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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4327 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 23, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Related question: what percentage of cis people "pass" as their gender, using whichever standard you choose?

I don't think I could get better than 99.9% correct, but I'm quite confident about reaching 98% given reasonable amounts of data.

That's an interesting question as well. Particularly if you include some of the other things pointed out in this thread - if you're more primed to think about trans-ness for whatever reason, it's probably more likely to identify actual trans people, but you would think that also corresponds to a higher chance of perceiving cis people who happen to be somewhat marginal as trans when they aren't.

I think it's also affected a lot by the evident desire of most people to clearly and obviously be the gender they were born as. If you got a bunch of candidates to all wear the same shapeless coveralls, get the same short haircut and shave any other body hair, and avoid any makeup, presumably it would be rather harder to tell. Probably a number of people who are on the spectrum of trans-ness but don't want to get actual medical procedures already voluntarily do things like that, or try hard to dress as the opposite gender.

There also seem to be a lot of differences in how people move. I've observed a few times that I can usually identify somebody's gender from a great distance, much too far to see any facial features or details of clothing, just based on how they move. It's hard to explain what the actual difference is, but it seems to be real.

Yes, this is also really important. I use "this person is weirding me out" as an important cue, but on it's own that would probably be a 10% false-positive rate. A lot of left/progressives seem to take a super strict line where a person is only counted as not-passing if they're so obvious that you would be like 99% confident that they're trans, while for me there are several gradients.

This is also related to how non-sex-conforming people are kind of the biggest losers of the current trans wave. There is a decent number of both men and women that already lost the genetic lottery with their looks, and in the past might have been insulted with "you look like a dude/girl". Nowadays, people will not say anything, but might think that you're actually the other sex.

You mean "cue," btw. Unless this is one of those British-versus-American English things and I'm unaware.

Thanks. No, this is one of those foreigner-guessing-the-written-from-the-sound things that always seems to go wrong in english.

Unless this is one of those British-versus-American English things and I'm unaware.

No. In BrE, "queue" is a waiting line. "cue" can either be a small signal that activates stored information in the brain, or the stick used to propel a ball in billiards family games.

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