because, in the tribal system, they are assigned the role of monitoring and maintaining the tribe's defensive perimeters.
I see at least one big problem with any such evolutionary theory. In the ancient prehistory of our species, I suppose that encountering *any* strangers would be relatively rare. Nearly all the time, the only other humans you saw would be the other members of your own tribe, whom you would know well. You don't need to gender strangers until you are running into strangers. That probably didn't happen much for humans until around, say, 10,000 years ago.
Is that enough time for evolution to exert pressures that select for certain gender-guessing strategies over others? I don't know. I kinda doubt it. This argument would tend to support social psychological explanations that see gender-guessing behaviors as culturally-informed and transmitted.
Fun stuff.