another report for the journal of experimental gender studies

[psocoptera]

Hair trumps everything. That is my conclusion. Quentin gets pretty consistently read as a girl, and for awhile I figured it was mostly due to him frequently being dressed in "girl" clothes, and then I started thinking it was the shoes regardless of clothes (for awhile he had purple and green sneakers) but recently there've been a bunch of times he's been read as a girl even when wearing entirely "boy" clothes (including his latest sneakers which are navy and orange, and also at the pool in his boy swim shirt and boy trunks and no shoes at all), so it's got to be the hair. (His hair is shaggy, not really all that long yet, but obviously not being cut short, and I pull his bangs out of his eyes into a little side pigtail thingy.) I'm trying to think, now, if Junie only got read as a boy when her hair was pulled back or obscured... anyways, I thought it was interesting.

Comments

[q10.livejournal.com]

as somebody who spent years in my adolescence being called ‘ma'am’, while wearing 100% male-gendered clothing, i could have told you'd that if you asked.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Well, replication of results is an important part of science! And actually, I wouldn't necessarily have guessed that people prioritize the same gender cues for adolescents and toddlers, so that's interesting.

(Clearly we need to send someone's kid out in really girly clothes with a really boy haircut, and see whether hair still wins, or whether any ambiguous kid is a girl... I am not willing to sacrifice Q's beautiful hair to this experiment, though.)

[rose_garden.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, hair trumps everything. I will definitely mistake a stranger's gender at first if their hair is not what I expect.

[eastgategirl.livejournal.com]

Both of my kids were basically bald for a long time. Even when Jo was wearing a pink dress, some folks would always assume that this hairless child was a boy.

[glassonion]

I'm impressed that people called you "ma'am" as an adolescent. I still get called "miss" a substantial fraction of the time. (Topic shmopic; this is the internet.)

[belecrivain.livejournal.com]

Further replication: my Orthodox friends' sons consistently got mistaken for girls before the first haircut.

Janet's hair is still ambiguous (...baby mullet) so clothes, and frequently a pink or purple clip in the hair, win.

(Meanwhile, Sheena is fully in the ALL MUST BE PINK phase.)

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

I've found that a lot of people rely on silhouette for their first/strongest gender cue, rather than looking at clothing or haircut as such. That's the only explanation I can think of for more than half the strangers who see me in my purple coat call me "sir." I wear it with a hat, and people see the general outline of man-in-traditional-wool-overcoat, and think "sir" without looking at my hair or face or even at the coat being purple.

[myalexandria.livejournal.com]

Hair is everything unless the clothing cues are absolutely unambiguous (suits or dresses.) I try hard not to gender-guess (out loud, anyway) anyone under the age of ten but my instinctive guesses are def. made on hair more than clothing. I have some limited face-blindness though -- it's not crippling or anything, but when I try to learn my students' names at the start of the semester I lean very heavily on hair, and I've been known to not recognize acquaintances after they make a drastic hair change.