My brain needs to know your sex

I’m actually not sure that I don’t need to assume non-gender characteristics just as I need to assume gender. I wonder if the tendency to think otherwise is because in everything but gender, there’s a default choice. Ceteris paribus, I assume people are – I confess – white and straight and cissexual and so on simply because statistically, they probably are. But as the male/female ratio is about 50/50, there’s no default, so the task of choosing which one to apply must be more consciously faced.

For example – forgive me if this is rude – I assume you’re female, because I have it in my head that ‘Ingrid’ is a female name (it is this post which makes me realise I don’t know why I think that!), and I would be a bit shocked to discover you were male. But equally I would be shocked to discover you were black, as I assume you’re white (you’ve what I think is a Dutch name, and in my mind the Dutch are white).

My guess is something to do with language, too. Even in English, third-person personal pronouns have genders (“he,” “she”). When I’m thinking about how to act in a given situation — say, if I’m thinking about what to write in an email — I tend to have a running verbal track in my head that involves phrases in which those pronouns inevitably appear (I ask myself things like, e.g., “what would [s]he expect out of me?”). It’s hard to do this without having one or the other in mind. (Personally, I use “they” as a gender-neutral pronoun a lot, and I so my mind-voice will use it if I don’t know which pronoun to use. But that use of “they” isn’t entirely standard [yet], and not everyone uses it.)

Evolutionarily speaking, the most important issue for small groups of paleolithic humans when meeting other humans would involve the potential to mate in order to increase the already thin gene pool. Exogamy was doubtless common in early paleolithic hunter-gatherers, so other issues like appearance or skin color would have proven much less important in terms of group survival than whether the new person is the opposite sex.

For a mathematical treatment of the likely size and structure of Paleolithic societies, see H. Martin Wobst’s landmark paper “Boundary conditions for Paleolithic social systems: a simulation approach,” American Antiquity, 1974, 39(2):147-178. The mathematics of group selection has been dealt with extensively by R.A. Fisher in 1930, J. B. S. Haldane in 1932 and 1955, W. D. Hamilton and George Price in 1964, and 1964. Anthropological research has shown that most clans are exogamous (due to the limited size of their gene pool; Wobst estimates Paleolithic tribes at no more than 25 members) and regard reproduction/marriage within their own group as a form of taboo incest, so this would neatly explain our apparently hardwired interest in whether a stranger is male or female. Clan members without a strong interest in whether a stranger was male or female would tend to differentially reproduce at a lower rate than clan members who had such concerns, since the former group would encounter fewer opportunities for reproduction — you have a better shot at getting lucky if you qualify the prospects by first ascertaining their gender.

References on the mathematics of group selection are:

Fisher, R. A. (1930). The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Haldane, J.B.S. (1932). The Causes of Evolution. London: Longmans, Green & Co.
Haldane, J. B. S. (1955). “Population Genetics”. New Biology 18: 34–51.
Hamilton, W. D. (1963). “The evolution of altruistic behavior”. American Naturalist 97 (896): 354–356.
Hamilton, W. D. (1964). “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behavior”. Journal of Theoretical Biology 7 (1): 1–16.
Smith, J. M. (1964). “Group Selection and Kin Selection”. Nature 201 (4924): 1145–1147.

It’s not your brain, it’s your culture. Trans people tend to get into the habit of suspending anticipation, and then generally to not caring. We like not being prodded ourselves; that spills over into granting others the same space, and realizing again and again how little it has to do with the qualities that make people memorable to us. GLBT sub-cultures are of course all over the map, but a lot of my gay friends are almost as detached about it as most of my trans friends and I are.

There are a lot of people I know well online whose gender identity and presentation I know nothing about. And why should I? It doesn’t bear on my reactions to a lot of why I’m glad to know them. Nor do I find it making a lot of difference in face-to-face interactions. I can see how people are choosing to present themselves at the moment, and may take some note of it, but I don’t care until and unless they want to make an issue of it, for good or ill. (I don’t mean that in a judgmental sense. People’s past history including gender performance and sense of self can give rise to all kinds of neat stuff illuminated by that context. It’s just that it doesn’t have to.)

