Do We See Someone as a Man or Woman Before We See Them as a Person?

Knowingly or unknowingly, how do you think you react differently to people depending on their sex?

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes. Photo by leah hetteberg on Unsplash.

“When you’re communicating with someone, but don’t know if they’re a man or woman, you feel a little guarded. You can’t help it. Until you can resolve their identity, your conversation is stilted and awkward, because you just can’t be yourself. ”

Or something like that—I can’t remember when and where I read it, but it resonated with my experience of chatrooms in the early days of the internet, or phone calls before Caller ID. Over the next decade, as realistic-sounding, AI-based chatbots become increasingly common in customer service roles, along with all their inherent gender biases and stereotypes, I expect younger generations will also experience the same moments of confusion and hesitation I did.

Or will they? Is it just me that sees sex first, and reacts to that? Do moments of ambiguity mean I actually behave and talk fundamentally differently around men and women, once their identity is resolved? I’ve often wondered. So, I was interested recently when I was listening to a New Books Network interview of Julia Serano, a transsexual woman, about her, well, new book, Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us and How We Can Fight Back (2022), and learned that it was her experience that people reacted to their perception of her sex before anything else. Listen from 15:40 to see how, or read below:

“When I was about to begin my [male to female] transition, I really didn’t know what personally to expect, other than I figured there’d be this period of time where I’d be in, like, a gender limbo, when people wouldn’t be able to figure out if I was a boy or girl. And I had a couple of instances like that, but much to my surprise, almost always people would make the determination that I was male or female [for themselves]. It’s just that their determinations often differed from other people in the exact same room. So I describe a lot of anecdotes I had, including…having a conversation, for instance, where someone who knew me as male before I transitioned and wasn’t aware that I was transitioning, introduced me to…another man, who—he was very flirty with me. And I could tell, because of what I was going through at the time, that he was reading me as female, but, like, my friend didn’t pick up on that…because from my friend’s perspective, we all obviously knew that we were [just] three guys talking together. And there’d be a lot of situations like that where people would read me as one way or the other, and they’d really believe whatever their initial determination was, that’s what they believed and that’s how they viewed me, and it was really hard a lot of times to convince people in the other direction.”

“….The conclusion I came out of [those experiences], is that first and foremost, we don’t really see people—we see men and women. And that’s kind of how we’re socialized to see the world, and becomes really unconscious…and, you know, the fact that we automatically categorize people as male or female, obviously this has implications for trans people, and for non-binary people—it creates a lot of obstacles in our lives. But more generally, if we categorize people [like this], it really shapes a lot of the assumptions that we place on people, and it results in us filtering out other aspects of their person…like once I transitioned, there were aspects of my person that people couldn’t really see any more, that they used to react to.”

The title of the book, not to mention its description, is actually a little misleading—the book is no prudish, anti-sex tirade. Instead, it’s more her observations and thoughts about sexualization, objectifiction, sex and gender roles, socialization, pornography, and so on based on her experiences before and after transitioning. In other words, fascinating, and more than enough to decide I couldn’t wait for a paperback version to come out.

As for my own answers to the various questions I’ve raised? Actually I completely disagree with Serano that we’re socialized to see people’s sexes first. Women, in particular, who didn’t immediately register someone as a man, and weren’t more wary of the potential danger a man represented, were more likely to be a victim of violence, and less likely to pass on their genes. Also, with the exception of asexuals, our well-documented, subconscious reactions to other’s heights, signs of youth, indicators of wealth, and other attractiveness criteria demonstrate that most people can’t help but immediately consider others as potential mates or rivals, even if we don’t consciously frame them as such.

Or, very, very consciously once suddenly becoming single again, at a frequency that surprises even myself…

Photo by Tomas Robertson on Unsplash.

But I stress that to acknowledge these gut reactions, usually so short-lived to even notice them, doesn’t mean they aren’t easily overcome. Nor should they ever provide excuses for boorish behavior. For instance, I’m acutely aware that many men dominate women’s personal spaces, whether through being unaware or through deliberately taking advantage of their male privilege to do so. So, when I’m around women, I constantly try to check myself from manspreading, and so on. Also, befriending mostly women for most of my adult life, because of reasons, I’ve often questioned if I talked and behaved differently around them, and if there were subjects that I wouldn’t broach with them that I would with men, and vice-versa?

Recently starting to make more male friends again because I suddenly have a social life now, I’m leaning towards that I actually treat everyone pretty much the same. Which is to say I don’t actually have ‘friends’ so much as “like-minded folks [that] fill very specific needs,” at varying levels of closeness, with whom their sex is only one of many factors influencing how I behave around them and what we talk about. And which in my experience is much less important than nationality—at least amongst Westerners.

So, although I haven’t met any yet, I don’t think I would feel compelled to ‘assign’ any openly genderfluid or non-binary people at all. And, to those I am fortunate to meet, I can only apologize in advance for not lacking the restraint to want to immediately ask you all these questions too. Including the most important one:

Was it necessary for Jane Austen to avoid conversations between men in her novels? Well??

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