We encounter many people in our daily lives, whether by telephone, static or moving images e.g. TV,or directly using one or more of our senses. Whatever the form of contact, we nearly always manage to assign a sex to each person with a high degree of reliability.
What are the essential cues that enable us to achieve this over such a wide range of sensory input data? To keep OT, breast development is one clue, although never of itself conclusive (!), but what if breasts or their absence cannot be seen or felt? What lessons are are there to be learned here by those who would seek to pass in a gender differing from their biological sex? Some of the answers may seem obvious, but I remain astonished that our brains manage to gather and weight available input data more or less subconsciously, and make instantaneous judgements based on data which often seems wholly insufficient. The brain's weighting of the data is obviously important here.
One way of looking at this is to consider those people who manage, deliberately or otherwise, to defeat our instantaneous assessment ability.. For example there was a newcomer to our village a few years back who managed to leave many initially querying his gender. Perhaps that is the ultimate badge of success in androgyny?
What are the essential cues that enable us to achieve this over such a wide range of sensory input data? To keep OT, breast development is one clue, although never of itself conclusive (!), but what if breasts or their absence cannot be seen or felt? What lessons are are there to be learned here by those who would seek to pass in a gender differing from their biological sex? Some of the answers may seem obvious, but I remain astonished that our brains manage to gather and weight available input data more or less subconsciously, and make instantaneous judgements based on data which often seems wholly insufficient. The brain's weighting of the data is obviously important here.
One way of looking at this is to consider those people who manage, deliberately or otherwise, to defeat our instantaneous assessment ability.. For example there was a newcomer to our village a few years back who managed to leave many initially querying his gender. Perhaps that is the ultimate badge of success in androgyny?