Everyone’s life situation matters sometimes, in different ways. But the sense of it being fundamental to all kinds of things and very important for others to know and categorize, that’s all culture, and potentially quite noxious culture at that.

The long shadow of Peter Hacker even extends to blog comments.

As to the post: cognitive disposition, cultural training, a structural function of language, or some combination? Who knows. For me, age seems like a more central self-imposed mental construct than gender; when I find out the age of someone I’ve been reading or corresponding with differs significantly from my unconscious guess there’s a nastier shock than when the gender’s off.

I correspond with people that I haven’t met on the Internet, but, since my means for this is mostly online role play games I have a twist.

Most games have only male or female avatars. You must pick(though in some games you can make the avatar pretty androgynous). However, there isn’t any rule saying that your choice must correspond in any way with who you are outside the game.

There are people who identify as male playing female avatars, and there are people who identify as female playing male avatars. of course there are also people who identify as male playing male avatars, and people who identify as female playing female avatars. Some players are CERTAIN that they can discern which is which….but I know of at least a handful of cases where they are quite mistaken. Some people care, and want to refer to the avatar using the correct pronoun for the player’s gender. Some of us just use the avatar’s visible gender for the pronoun, or make an effort to drop any unneeded pronouns from our communication.

Most of the time I drop the pronouns, or if I need one I will reference the avatar’s gender…as that is what the person is choosing to present themselves as. However, when I meet someone online, I know that I have no clue who or what they are, unless they choose to tell me. Even then, I have only what they chose to tell me.

You may find this of interest:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2809573

“[T]he results of these studies indicate that sex, race, age, and [wearing] glasses represents a naturally occurring salience hierarchy that is reliably present among children of preschool and early elementary school age.”

DCA – all the variants of Chinese distinguish between genders in their pronouns, and you can see this clearly if you write out the characters. The words “he”, “she” and “it”, however, are homophones in Mandarin, which may be why your friend had difficulty remembering which is which when speaking.

In some professional contexts one is identified by two initials and a surname in gender neutral fashion*. I’ve never found the ambiguity to be a problem, although historically there has been an assumption that the authors are male.

The common use of pseudonyms on the web has taught me that it’s practically impossible to distinguish between men and women by their writing alone, and that for most topics it’s utterly irrelevant. When the subject is sexual the writers often indicate their gender or sexuality in order to claim or disclaim authority. Since I don’t take notes I can rarely remember who’s what; I don’t know whether that’s evidence for its unimportance or my senescence.

* In such cases I go by “J S Sweeney Jr” which of course is not neutral. Oops.

Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic (probably all Semitic languages?) clearly signal the speaker’s gender by verb conjugation. Spanish signals first-person plural gender, but not singular — and, of course, all these languages treat female as the “marked” gender, by using the masculine construction for mixed groups.

I recall reading somewhere that the Chinese homophones “ta(1)” for he, she, and it are neologisms introduced in the Qing dynasty to translate Western texts. My grandfather-in-law, whose native dialect was Wu (Shanghainese), mixed these pronouns up equally often in written Chinese and in spoken English.

I doubt that linguistic or other cultural factors can account for the tendency of most people to have a special interest in the gender of those with whom they are communicating. Let’s leave the politics out of it. (A number of the comments are politically charged.) Admitting it’s primarily a biological thing does not necessitate taking a particular ideological stand, and nor does it necessitate denying individual diversity.

Anthony: a further twist here is that there are a bunch of fairly common Turkish names which are unisex (off the top of my head, Can, Deniz, Barış, Umut, Onur).

Gender in language—it might be related, but might not be causal. The evidence seems to be that even the grammar of your native language only affects your way of breaking the world into concepts a little bit, at the margins. To me it’s not super plausible that the existence of gender in language causes this effect that you always conceive people as gendered, cause surely there are other grammatical distinctions that don’t impose themselves on your instinctual conception of reality? Just speculating, it seems like the man/woman distinction is drilled into most of us over & over, really really often, from the moment we’re born. I mean, I bet a typical kid doesn’t go more than a few hours on average, if even that, without getting some reminder that men & women are different kinds. Ideas about other categories (like race) can be just as emphatic but maybe they tend to come up a little less constantly in people’s lives.

