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"
Here people tend to not gender people in places like shops (Europe/UK). It's good in some ways but doesn't do my confidence any good if I'm wondering if stuff like my body language is doing giving of the right signals.
love the inclusion of the animations! i went to art skool for animation and as such i’ve become hyper aware of how people move. i especially love how people push their glasses up - it’s so individual and one could do an impression of someone with just that tiny gesture!
but walking! really watching how people walk is fascinating - and then imitate it and feel like a totally different human for a few moments! animation practice, yeah?
men generally walk “with their shoulders” and that’s something i totally had to focus on doing for way too long. their arms hardly pass in front of their bodies, swinging stiffly and parallel to the direction of travel.
ladies walk more with their legs and hips, shoulders don’t swing forward and back as much. a *lot*more motion from the elbow down and the forearms cross in front of the abdomen/hip area rather than straight forward and back. i’ve seen women power-walking in my neighborhood whose arms seem to go left and right more than forward and back!
i’m almost 3 years on hrt and i get ma’am much more than sir. people seem surprised when i point out my trans flag she/her pin, like they didn’t spot it?
i’d love to know if they gendered me based on sight alone or if they registered the pin and made an effort to be kind, but it feels like that conversation would confuse the matter and folks might inadvertently think of me in male terms by contrast. like saying “don’t think of a pink elephant.”
fellow queers certainly don’t need the pin, but they notice it right away and always make a point to say “hey, i see you🌈” by saying “hey. i like your pins.” you can totally hear the rainbow in the way they say it 😅
i’m loving all your articles, i’m still trying to absorb trans info from as many sources as possible since coming out 3.5 years ago
This is a really helpful compilation of information for folks! I will mention that, at least for me, the level of confidence used in the sixth part feels excessive and like it could be counterproductive, due to the nature of what was involved in the study, it was a pile of averaging on top of a pile of averaging, and so it seems wiser to make note that the orders being listed at the very least are an outcome of averages and estimates more than consistent facts of the way such information is processed. (This is not to dispute the studies findings, they are fascinating and extremely helpful to know, just I am someone who is also deeply aware of how wide the range of peoples heuristics around this topic is)
I also do want to briefly touch on the philosophy/social psychology topic, and note that in the countering of more prevalent ideas, I think something was also lost a little bit, because while the exposure or lack thereof is certainly a factor, there is also quite a few other social factors around this, in media representations and celebrities far more often exposing people to a wider array of masculine facial structures than feminine, further exacerbating the exposure issue, and extending it to further generations. I would be very curious how much, if any, of these studies tracked differences in the ways these factors effect heuristics between different age groups, more specific social groups, and cultures (as well as if any of these factors impact the speed at which the gendering process is initially completed).
Again, seriously, extremely helpful information, thank you for the work that you do!
"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.
One of the reasons I find the social psychological argument persuasive is that we see similar (but by no means identical) processes play out when we look at inherent bias and bigotry reactions. Basically, a learned response (gendering, bigotry) becomes so deeply ingrained that it becomes an essentially-automatic response.
You're *absolutely correct* that our current research is heavily biased toward the Western world--this is a huge problem across all of medicine, psychology, and frankly almost every discipline.
An evolutionary model for a gendering response is something I'd hesitate to accept right off the bat, but gender is itself a social technology which, like language, has and is bending evolution around it, so there's definitely the potential for an evolutionary response. One really big thing in your hypothesis I'd be *deeply* hesitant over, though, is arguing that we, on an evolutionary level, view men as threats and women as not; it smacks of sexist cultural assumptions (for clarity, I'm not accusing you of sexism here! Just calling out the common cultural idea that men are dangerous and women are not as being sexist, which it flatly is). Regardless, where you get to in talking about tribal behaviors essentially turns into a more sociological argument anyway, rather than evolutionary.
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"
Here people tend to not gender people in places like shops (Europe/UK). It's good in some ways but doesn't do my confidence any good if I'm wondering if stuff like my body language is doing giving of the right signals.
