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.)