I assume that everyone (for whom one or more of these markers is lacking) is White, male, heterosexual and able-bodied; there may even be other default settings, I don’t know. Being w., m., h. and a.-b. myself, I’ve got no incentive to be more imaginative about other people.

I’ve never had major gender-shock, but I was genuinely taken aback to find that someone I’d been having fairly intense theoretical discussions with was Black, particularly as I found it out through random googling (so I don’t know if s/he knows I know – and obviously there’s no non-offensive way to bring it up). Why was I taken aback? It’s a sort of “oh, so s/he’s *not* like me after all” reaction – even though the common ground I originally found with this person is entirely unaffected, & unchanged. Very odd, and a bit disquieting.

I would resist Whorfian explanations, not because they’re impossible but because without strong evidence in their favor they tend to make you come to bad conclusions about the world. It’s a bit like race and gender science: It’s not biologically unthinkable that women or people of certain ethnicities might be disposed to having a biological trait is non-obvious and influences their lives in some way, but drawing the conclusion that that explains something without very strong evidence in its favor tends heavily to lead to sexist and racist conclusions. Whorfian explanations are not impossible, but have the same general tendency to lend themselves to dumb beliefs about people.

We live in a very gendered world, one that is far more gendered than raced or aged. This is perhaps even more true in academia than in ordinary life. I don’t think there is any need for a deeper explanation than that: Gender is a much more important characteristic of people for you that race or age or ethnicity, at least with respect to people you deal with professionally and academically.

Both sides now,PH is well known as a Wittgenstein interpreter, and the point is a Wittgensteinain commonplace. Wittgenstein is a whole lot better known than PH. Further, almost everyone accepts that Wittgensteinian point. Crediting it to PH is a bit like crediting Andy Clark with the claim that human beings are always already thrown.

Wikipedia says that the female Chinese pronoun 她 was coined by the poet , and became widely used after ones of his poems became the lyrics for a pop hit in the 30s.

My personal experience with have a baby in China adds support to the linguistic explanation for the discomfort. It is illegal for the hospital to tell you the sex of your child after they do ultrasounds, so I didn’t know if we were going to have a boy or a girl until she was born. When I was talking with my wife in Chinese, the babies gender was simply never a problem and was surprised how little I thought about it. But whenever I was talking to my parents or other English speakers, it was awkward always having to pause and think if I should say “he or she” or “it” when talking about our baby. So I think that gendered grammar structures really do effect how identify someone by forcing you to address the issue if you want to communicate fluently.

I’m a little confused about the discussion of Chinese. Chinese pronouns are ungendered in speech in all variants of the language, and include inanimate objects, and I think it’s been that way at least since the era of Confucius. The written distinction is a recent affectation.

It’s a good example of how non-sexist language does not lead to non-sexist behaviour.

Simply put, not knowing someone’s gender leaves me twisting in the wind as to the proper levels of assertive and argumentative [sic] I should show in order to develop a good professional relationship. Likewise without knowing gender, it’s difficult to judge whether “I’m certain” means “65% sure” or “if you don’t [sic] this as a given, you will have severely questioned my technical competence”.
Tom West: if you were a feminist you might find it easier to develop good working relationships with your peers. As it stands, when egalitarian-minded fellow professionals of both genders learn of your patronizing and unpleasant assumptions, they are likely to blow you off on the grounds that you are a sexist douche.

Do you recognize this phenomenon?

I would certainly wonder about a regular correspondent. I remember wondering for a long time about a colleague called Lassina for instance. But I also think that in a prolonged conversation with someone, I would end up wondering about age as well, and also perhaps nationality and/or place of residence-I did eventually sort of checked this for most CT contributors for instance. On the other hand, I don’t think I systematically seek to ascribe a gender to ambiguous names in all situation (I don’t think I do it when reading articles for instance).

