Can women identify sex better than men?

[pippapegga]

I've just finished watching DEVS on BBC with DH (brilliant series if anyone is looking for something to watch by the way).
Anyway, in relation to the character of Lyndon - before any pronouns were used I automatically was referring to her as she etc as I just naturally assumed that she was female. DH didn't know who I was referring to at first and we ended up a 'that's a woman' / 'no that's a young lad' discussion until I decided to just Google it. Now the character is meant to be a male, however the actor is a female. To me it was glaringly obvious that she is a female, although she clearly presented androgynously. But DH genuinely thought it was a man.
It got me wondering whether men just don't have the same instinctual ability to see the subtle differences and are more taken in my how people might 'present'. We see so frequently people really trying to convince us that men in dresses can truly 'pass', and now I'm starting to think perhaps some people can't actually see the difference.
Just for the record, DH is GC and totally supports the radfem movement in relation to gender and modern trans-issues, he's not some woke dude-bro.

[Itisbetter]

I thought the dev character was a boy for the first half where she were always sat down/not moving much, but female in the last scenes. I’m female. Younger people can be less obviously one sex or another.

[pippapegga]

I know it isn't always obvious, but that's what I'm wondering. Whether women in general think it IS actually quite obvious. But perhaps it's more that for some people it's obvious and others it isn't, rather than women vs men.

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

I'm a lot better at spotting this kind of thing than my husband is. It's not infallible, of course, but if you see video footage rather than a still image there's usually something that gives it away - size of hands/feet relative to the rest of the body, width of shoulders and hips, Adam's apple, facial features, gait, manspreading, just for starters.

[Prawnofthepatriarchy]

I don't know if there's any research on this but I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that women are better at distinguishing sex.

After all it matters far more to us. Knowing whether a shadowy figure following us down a dark road is male or female is a survival skill if you're female. And there are so many other contexts.

When it comes to trans people, some pass very well in a still (often photoshopped) photo. On the move in the flesh it's a very different story.

[MarkRuffaloCrumble]

Yes. Anyone even slightly androgynous (short hair, no make up etc) DH automatically assumes is male. And vice verse, long hair = must be a girl. I think he’s just not paying attention really most of the time.

As an example when we watched Stranger Things he assumed Eleven was a boy to start with. I kept referring to her as ‘she’ and he was totally confused. When it clicked he was like “oh I know the character is a girl but do you think maybe she was played by a boy?” As obviously no girl would ever shave her precious head of hair off to play an amazing role!

Same with Tiger King. The worker with one arm, I was talking about her and he kept saying him. It wasn’t outright mentioned for quite a while but it made for quite a confusing conversation about these apparently two separate people with one arm each

He also couldn’t believe Paris Lees wasn’t genetically female when watching the island. Or Monroe Bergdorf on that shit show of a discussion on Channel 4 - he would have been totally baffled by Magdalen Berns, God bless her soul.

[OhHolyJesus]

Same as Prawn - honestly I think it comes down to what it means for women to be around men or around other women.

I've had a similar discussion with DH and he doesn't see a problem in the men's toilets but does see what it means for women if a man enters.

It's just not something men need to consider, for safety at least.

[MarkRuffaloCrumble]

Interesting (to me anyway!) that it seems to be from my examples that men have to go to a great deal of trouble to pass/appear as a woman, whereas women apparently just have to cut their hair and not perform femininity to confuse men.

[deydododatdodontdeydo]

It would be interesting to see some proper research, but I can't see such "transphobic" research getting funded.
There is loads of proper research on facial recognition.
I think there may be a difference, due to the reasons mentioned above, but doubt that it's 100% of women are better.
(Plenty of women still misgender my 15yo DS simply because he has long hair).

[Sexnotgender]

I think generally we are yes. I would assume it’s a survival skill.

Babies are good at identifying male or female, as are animals generally. My dogs are both rescues and are very wary of men.

[deydododatdodontdeydo]

Babies are good at identifying male or female

Are they really? Toddlers certainly aren't!

