just checking - since the SC there is no such thing as misgendering on Mumsnet? Or is there??

[loveyouradvice]

Just checking we can refer to TIM as he now? I think so... The deeply admirable Helen Joyce does and I share her rationale...

Goes all the way back to the sublime Pronouns are rohypnol from a much loved mums netter...

In order to agree to differ with someone its neecessary to concede they may have a point.
So I can never agree to differ with someone who thinks women don't know what a man looks like

”Agree to differ” means that you do not accept each others point and stop arguing about it.

Which is what I would like to do, but people continue to quote me.

I accept that others on this thread don't agree with my point of view and never will however long I keep replying to posts quoting me. It seems most people on this thread are unable to do the same.
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I think that people would stop responding to some posters, if some posts didn't mischaracterise the posts on this thread to the point that people felt they need to clarify.

@Helleofabore

"And do you think that prior to hormones and facial feminisation surgery that people in the UK would not have been very easily able to correctly identify another person’s sex?"

Yeah. I do think that trans people have probably always existed, because there's no reason that whatever is wrong with me couldn't have been wrong with someone 5,000 years ago - but I also have no doubt that people would have known something was up just by looking at the person. And that's of course if people had been able to socially transition in the first place, which isn't a given.

I tend to agree with you in a sense.

I do think there were people who felt gender dysphoria, of course they would. However, if they socially transitioned, and I expect this would have been very rare, that as you say, people would be very highly likely to know the sex of the person if that person was male.

I also wonder though, if the poster was leveraging other cultures societal structures in that statement. Which we have seen done many times, but I find very problematic.

"people would be very highly likely to know the sex of the person if that person was male"

Also very likely if the person was female, honestly. Absence of beard. Presence of breasts. Higher voice. Female fat distribution. Height and bulk and size of limbs. Etc... A slight young woman could maybe pass for a very young man, but as she grew older, she'd look more and more odd for a man.

(Anecdotically, I barely pass. Without a double mastectomy to remove my big breasts, and testosterone to lower my voice, give me a bit of a beard, and re-distribute some of my fat away from my former very hourglass figure, I'd stand less than zero chance of passing 😂)

"I also wonder though, if the poster was leveraging other cultures societal structures in that statement. Which we have seen done many times, but I find very problematic."

Indeed. I've read or heard of things here and there, but I've never come across anything that fits the concept of trans as we have it now.

"Indeed. I've read or heard of things here and there, but I've never come across anything that fits the concept of trans as we have it now."

This is just it. Those culture's societal structures don't seem to fit the concept, but are used relentlessly in an attempt to add substance via a back story. I find such usage racist, myself.

You are right about female people being correctly identified too. I actually find the tell around their eyes and their expressions. I don't know what it is but when I see it, it is instinctive. But I know that female people 'passing' is more likely.

I also wonder if that is because the brain instinctively understands that the person is female and therefore not a 'threat' (ie. the brain doesn't go into alert mode). So effectively, people don't look further or register what their brain has identified. It would be an interesting study.

It seems to me that TRAs think that if someone is trans they are gender non-conforming, so gender non-conforming people are trans.

This strikes me as nonsense. For one, trans people are, typically, not gender non-conforming. They adhere to sex based stereotypes at least as much as anyone else, it's just that they adopt wrong-sex sex-based stereotypes, not same-sex ones. Secondly, it is perfectly possible to be a woman and love beer and football and not be trans. Thirdly, there is no evidence at all that prior to around 100 years ago there was any idea that some people had wrong-sex gendered souls or were born in the wrong body.

I find "sexing" people so fascinating, and I try to monitor my subconscious and think consciously as well.

Perfect example today... I saw a long haired woman in her 60s today... in trousers, one of those very very skinny types. A few minutes later I came up behind someone who was incredibly skinny, long hair, short of stature and almost instantaneously and simulataneously thought "another of those skinny women... no it's not". A few seconds later I passed and turned and it was a man with a big beard.

In the space of a second I clocked someone, immediately put them in a box (a type of very skinny elderly woman who has a particular "look"), and immediately took them out again as I realized - probably due to the way he was walking - that he was a short skinny man. All before seeing anything more than skinny trousers, baggy jacket, and long hair from behind.