That's absolutely true. More conservative places tend to police gender much more fiercely.
love the inclusion of the animations! i went to art skool for animation and as such i’ve become hyper aware of how people move. i especially love how people push their glasses up - it’s so individual and one could do an impression of someone with just that tiny gesture!
but walking! really watching how people walk is fascinating - and then imitate it and feel like a totally different human for a few moments! animation practice, yeah?
men generally walk “with their shoulders” and that’s something i totally had to focus on doing for way too long. their arms hardly pass in front of their bodies, swinging stiffly and parallel to the direction of travel.
ladies walk more with their legs and hips, shoulders don’t swing forward and back as much. a *lot*more motion from the elbow down and the forearms cross in front of the abdomen/hip area rather than straight forward and back. i’ve seen women power-walking in my neighborhood whose arms seem to go left and right more than forward and back!
i’m almost 3 years on hrt and i get ma’am much more than sir. people seem surprised when i point out my trans flag she/her pin, like they didn’t spot it?
i’d love to know if they gendered me based on sight alone or if they registered the pin and made an effort to be kind, but it feels like that conversation would confuse the matter and folks might inadvertently think of me in male terms by contrast. like saying “don’t think of a pink elephant.”
fellow queers certainly don’t need the pin, but they notice it right away and always make a point to say “hey, i see you🌈” by saying “hey. i like your pins.” you can totally hear the rainbow in the way they say it 😅
i’m loving all your articles, i’m still trying to absorb trans info from as many sources as possible since coming out 3.5 years ago
This is a really helpful compilation of information for folks! I will mention that, at least for me, the level of confidence used in the sixth part feels excessive and like it could be counterproductive, due to the nature of what was involved in the study, it was a pile of averaging on top of a pile of averaging, and so it seems wiser to make note that the orders being listed at the very least are an outcome of averages and estimates more than consistent facts of the way such information is processed. (This is not to dispute the studies findings, they are fascinating and extremely helpful to know, just I am someone who is also deeply aware of how wide the range of peoples heuristics around this topic is)
I also do want to briefly touch on the philosophy/social psychology topic, and note that in the countering of more prevalent ideas, I think something was also lost a little bit, because while the exposure or lack thereof is certainly a factor, there is also quite a few other social factors around this, in media representations and celebrities far more often exposing people to a wider array of masculine facial structures than feminine, further exacerbating the exposure issue, and extending it to further generations. I would be very curious how much, if any, of these studies tracked differences in the ways these factors effect heuristics between different age groups, more specific social groups, and cultures (as well as if any of these factors impact the speed at which the gendering process is initially completed).
Again, seriously, extremely helpful information, thank you for the work that you do!
This is really good, thank you for writing it.
Of course!
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.
Ooh! A meaty comment!
One of the reasons I find the social psychological argument persuasive is that we see similar (but by no means identical) processes play out when we look at inherent bias and bigotry reactions. Basically, a learned response (gendering, bigotry) becomes so deeply ingrained that it becomes an essentially-automatic response.
You're *absolutely correct* that our current research is heavily biased toward the Western world--this is a huge problem across all of medicine, psychology, and frankly almost every discipline.
An evolutionary model for a gendering response is something I'd hesitate to accept right off the bat, but gender is itself a social technology which, like language, has and is bending evolution around it, so there's definitely the potential for an evolutionary response. One really big thing in your hypothesis I'd be *deeply* hesitant over, though, is arguing that we, on an evolutionary level, view men as threats and women as not; it smacks of sexist cultural assumptions (for clarity, I'm not accusing you of sexism here! Just calling out the common cultural idea that men are dangerous and women are not as being sexist, which it flatly is). Regardless, where you get to in talking about tribal behaviors essentially turns into a more sociological argument anyway, rather than evolutionary.
The timeline isn't a problem, though. Evolution can work *fast*--as an example, the overwhelming majority of dog breeds we know today were force-bred within the last 200 years (https://www.science.org/content/article/where-did-your-dog-come-new-tree-breeds-may-hold-answer). Even assuming simple natural selection rather than forced breeding for traits, you can see major differences within 4-5 generations (https://ucnrs.org/rapid-evolution-a-recipe-for-success/). A great example is black-furred gray squirrels, which were first observed in 1912, but are now succeeding so well that they're outcompeting gray-furred gray squirrels in urban environments across the Eastern US, because their black fur helps them hide better in alleyways and when darting across blacktop streets (https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/city-squirrels-look-different-is-evolution-driving-a-color-change), making it harder for birds, their main predator, to see and therefore catch and eat them.
Fun stuff, though!