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

MarkRuffaloCrumble, roughly what age is your partner? I'm fascinated by how rare it is now to see a young girl with short hair, and how confusing many seem to find this. My impression is this started maybe 15-20 years ago. When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s it was far more mixed. I had short hair for most of my childhood as my mum thought it was more practical. I remember having to persuade her to let me grow it. In secondary school it was maybe 50:50 short/long hair. There were plenty of other things about our appearance to mark us out as girls, but long hair wasn't compulsory (and of course from the late 60s and through most of the 70s there were plenty of younger men with long hair too).

[Miriel]

I think so. My dad and I were watching a news show the other day and a transwoman was being interviewed, about a completely unrelated subject. A few minutes in, he looks at me and asks if the person is 'really a man'. Their sex was obvious to me the instant they came on-screen.

I remember as a child being confused about stories where a woman has to disguise herself as a man for some reason. It didn't make sense to me that nobody noticed the truth!

[aliasundercover]

he would have been totally baffled by Magdalen Berns

I don’t understand this - do you mean he’d have thought she was male?

[Koalablue]

I was watching a documentary with dh and an obvious trans historian was talking. Dh asked if they were male or female but to me it was so obvious, apart from long hair and a bit of lippie almost no effort had been made to pass as female.

[ravenmum]

No. Some friends of my bf have two children (maybe 7 and 8?) who are androgynous-looking with long hair and neutral clothes and names. I have no idea what gender they are (which is obviously what the parents intended, so no problem).

I had short hair in the early '70s, but also a teeny tiny pinafore dress :)

[burnoutbabe]

I assumed all along the young person in dev was a boy, and one that was very young ie pre puberty.
So I couldn't tell.
But I could tell the character in greys anatomy was a transman, the beard just on jaw line gave it away.
Perhaps women are just more observant of characters in general? What they are wearing and any inconsistencies in presentation that come up. Ie we may notice slight breasts and then start considering what that means as we can distinguish breasts from say moobs.

[aliasundercover]

Sometimes when I'm not concentrating these things can slip by. In the last series of University Challenge there was a male-presenting-as-female contestant, but I didn't notice at first. Towards the end of the episode the contestant did an exaggerated 'feminine' gesture - flicking hair or something similar - and it became instantly obvious to me, and from then on they were about as convincing as Bernard Bresslaw when Sid James made him wear a dress.

However, this was on television. I reckon in real life these things are much more apparent. When you can see how someone walks, or the way they move their shoulders, or how much they try to cover their adam's apple, it's usually pretty clear.

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

I spotted that UC contestant at once.

ravenmum, I agree with pre-pubescent children it's not usually obvious if the clothes/hair don't give it away. Puberty changes all that.

[jhuizinga]

I'm definitely better than my DP. We've recently watched a couple of quiz shows where it was immediately obvious to me that two contestants with stereotypically female names were male. In each case, it took about 10 minutes for DP to ask 'Is that person male or female?'

[MarkRuffaloCrumble]

I don’t understand this - do you mean he’d have thought she was male?

yes, he’d have seen the short hair and the fact that she wasn’t performing femininity, but also railing against the trans movement and been very confused by her.

I often thought about showing him some of her videos to hammer home the points she made so eloquently but I felt he would have been so caught up in how she looked and dressed etc that he’d have totally missed the point.

[KatieAlcock]

Indeed they can
www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361923004001017

[Sexnotgender]

Are they really? Toddlers certainly aren't!

My children and others I’ve observed have certainly reacted quite differently to unknown people depending on if they were male or female.

[deydododatdodontdeydo]

My children and others I’ve observed have certainly reacted quite differently to unknown people depending on if they were male or female.

That's not the same as what you said, though. You said they are good at identifying male and female.
I've observed small children misgendering people many many times, causing huge embarrasment to the mother (usually).
One cringy memory is of a young lad on a bus with long hair and a toddler shouted out "mummy, why does that lady have a moustache"? (he didn't, just a bit of stubble).

[aliasundercover]

yes, he’d have seen the short hair and the fact that she wasn’t performing femininity, but also railing against the trans movement and been very confused by her.

Wow! That seems amazing to me. Yes, she had many signifiers more often associated with masculinity, but I never thought there was anything unwomanly about her.