in our daily life, we habitually judge individuals as male or female on the basis of their secondary sex characteristics [...] and social cues [...] and not, so much, their primary sex characteristics (i.e., their genitalia)

That's because it's not that much of a bad heuristic when people habitually hide their primary sex characteristics under layers of clothing and the vast majority of them aren't intersex.

So most people see the second picture as female? That's interesting: I thought a majority used the "penis trumps all" criteria. But that's good news for transpeople :) Actually, that might explain why most transpeople --even those who don't want "bottom" surgery-- do want hormones (to acquire secondary sex characteristics) and/or chest surgery (to get larger breasts, or to get rid of them).

Interesting, but I'd like some way to eliminate the possibility that we read images from the top down (I certainly did with these, scrolling thru my feed reader), and judge before we get to the bottom. I wonder what would happen if the pictures were upside down?

we talked a lot about this in one of my classes: socially-constructed gender vs. biological sex. in western culture, they are pretty much the same thing, but here, they are at odds. the person in the first picture is biologically female, but is a "man" because of short hair and a hairy body. in the second picture, it's a male biologically, but socially a "woman," with longer hair, boobs, a hairless body.

reminds me of Egalia's Daughters.

There's also the issue of presentation. We're supposed to treat people like they belong to the gender they present as out of pure courtesy -- if we met the people in the drawings on the street and they both wore an identical t-shirt and jeans outfit, it would be rude to treat the first one as a woman and the second one as a man, nevermind their present genitalia.

Elena said it all in the first comment. Most people want to know the sex of the person they interact with because sex is a major part of life for most people and genitalia, in addition to secondary sex characteristics, is a major part of the sexual discrimination process.

Social constructionists need to get over the fact that we're a biological species and that in being so,

A) sex difference exists
B) biological function, adaptation, and nature need not be conflated with morality with respect to sexual preference.

^And, in some languages, words have to agree with the gender of the people you're talking to or about.

By the way, you could also illustrate this issue with Jusepe de Ribera's portrait of Magdalena Ventura with her husband and son, "The Bearded Woman."

As a social scientist, I back up what ignotus said. You could give the pictures a mouseover effect. That way people would be able to get the whole thing on screen before judging it.

I saw a man in the first pic and a tranny in the second, then i noticed the top pick didn't have a penis...

"Tranny"? Seriously?

The thing I most noticed after the genitalia/body hair was actually that the second figure had feminine hips - the bodies and facial features look to be otherwise the same though, and the breasts appear "tacked on".

Also, on re-examination, the second figure's navel is a *smidge* too high to be coded feminine (says my figure drawing class memories).

I disagree with the interpretation. I think if you lob off the head (or make them both bald, it doesn't matter), it would still be seen as a man without a penis and a woman with one. The hair is really the only "cultural" cue here. Breasts, hips and the particular pattern of bodily hair are all biological features of the two sexes (actually, you can do away even with the body hair on the man - the hips and breasts are cue enough).
How can you call biological features "socially constructed"? Yes, some women have less curvy figures, and some have no clear breasts, and some men are not quite as hairy as this guy, while some women are hairy (but never in this pattern). Still, the accumulation of features indicates one as male and the other as female regardless of "cultural" cues.
Maybe it's the poor artwork, which makes it very easy to dismiss the penis or the female pubic hair as "tacked on". I think seeing transgenders fully nude makes for a more difficult decision, but even that doesn't do anything to prove K's point: these features are still biological, even if we're able to manipulate them through modern science.

Did you guys read the article? It said that we use cultural cues AND secondary sex characteristics to determine whether a person is male or female, and that those are more important than genitals. I think the images provide a good illustration of this, although there are confounds, like the top-down reading others have pointed out.* I also think the first image should more clearly have female genitalia, rather than just the absence of a penis, in order to prove the point. As is, the drawing could just be interpreted as censored.

I think it's interesting, and relevant, to point out that people gender bodies by secondary sex characteristics and not so much by genitals, because it contradicts the common transphobic sentiment of "penis-trumps-all," as genderkid pointed out. If secondary sex characteristics and gender presentation are more socially relevant, then those criteria should be more important than genital status for transgender people seeking to correct their gender status on official documents.

--

*although, top-down reading may not be as much of a confound as we might think. For example, when we interact with people in real life, we're also reading them from the top down: we tend to focus on faces first, and take the rest of the body as peripheral. It would still be interesting to compare the reactions to the images upside-down and right-side-up, though.

This is mighty interesting. In the second image (lady with male genitalia) if you put a mustache or a beard on the person I think it would supersede the hair and breasts and connote a male figure.

My SO and I went to see a famous transvestite comedian (Eddie Izzard, for those who are curious) once and during part of the act, he talked about how he had been wearing a bra with fake breasts and still got called "sir" repeatedly. He was clean-shaven and wearing a dress, heels and makeup at the time, but he does have a very strong jawline (which is both a real biological tendency of men and the socialized expectation of them) and wear his hair short. So I think the reactions might be different depending on a lot of different factors, though that doesn't negate the idea that we use secondary sex characteristics to determine gender.