Would it have something to do with the fact that our languages are ‘gendered’?

I would definitely say yes. Being kind of formal, I start all my correspondence with Dear X… In my own language, this is impossible if you don’t know the gender of your interlocutor, so it starts here. I remember recently double-checking if I was right that Fei was feminine before writing in French while I have written several e-mails in English to someone called Reinie without bothering to verify my initial assumption on the gender of this name. Even in English, it can rapidly be awkward if you don’t know whether to use Mr. or Mrs.

Let me assure you that this problem is not confined to people in remote contact. I once (or twice) ran a stall at fetes, drawing pencil portraits in fifteen minutes at a time. One child came forward with a diamond earring. I fussed with my pencils and sharpeners for a minute while I constructed a question that might give me a clue to the sex of the individual. I think I asked “What is your name?” It turned out to be a girl. My wife, who was taking the money and minding the customers, did a double-take – clearly she was no more clear on the sex of the child than I was. It didn’t make much of a difference in conversation with the customer, but it did make a difference in how I approached the portrait. It’s a minefield.

I guess if communications go beyond pure technical matters, empathy gets into the picture. If I can picture where he/she is coming from, what sorts of life experiences and struggles they had to go through to get to the present place, then a deeper level of bonding can take place. Even the thought, “if times places and circumstances been different maybe he/she would have been that someone special” can have an impact on the ability to connect empathicly.

Interestingly the only really startling experience involved race. I’d dealt with a certain individual for a couple of years -including mostly phone conversations, and I’d always pictured him as white (for the time and profession -overwhelmingly likely), and was startled when we actually met -he was black -it took me a couple of awkward minutes to get over it.

I am often tripped up by what I expect is an Anglophone assumption that given names ending in -a are female, and ones in -o are male. I’ve learned, of course, that the reverse is the case with Japanese.

(A plot element based on this mistaken assumption figures in the late Michael Dibdin’s A Long Finish, involving the name “Andrea”.)

For Fred Cairns (@42 currently)

I wonder what you think Hidden Heart’s (@8) phrase “gender presentation” means….?

If you have time and are interested, check out the book with my all-time favorite title: Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us. The title is a big clue in its own right, but the book is wonderful: funny, poignant, enteraining, and enlightening.

As someone who lives in a female body but has often been mistaken for a male, and who considers “men, women, and the rest of us” to be the best pithy summary of a difficult topic I’ve ever seen, I agree that the subject is a minefield, though I suspect for a quite different mix of reasons than yours. I totally get why pronouns and titles are difficult if you (the general you, including me) don’t know a person’s gender, but I don’t understand why you (the specific you, Fred C.) have to know the gender of a customer before you can draw what’s in front of your eyes.

If I come up to you and you can’t tell whether I’m a boy or a girl, why does that matter? Are you going to put the quick-portrait equivalent of baby clothes in pink and blue into the drawing, or what? If so, consider the possibilities of green, yellow, purple, etc. If not, what is going on? Are you prescribing the your portrait subjects as much as describing them? If so, and speaking as a person who fits pretty handily into the “the rest of us” bin, I’d suggest considering a little rebalancing of the prescription/description ratio. If I asked you to draw my portrait, I’d expect to find me in it, not your idea of a girl, or of a boy for that matter.

I don’t understand why you (the specific you, Fred C.) have to know the gender of a customer before you can draw what’s in front of your eyes.

Because, I would guess, we never just see with our eyes or draw just what’s in front of us. Many of us (myself included) have experienced something similar with sound. Someone from a different culture will tell me their name over the phone, but I can only repeat it back to them if they spell it. Why would I need the spelling before I can repeat what I heard? I don’t know, but I do.

Uhh, of course, all proper names are in Kanji, and the kanji (2 characters) for “Jiro” mean “second son”, so they aren’t all unisex

“Hiro” on the other hand is unisex, but can represented by three different single characters

tomslee — I’m the same way. In my case, I think the experience you describe has something to do with being able to take in and remember information visually much more readily than by ear.

