I used to think I could reliably divine the "real"
gender of anybody I was communicating with online by their general
style -- that I had some kind of inbuilt
intuition or
gender radar. This, I have come to realise, was arrogant
self-delusion and pure, undiluted
bullshit. All I was really doing (an embarrassing admission from a self-proclaimed
feminist, this) was showing off my skill in the use of
stereotypes: X is
empathic so must be a woman, Y has a particularly dumb
breast fixation so must be an
adolescent male, and so on.
I was cured of this illusion the hard way in the end, and learned (or re-learned) several important lessons in the process:
-
Constructions of gender are culturally specific. Behavior which is counted as typical for one sex in one cultural setting may count as aberrant for the same sex in a different cultural setting.
- Any remotely thoughtful, intelligent, observant person with decent general knowledge can disguise his or her gender online with relative ease and a low probability of being unmasked.
- Unless you're actually planning a physical encounter with someone for the purposes of reproduction (and in a few more years maybe not even then), their gender doesn't matter. It's utterly irrelevant for the purposes of just about anything you can do online.
- People who obsess about other peoples' gender, online or off, are boring. The question is not "are you {insert label here}", but "can we have fun together?"
All of which is a roundabout way of saying I don't believe there can be any such thing as a universally reliable gender
Turing Test. The Turing Test requires you to measure the actual responses of the entity being tested against your own predictions or
expectations: and individual human
behaviour is
predictable only to the extent that it
conforms with conventions or stereotypyes. Given that stereotypes themselves are frequently
inconsistent and contradictory, this is probably impossible
in principle.
If anybody can think of a question or set of questions that will reliably and universally distinguish human males from human females, please node them and I'll do some kind of virtual equivalent of eating my words in public.