To be fair, I think (purely from my own experience) that women correctly sex human beings better than men. My husband and I were watching a tv show where I picked up something 'off' with the main, ostensibly male character and lo and behold, that actor is a trans identifying female. My husband hadn't picked up anything at all.

I agree with Helle that it's instinctive for women. That constant scan for threat.

100%... but I am sure some women are better than others, and some men are good and others appalling.

I also wonder the extent to which correctly sexing people requires "training" if we're talking about people who have taken hormones and maybe had surgery.

At one end of the spectrum if you were completely naive and didn't know that gender non-conformity or trans was a thing, you might just see trousers and beard and assume man. At the other end of the spectrum there are people who know a lot about trans and know all the signs that suggest the person with no breasts and a beard is female, even if many of the obvious signs of feminity are hidden

Trousers wouldn't figure one way or another. Except that wearing them makes hips more visible, so maybe they'd make the femaleness more obvious. The beard would cause a moment's pause, but not necessarily more than that. Lots of women have very small breasts.

The obvious signs of femaleness - smallish hands and feet, sloping shoulders, wide hips, larger eye sockets - are all instantly recognisable, and if the woman moved her gait would be distinctive because of that knee thing..

In fact when trousers for women were moving out of the 'mainly sportswear' category into 'everyday casual' - 75 or 80 years ago - the objections from the old and stuffy weren't that they made women look like men, but quite the reverse, that they made female hips, buttocks and legs far far too obvious.

The sex-disguising aspect of skirts lasts a little longer (which might be why men with nefarious intent like to wear them).

There was that time in the early 90s when I was at a conference in Edinburgh, idly musing on how many plain and frumpy women there were (NB, I am neither beautiful nor chic) before realising they were the gentlemen of a Scottish Geological Society, off for a formal dinner in their kilts.

Most unfairly, the change in sex rendered them rather stylish and distinguished. And not nefarious. Or no more so than trouser-wearing geologists.

The obvious signs of femaleness - smallish hands and feet, sloping shoulders, wide hips, larger eye sockets - are all instantly recognisable, and if the woman moved her gait would be distinctive because of that knee thing..

Well I can't agree to differ on this one.

Many women don't have any of those things, including the "knee thing", which depends on having wider hips. All physical traits like those you mention are a generalisation and the male and female bell curves for those features will have a significant overlap. Women with the biggest hands and squarest shoulders have bigger hands and squarer shoulders than men with the smallest hands and the most sloping shoulders.

Comments like this are demeaning to women who don't look like that stereotype of women. Their femaleness is being questioned because they have small eyes, square shoulders, narrow hips and big hands and feet.

That's as bad as the trans activists' stereotyping of what it means to be female, only worse because it's coming from women themselves.
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It's really not

Q angles of the hips which translate to the knee position comes from pelvic bone structure.

The pelvic bone structure involves having a wider opening to allow a child’s head to move through it. It causes the placement of the femur at the hip socket to have a different angle to a male hip alignment. This is a significant difference and causes the difference in gait between the sexes.

You really sound ill informed with this post. The differences in male and female bodies are quite well studied.

All female people have the ‘knee thing’ and it is measurable because of q angles of the hip joint.

If you cannot understand the skeletal differences between the sexes, maybe that is why you don’t believe that people can tell the difference. But I would suggest you read up on sports science as a start. There are plenty of discussions about skeletal differences in relation to sports.

I must admit to being surprised by someone’s dismissal of the differences in male and female bodies. But then I remember that there is a branch of feminism who really believe, despite the science that proves them wrong, that women are just as strong as men if they train hard enough. They believe that there should be no sex segregated sports. So, perhaps that is why we are seeing this doubling down on the disbelief that female people can reliably tell the difference between a male and female person without asking. It is like the arguments we are constantly having about Khelif and Semenya.

Maybe this will help. These are just some of the differences in the male body due to testosterone.

https://www.theparadoxinstitute.com/watch/testosterone-and-beyond-the-male-advantage

I am very happy to provide links to the numerous sports studies detailing sporting differences between the sexes. I will look for the video which shows male and female gait using dots on joints. Maybe that will help too. And no, not ‘feminine’ vs ‘masculine’ gait. But the actual differences driven by q- angles and ‘knee things’.

there are some other interesting vids on Paradox too.

https://www.theparadoxinstitute.com/watch

Here in this Times article is a good hip alignment article.