But I consider that to be a lack in the audio department, not a virtue or something I have to just accept resignedly. So I do work a little at getting better at hearing.

I was suggesting something similar in relation to Fred’s comment. That is, I was trying to make the point that it’s valuable and maybe even important to make some effort to take people on their own terms, to honor their own framework for themselves, rather than to be always imposing our own.

I mean, if portrait artist A can only draw either a boy or a girl, then “the rest of us” can just go to portrait artist X – if we can find that person. Given the numbers and the state of the world in general, that’s probably not going to make any difference to whether A can make a living as an artist or not, so it’s no big deal as far as A is concerned. But for “the rest of us,” it’s business as usual in the marginalization and invisibility department. Not so much fun, really.

I want to be clear that I know it’s a minefield, where you can ever so easily be damned if you do and damned if you don’t. And it’s especially tricky with children, where you have not only the child’s self-image and presentation to think about, but the parents’ notions as well.

I know a little girl who, after cancer treatment made her bald, was mistaken for a boy, and was incensed. She was neither boy nor “the rest of us” in her own mind, and she was upset that that wasn’t obvious to everyone else. Then again, I know of a little boy who has been convinced he’s a girl since the time he was about three years old. Now there’s a minefield, especially in a family that had never before considered the possibility/reality of that experience.

Salient,

Wax Banks’ point was that the phrasing “my brain needs to know your sex” and “my brain needs to know the sex of the people I’m corresponding with” confuses processes in the brain for states that only a person can have. “My stomach feels hungry” or “my foot is experiencing pain” are the same thing; these things can’t feel hunger or pain, or experience need. Only the overarching person can, and there are a host of conceptual mistakes that are easy to make if this distinction is lost. This is completely compatible with you getting different kinds of upset at the functioning of different physical parts (foot, stomach, brain etc) and functioning of different aspects of your self or personality.

Neil’s right in that this comes out of Wittgenstein, but rather in the same way that Arabic scholars transmitted Aristotle back to European intellectuals while they were trying to quantify angelic waltzing on sewing equipment, Hacker rescued this Wittgensteinian conception from history and forced it back into the neuroscience community after it had a few decades of making these kinds of conceptual mistakes.

Actually, one of the biggest shocks I’ve had online was a poster who put himself out as someone who’d studied the topic of discussion for years, who turned out to be fifteen years old.

More simply: as a female-bodied person, I am not offended when somebody accidently calls me “sir,” but quite offended by their embarrassment and excessive apologies once they get a closer look. Because that says me looking as I do is so wrong that to have reflected it back to me is an insult

Well said.

Maggie: Reasonable questions, seriously. The matching one is: Under what circumstances are you prepared to take “I’m not interested in telling you that” as an answer? If people are prepared to do that, then I don’t mind them asking. It’s the asking with the presumption that they are owed the kind of answer they’re seeing that makes life unpleasant for some of us.

And of course if you’re prepared to take “not your business” as an answer, then you may realize too that you need to ask less often than you thought.

“And now it turns out that this person is a man, whereas I had assumed he was a woman.”
Why, exactly, had you made that assumption? (Probably not just because of some phonological accident in the person’s name — though probably akin to assumptions each of us has made at one time or another.) That’s the question that deserves interrogation here, IMHO. As well as the questions: why does it matter to you (any of us), under what specific conditions, if your interlocutor is male or female? Really, does it matter over an exchange about some technical details, for instance, as opposed to the framing of larger questions?

I do form a mental image of most posters. Some I see as women with a beautiful smile and long, curly hair; others as fat, bald men wearing a cardigan and sitting at their computer. Some are monsters, some sexless androids.

And it is well known that Cosma Shalizi is actually a superintelligent shade of the colour blue, who can only post on CT if first refracted into a free-standing prism.