Elena - "if we met the people in the drawings on the street and they both wore an identical t-shirt and jeans outfit, it would be rude to treat the first one as a woman and the second one as a man, nevermind their present genitalia."
i understand that, but it still leaves me bewildered why this should be considered rude.
having had my hair shaved off about one year ago i had some people, in shops from a distance, for example, referring to me as a boy. when they realized their mistake, they really seemed to be heavily embarrassed about it and couldnt apologize enough. i, on the other hand, got quite embarrassed sometimes at the fuss they were making.
if someone told me i was ugly repeatedly i would be way more offended than in cases where someone gets my sex wrong. i dont bother with it. i feel very much like a "woman", so it is part of my personal identity, but i dont really care what others make my appearance, genderwise. first and foremost im a person.

e., as a trans woman I can hopefully shed some light on what you just described.

My suggestion is that you aren't bothered by being gendered incorrectly because you are cisgendered: Your physical body sex has always been aligned with the gender you feel in your mind. That is not the case for someone who is transgender, who will have a razor-sharp awareness of the gender cues they are embodying and how other people are interpreting them.

I can tell you that it is a source of much stress when people gender me incorrectly (ie, using masculine pronouns). I feel very much like a "woman," as you say, but I do not have the cissexual privilege required to take my appearance similarly for granted. It's very emotionally painful when I'm treated like a man despite my best efforts to present otherwise. So I consider it extremely rude when someone decides to do this to me on purpose, when they likely know I'd prefer otherwise.

I think there are other reasons too. Hopefully that sheds some light on one aspect of it.

omg you ppl r kinda crazy(no offense) but wat r u doin...lol y all of this argument u ppl have alota spare time ...lol im only 12 i didnt get any of this terms! like...:genitalia omg u guys r...lol y all of this complex talkin:P ur talkin life very serios chill out lol!

omg u guys take life very seriosly!!!!!!very seriosly im repeatin it lol calm down it's just 2 modefined images to make some argument lol u guys r sad:P very hard words lol i really mean it wats genitalia and scrotum? lol u guys have alota spare time:P cya!

plz reply!i found this website by mistake any ways cya gona go back to play on internet!

lol i found this site by mistake lol u r complicated ppl take life easy ima gona go play computer games again lol bye!

I actually think both are male.

Neither is male and neither is female until they define themselves as such. Because frankly, with or without "mixed" signals, gender is self-defined. Even biological sex is a little sketchy at times.

Now women with pubes

I go by the gender one presents (through some form of comunication) one as.
I can not and should not decide for others.

My guess was: person on the left looks like they want to look male or at the very least don't mind it (they at least don't mind the chest hair, for exp., otherwise they would remove it, they don't shave legs, they have a male-looking haircut; similarly, person on the right has a feminine-looking haircut and dies not shave, so they may want or at least don't mind looking female.

If the object of the exercise is to "guess" which gender they are without asking them, I would guess person on the left is a trans man and the person on the right a trans woman; they have probably started taking the respective HRT a while ago and may have had top surgery(that would explain the chest hair and boobs) but have not had bottom surgery. This, in turn, would mean that I would guess the person on the left is male and the person on the right is female, because if my guess is correct they identify as such- and if they do not, their self-identification would immediately trump any guesses I may have made.

But now if we are to examine the "why" of that: let's say the person on the right has XY chromosomes, a penis (born with it), breasts (developed after starting HRT), wears a feminine hairstyle, skirts and makeup and identifies as female. Would that make them male or female? I definitely say "female", but the choice I make- "self-identification determines gender rarther than any other characteristic" rests on moral rather than "purely biological" or "descriptive/scientific" arguments: her chromosomes are "biological", her body changes in relation to HRT are "biological", whatever it is in her brain that makes her recognise herself as female rather than male is "biological"-so "biology decides" (as some people who would categorise her as 'male' would insist) won't take me any further.

This is where I think choosing which characteristic determines gender can only be made on moral grounds, and the best moral arguments are for "people are the gender they identify as, no questions asked about any other characteristics" (from an utilitarian perspective, it allows them to lead happy and fulfilled lives free of dysphoria and severe depression while being no skin off anyone else's back; from a Kantian perspective insisting that your assignment of someone's gender based on -say- their genitalia and chromosomes overrides their self-identification means treating them as objects rather than as ends-in-themselves, from a human rights perspective it falls under the right to human dignity etc.)

Huh, fascinating. In everyday life people are almost always wearing clothes that cover their crotches. As a result people focus on the parts of the body they can see and clothing to determine a person's gender. Do you get paid for this "research"?

I think the analysis in the source of the Kessler and McKenna piece is much more interesting, which is that bodies are generally read as male unless there is overwhelmingly evidence otherwise. I'm not saying it's a plagiarist analysis as it's asking a slightly different question, but it certainly doesn't add anything to their original text, and in fact takes quite a lot away imho.

I wish I had breasts. Le sigh. Maybe someday :)

i am sexy