If everyone was gender-non-conforming...

[lionelduty]

On these boards we seem to think that being GNC in various ways is great (I hate how gendered kids' clothes, toys, etc are and hate that I feel weird buying my son pink or flowery clothes).

It's also stated quite often that most people can 'tell' if someone's a natal male or female just by looking, but I've genuinely seen people I honestly am unsure about (and plenty of transmen on TV that I would have had no idea weren't born male).

Would life actually be better if we couldn't tell anyone's sex from how they presented? We actually would need to ask pronouns and in single-sex spaces wouldn't be sure if someone wasn't 'supposed' to be there. Do we actually need some sort of gendered shorthand to function as a society or would there be some sort of freedom in removing it?

(Just my idle thoughts but interested in people's views)

If you couldn’t readily tell someone’s sex from their appearance we’d have never developed our language to use sex-specific pronouns.

ok, maybe this is a near-future world where we are all GNC and have phased out pronouns (except in medical/biological speak?) so everyone is xey/xem or something.

we'd probably need to know who to fancy as well, unless we're all pansexual or whatever now

Then we'd all be poor little oppressed non binary people.

The species would die out fairly quickly if we couldn't tell someone's sex.
But given different cultures dress massively differently and yet lots of relationships start with almost no common words and couples have children and learn each other's languages, we can somehow tell which Inuit or Balinese person is male or female.

??
You're confusing trans with gnc.

The transmen that "you really can't tell" were born women only look that way because of high doses of testosterone that lead to them needing a full hysterectomy otherwise they'll develop gynae cancer, and they've had either a double mastectomy or very painful breast binding. They're still female.

Transwomen who pass only do so with masses of surgical and medical intervention but it's extremely rare for tranwomen to actually pass.

If everyone could be free to be gender non conforming without being subject to discrimination due to breaking expected gendered expectations, people could live without needing masses of expensive and harmful medical intervention.

You still need sex segregated spaces for females because our biology renders us more vulnerable no matter how the female "presents". Gnc or not.

Or maybe we end up with access to government-owned DNA databases, facial recognition systems and any other bio-metric systems governments deem relevant to use at any security access point to establish the legal identity of any citizen of any country?

Maybe all this means the loss of individual privacy in the future?

Even if you couldn't tell sex at first as soon and you tried to DTD you'd find that there's no penis/vagina and that you might not like that or it's not going to result in offspring. You'd just end up asking/finding out quickly for a potential mate.

Until male violence is a thing of the past then I feel better knowing an individual's biological sex so I can assess risk and keep myself safe. I'm not bothered by how people present and it would be great to inhabit a world where stereotypes didn't exist.

we'd probably need to know who to fancy as well

Er, we'd probably manage that by who we fancied - which might change as clothing was shed. Just like now.

Well, everyone is gender non conforming to a degree. No One is literally Barbie or g.i. Joe as per the mermaids chart.

In the vast, vast majority of cases, you can tell a person's sex almost immediately in real life. There are many characteristics that we intuit, height, gait, proportions, speech patterns etc. Even babies and dogs can tell. The ones that are close to passing end up in uncanny valley territory in my (real life) experience. It is a necessary part of the continuation of our species to recognise sex, I don't think we'll see the end of it until we get rid of sexually dimorphic reproduction.

Removing the gendered expectations tied to sex would certainly be freeing.

If everyone on earth is suddenly free to be gender non conforming, like, y'know how it was in the 80's in the UK, we'd still need to know each other's sex. And we aren't gong to stop being able to recognise each others sex at a glance, ever, it's not going to happen.

Vitriol Uncanny valley... that's what it is! That's why I spend longer looking at trans people (mostly pictures, rarely irl) trying to figure out why something seems off.

If you removed all social gender markers and i doubt we’d get adults gender confused, with a few exceptions.

Stick everyone in jeans and a t-shirt, you’d still be able to distinguish m from f.
Ive met plenty of men with long hair and women with short hair and can always tell. Stick a man in a dress and it’s a man in a dress, it doesn’t magically make you think they are female.

Men have narrower hips, broader shoulders, deeper voices. Stronger features, facial hair- even if they shave it is still visible. Large adams apples. Women have boobs and hips and a different centre of gravity. No facial hair, no chest hair.

When did language evolve? Presumably pronouns have been around since animal skins, long before pink dresses and hairdressers. People could distinguish sexes fairly easily even then.