ONE OF THE Q-ANGLE DIAGRAMS & A POLL

If you believe in fair competition, Emily Bridges should not be racing Laura Kenny

Owen Slot, The Times, 29th March 2022

https://archive.is/u4oSa

^www.thetimes.co.uk/article/3081c8c0-af7c-11ec-8b8c-0207c0fd6104?shareToken=dfc4c5b36b407a8e0ccc2133e718b121^

"Biomechanically, though, she still retains distinct advantages. The athletes she will be competing against have naturally wider hips. For the purposes of powering a bicycle, the crucial element here is that they will have a wider angle between the hips and the knees — this means their quads do not work so efficiently in transferring power."

Samphire (of various username combinations) works in the sports field and is usually excellent with explanations. But this is one short post with a diagram that I have found as I only have a short amount of time.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/4725860-has-a-man-dressed-as-a-woman-ever-come-into-a-communal-changing-room-with-you-or-joined-a-specifically-female-group-you-belong-to?page=13&reply=123299406

As she has said in the past, even when watching male vs female road cyclists the position of the knee will be obvious amongst Lycra wearing humans so you can tell the difference from behind watching a pack of riders.

Here is a study done on faces

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004269892200133X

Our results indicate that facial structures with full information on the texture and color of the skin are correctly classified as to their sex by most of the participants (98.4 % for Exp. 1 and 94.6 % for Exp. 2). If we do not consider versions 3 and 5 (close to the androgyne version 4), which contain a certain degree of sex ambiguity and only consider the less ambiguous versions (1 and 2 for male faces, and 6 and 7 for female faces), the accuracy approaches the ceiling (99.9 % for Exp.1, and 99.1 % for Exp.2). This is in line with previous research which observed that natural faces, devoid of any cultural signs of sex, are generally correctly categorized into their sex

I would think that results over 90% indicate a correct assumption that most of the population can accurately identify the sex of humans from faces. However, note the difference between people correctly identifying male versions of faces vs female.

The study mentions other papers as well.

I have a link stashed away that show that babies can recognise male and female faces too.

I am really not sure when people started to believe that their inability to tell the difference between male and female people through observation and hearing voices was the norm. The research says otherwise.

I also suggest readers should look at the documentation behind facial feminisation surgery (many providers will describe what gets done). The changes they make even to narrow the difference between the top lip and nose and the tilt of the eye. But the obvious ones are skeletal. Brow, jaw and cheek.

I think either some people cannot correctly identify people’s sex so they believe others can’t as well. Or that perhaps due to being constantly told that humans cannot correctly identify another human’s sex from extreme transgender activists, that some people actually believe this.

Either way, the evidence shows that the vast majority of people can correctly identify people’s sex from observation.

@Imdunfer Many women don't have any of those things, including the "knee thing", which depends on having wider hips

As others have pointed out, that is false information. Adult women's pelvises are different from adult men's pelvises.

That's as bad as the trans activists' stereotyping of what it means to be female, only worse because it's coming from women themselves.

Women being the ones with bodies that can grow and birth humans is not a 'stereotype'. That is what it means to be female. Men cannot do that. The fact that you want to deny that fact makes me doubt the reality of your claimed inability to assess people's sex.

The deconstruction model is often useful on MN. But not for individual body parts in the way that dunfer is attempting.

What is the relevance that individual body parts might have bell curve overlaps? The argument relies on enough male body parts being sized and shaped to the female range to mean that that male could be considered ambiguous in identification terms. Face and whole body.

We've seen a fair few TRA's on this board swear blind that there is absolutely no difference between male and female bodies.

It makes you muse on how cult addled thinking can change their perception to the point of denying the obvious.

Either that, or that cult doctrines can groom them into being an outright liar.

But if we didn’t know…. How do you know? Do you have some secret superpower or do please point to the studies showing that transgenderism has been around since the Stone Age? I mean, how detailed were the cave paintings? At what points did we not know trabs people were there?