The secondary characteristics under discusion are usually the result of developments at puberty after exposure to testoterone levels. So not likely.
As mentioned, the differences are minimal at young ages, and we rely on cultural cues like clothing and haircuts.
I suspect even at adulthood,much of the perception is cultural cues; women wih shorter hair ofte get mis-addressed as mister.
Yes, the thread is about adults but your particular answer was about “practice”. Therefore, it seemed reasonable that one possible way to test that is to see if “practice” works on identifying children. Or maybe another test scenario is a 3-year old child that’s in a car accident and slips into a coma for 10 years and when he wakes up at age 13, he can’t really tell the difference between men and women because that child hasn’t had enough visual “practice.”
I don’t know of any other clever ways to test this out. Unless, you’re saying there’s already 99% universal scientific agreement that “practice” is the reason, so there’s no need to keep wondering about it.
We’ve evolved for this, on both ends of the question: We both look different, and we’re good at picking up on those differences. And the reason we’ve evolved for it is that all the steps leading up to reproduction would be a lot more difficult if we couldn’t tell the difference.
I and many other tall women have suffered the ignominy of being called “sir” or “sonny”.
We’ve been stared at for looking at lingerie (as in looking to buy it for ourselves)
Questioned as to why we’re going into the women’s loos
Been directed to the men’s department when asking where the shoes are
Recognizing people’s faces is not about practice, it’s a specific part of your brain responsible for it, and some people have deficiencies there.
Are there people out there born without an ability to distinguish between those who present as male and those who present as female?
That’s not necessarily because they think you are a guy… it could just be they think you have big feet.
[Troll] Bisexuals [/Troll]
If newborn boys and girls have distinct facial features and other traits of that type, then it might be possible to compare. I’m not sure that’s the case. Small babies pretty much all look alike to me, too.
Yes, some people have trouble recognizing faces because of neurological problems like prosopagnosia. They are unable to retain information about faces that other people are able to retain. Think about what the word recognition means. You cannot recognize something you have not encountered before. You didn’t know what your friends looked like before you saw them; you saw them and were able to store that information in your brain. We’re able to recognize and respond to other faces from a very early age, but I’ve never heard anyone say we have an inborn ability to tell men and women apart.
Because transsexuals and transvestites are quite different. Transsexuals feel like they are the opposite gender of the body that they were born in (and have the brain structures to support their beliefs). Transvestites just like dressing up in the clothing of the opposite sex; it’s not about being the opposite sex, it’s the imagery, the symbolism. They aren’t necessarily trying to look like an actual woman; they are trying to match feminine iconography.
That picture particularly emphasizes the masculine aspects. Check out here, especially the video.
Yes, there’s still something there, but it is far more subtle, and is a lot more masked in a lot of those images.
I’ve seen female strippers that look more masculine. Not crossgenders, actual women.
As for practice, I think it does play a role, but misses the point. In order for practice to work, there has to be some distinction that we are picking out.
I’m by no means an expert on drag culture, but there are different subcultures there, just like there are different subcultures in straight culture. The thing is, high makeup and dress allow the masquerade a lot more leeway. Dress in a T-shirt and jeans, and you’re gonna look a lot more masculine, because men wear that. Go for the flamboyant, over-the-top look and have more room to fudge.
Also, gay culture itself is not so much about acting like women, it is acting as an exaggeration of “feminine traits”. It’s about having soft voice, higher voice, softer mannerisms, smoother movements, acting more delicate. That’s not the way most women behave, it’s an exaggeration of how they differ from men. So there may be some parallel there with exaggerating the non-maleness.
Then there’s the “dress like a celebrity” aspect, where they try to look like a famous female celebrity. There’s an element of the drag culture that is about showing off, not just looking like a woman, but flaunting the glam persona.
It can be difficult to tell pre-adolescent sexes apart. That seems to be true in much of the animal kingdom. Maybe because it’s not important for continuation of the species.
I don’t think that misses the point at all. Men and women tend to look different, and over time you acquire practice in noticing the distinctions.
That’s fine. I wasn’t trying to give you a hard time.
Your word “practice” triggered my honest questions because I just read about the history of chicken sexing. Apparently before 1933, farmers had to wait 6 weeks before knowing if a chick was male or female. If the primary purpose of the chickens was egg production, the males would be useless. In the meantime, you had to spend $$$ feeding them for 6 weeks until you knew which was which.
Around 1933, somebody in Japan figured out a away to look at chicks just 3 days after hatching and determine with 95+% accuracy what the gender was. The anatomical difference is not very easy to see and it takes training (aka “practice”) to master. It was a huge breakthrough. When the technique spread around the world, the cost of eggs went down. I guess if producers are not wasting 5 extra weeks feeding unwanted chicks, the cost of eggs should reflect that. (It surprised me that civilization lived with this ignorance for thousands of years and we only recently figured out – and it didn’t even require any new technology! Just a different way of looking at it.)
So, the direct equivalent to infants is to just look directly at their genitals. However, I was wondering if there was anything in the face that a person that’s seen thousands of infants would discern. Maybe a very subtle geometry of the lips or eyelashes. I’ve seen less than 100 infants up close. A nurse may have seen 10,000+ or more baby faces and maybe they can figure it out without looking under the diaper. If so, it adds more evidence to the “practice” answer.
Some XY babies are born with androgen insensitivity: Androgen insensitivity syndrome - Wikipedia
Their bodies do not respond to the testosterone they’re making, and the effects have a range, but mostly, they don’t “transition” to males as you would expect. Many of them have to have estrogen treatments to go through puberty (as such) and develop womanly body characteristics. Of course, being XY, they’re not coded for a uterus, so they can’t have kids.
I’ve seen one on Oprah (I swear, someone else was watching this, not me), and you would never have known. She had the smaller nose and chin, bigger lips and eyes, narrower shoulders, breasts, narrowed waist, widened hips, all of it. She actually was kind of a hottie.
My point being that it’s exposure to hormones that creates those differences. If you want some sort of opposite example, observe that dosing a human woman with testosterone allows much bigger muscles, but also changes the shape of the face, even in an adult: Joanie Laurer
Winona Ryder in Girl, Interrupted could have passed quite well as a 14-year-old boy. She would have been perfect for the lead in a movie about that 23-year-old woman who posed as a teenage boy and enrolled in high school.
A WAG, but I think it probably goes beyond this. There are most likely situations when having a male body type is an advantage and situations when having a female body type is an advantage. So we, as a species, evolved both and get the advantages of both body types. The fact that the body types are split along gender lines keep us from evolving into two separate species.
I don’t know. Ryder generally doesn’t emphasize it, but she’s got one hell of a rack. Hard to believe anyone would think this is a fourteen year old boy.
I knew someone in college that I initially thought might be a boy (name was ambiguous) with a sightly girlish face. She always wore boyish clothes and never wore skirts or dresses, but I couldn’t quite make the “judgment” so to speak. It turns out that she was a total lesbo.
A bunch of small clues, none of which are invariably present:
Women are generally smaller framed and shorter; have less prominent chins, jaws and adam’s apples; have little facial hair; have smaller brow ridges; proportionally smaller hands and feet; proportionally wider hips and shorter legs; rounded butts and breasts; more fat under the skin that causes smoother features, generally rounder heads.
The list goes on. We notice these differences because noticing them encourages reproductive success.
When the pics are really tiny, he passes for a girl. As soon as you click on one, however, the dude 'dar pings. That either one manly looking chick who needs a brow wax or a boy.