Katherine – you certainly may, as it’s what I was thinking myself. I specifically didn’t say I defaulted to the social default setting[1] *because* of my own attributes, but that my own attributes don’t give me any incentive to override the defaults. A woman reading comments from ‘Kris’ or ‘Jan’ is more likely to entertain the possibility that K. or J. is female, because when it comes to women reading blogs she’s her own existence-proof. (Now I’m wondering about the long and snippy ah-but-you-*also*-said-type argument I had with a ‘Kris’ a while back – a third commenter actually said “you two should get a room” at one point. I was sure I was talking to a man at the time, too. Maybe I was the only one.)

[1] Framing this as the “highest social status” – and hence the least likely to be taken as demeaning – is a good way to think about it, if rather disturbing in its implications.

@JamieM – I don’t disagree, and I’ve pondered why it should make a difference to me. There are two parts to the answer: one is that I tend to chat to the people sitting, and the other is that the portrait is for the parent, and it is the parent’s expectation that I have to fulfil.
As a representational artist (however amateur) it is important to draw exactly what you see and not what your expectations imagine – it’s one major difference between naive and representational art. The matter of portraits do bear different treatments: compare the work of Bacon, Freud and Sargent. Not to say I’m comparable to them, but it might make a difference of emphasis in what I represent.
You agree it’s a minefield. I’m glad my comment extended the discussion.

Bob’s right about how Japanese don’t use first names at all, but, at least in the context of students, girls family names always get the suffix of -san and boys get the suffix -kun, even though you are using a last name. In fact, I’ve heard Japanese teachers say (in Japanese) “Sato-kun, excuse me, I mean Sato-san”. (It is generally rude to address a female student with the male suffix, but not as big a gaffe to address a male with the suffix -san)

Of course, these suffixes aren’t usually applied when the person is older than you unless there are hierarchical reasons to do so. I do martial arts, and there are now more people taking up martial arts at a later age, which then has the teachers referring to them as kun in the context of time of study, but it doesn’t come out easily sometimes.

There is something that I think is related and that is that female first names that work as ‘English’ names are much more common than male names that do the same. In fact, I don’t think that there are but a tiny handful of male names that work in both English and Japanese (Ken and Joji (George) are the two I can think of, and Ken is really a shortened version of something like Kenjiro or Ken-ichi) A lot going on there, I think

lj: I think that if you use two hyphens then the software here interprets it as a strikethrough of everything between them.

-like this-

I worked for a European company with an offshored IT department. When I was emailing or IMing someone whose exotic name I could not decode for gender, it did not matter to me at all; though perhaps it served to enhance my prejudice of offshoring as a dehumanised process. One difficulty I did have was decoding which of multiple names was the forename-equivalent for greetings.

you spend desperate teenage years trying to wheedle people’s gender out of them during faceless correspondence, and though the drive disappears with age and wisdom, the habit remains.

Don’t think it can be that. During my desperate teenage years I devoted large amounts of time to a number of things related to my own & others’ gender, but playing “what sex is that person?” wasn’t one of them – there weren’t that many opportunities in the 1970s. Not in Croydon, anyway.

Just to clarify, my experience is that the majority of most males use “I’m certain” in day-to-day conversation quite casually (“I’m absolutely positive” and further qualifiers are used when their certainty rises well beyond that). Conversely, not taking “I’m certain” particularly seriously (again, in casual conversation) is not taken lightly by many women (i.e. taken as questioning their competence).

I consider this merely a convention of speech (a “couple of things” goes up to five for many people). I find it interesting that Ms. Waring would dismiss such a common speech usage as demeaning when it’s simply a convention (albeit by mostly by one gender). Certainly points to how it’s easy to dismiss the other based on differences in their common speech usage.

84: in my experience “I’m certain that X” actually means “I am not at all certain that X”; if you are certain that X, you just say “X”.

I posted a reply at Obsidian Wings: Getting used to not knowing.

I just had the interesting experience of discovering Siva Vaidhyanathan is female , then discovering that he isn’t really. I also only just found out that Eric Holder is African-American. I can’t say that either of these had much effect, though my change in belief about Siva was maybe too brief to matter.

One case of this kind I can remember being surprised by was meeting Karl Smith, and finding out that he is African-American. Apart from the obvious default assumption for US economists, I realize that I thought of Karl (unlike Carl) as a “white” name.