Many animals don’t have clothes to distinguish gender. But even people can tell which is the male lion, or elephant, or seal. It’s easy to tell a female blackbird from a male. That’s without putting a dress on the female one...

I have honestly never seen a transwoman that I thought was a woman. Transmen maybe, although they are small in RL (but I also thought that when I saw Jude law and he’s definitely male as far as I know).

Children, yes, you can’t tell which is why we have to see all those horrific BBC articles with small boys plastered in makeup but secondary sexual characteristics are a passing-killer.

Which is of course why TRAs push to trans children.

My DD is what you would probably call gender non conforming, identifies as female but chooses to dress almost exclusively in jeans, hoodies, Doc Martens and has short hair. I went to pick her up one night and mistook her for a boy at a distance and it was only when I got close I realised it was her. She looks like she belongs in a boyband as she has that kind of baby face.

She has been mistaken for a boy, once an old man in the bus struck up a conversation and kept calling her "son" which she found amusing.

Not being able to tell at first glance does cause confusion for some people. She has had a few negative comments like a girl at college asking her why she dresses like a boy.

I think having to remember to refer to people as they, or use pronouns different to how the person presents is confusing.

I would love to smash down some gender stereotypes.

I think on the whole the only truly gender -conforming people are trans people who are confirming to the gender stereotypes attached to the 'opposite' sex.

I don't think I know any women who can be considered wholly gender-conforming.

You're confusing trans with gnc.
I'm not, I've read loads of posts on here saying you can always tell what sex someone was born as - which I did believe, but now I don't. Yes of course it's due to intervention in many cases.

As for transwomen, I don't think I've seen any that truly 'passed', but how would I know - and without wanting to sound like a dick there are plenty of non-feminine looking women that I wouldn't immediately be able to tell with absolute certainty.

Anyway, this was meant to be a bit of a thought experiment starting with the assumption that we couldn't tell who was M/F on first look.

Until male violence is a thing of the past then I feel better knowing an individual's biological sex so I can assess risk and keep myself safe. I'm not bothered by how people present and it would be great to inhabit a world where stereotypes didn't exist.

I agree with both of these but wondering how we'd know who would be viewed as an increased risk if in my imaginary world we couldn't always tell.

we can somehow tell which Inuit or Balinese person is male or female
The Inuit are supreme masters (and mistresses) of their environment. They survived the harshest place on earth by developing very specific technologies - the men hunted the fur and the women sewed the clothing. The traditional outer garments are clearly gender-marked in a way that is visible at a distance, because a lot of the sex-markers (shoulders, breasts, hips, hands) become invisible under layers. One way of looking at that bifurcation is that they decided they needed help in telling who was male or female.

I know nothing about Balinese people.

I don't want to name them but there is a person on TV I'm genuinely unsure about their sex (they have a gender neutral name too and don't obviously present as either gender). Maybe I'm just terrible at this! My gut feeling is they are female.

Maybe if you post a photo we can help you work out the sex of the person.

When it comes to correctly sexing people, I think seeing a picture or video of someone is not the same as interact8ng with someone in real life.

In real life, hormone treatment could mask many sex markers including the scents/pheromones? That we probably are subconsciously aware of. That starts to feel like deception to me, as reproductive capability is a very basic function/need of humans.

Would life actually be better if we couldn't tell anyone's sex from how they presented?

The thing is 95% of the time you can. Even 'presenting' with short hair and wearing trousers you could tell a woman a mile off.

Hmm.. coming at it from a thought experiment point of view, assuming we did not have external markers of sex...

I think ther would be many benefits in terms of socialisation, as we would need to interact with everyone without knowing their sex. I do think as a result over time sex based discrimination would fall, which could have an indirect (but of course not a direct) positive impact on male on female intimate partner violence.

In terms of dating, it might open up bisexual/pan sexual dating to people who might not have considered it otherwise due to socialisation. I imagine it would make things less heteronormative generally. In terms of the majority with a single sex sexuality, I imagine it would be first date conversation. “I’m XX and interested in XY.”

For it to work, both sexes would need to be equally physically proportioned on average. There wouldn’t need to be women’s only spaces imo as long as women and men both had (on average) indistinguishable physical size and strength, because then any potential predators wouldn’t know the sex of their potential victims.

I know nothing about Balinese people
Sarongs.
I clearly know nothing about Inuit clothing but could still tell a male from a female.