Is your thinking, writing, from a feminine brain? (Trigger warning)

[Jera]

Sorry, I feel like I went a little ranty in here the other day. This idea kind of irritates me.

It really seems to me like what you're saying is that some girls speak and act like this:



And some do, to be sure (some men deliberately do, too). But it's kind of a HUGE leap to say that because some girls act this way, anyone who does not, is not communicating with "true female conviction, emotion, and spirit" (like stated in the OP). Like the many, many women who do not act like this are communicating from a "male brain."

[Rose City Rose]

The gender guesser thing seems to constantly gender me as male, but it doesn't seem to pick up on the increase in emotions I've been showing in my characters since I began transitioning and really letting my emotions flow for once.

[Michaela Whimsy]

I have wondered and worried about this, mostly on here.  I do seem to have a more femme feel to my writing when my writing is alcohol induced ( maybe it gets me to relax or maybe it just kills my ability to inhibit myself so the female comes out?)  Most of the day at work my writing is technical and NEEDS to be succinct and easily understood, so it may just be habit.  I really doubt that gender can be accurately determined by a piece of writing, but there is a lot that can have very definite male or female voice.
https://www.susans.org/forums/index.php/topic,165725.msg1433737.html#msg1433737 not sure if this is close enough related, but some of the posts might fit this thread for Info's sake.

[Lady_Oracle]

I'd say we've always been thinking in a female mindset. It's just a lot of us have it suppressed by either the culture's we're raised in or when we try to be hyper masculine to "fit in"

[Katherine]

I used to wonder about that.  I believe that what I do and say, how I act, etc., is from a female brain simply because I am female.  My thoughts and expression of those thoughts in what I write will be influenced by my male existence and experiences, but nevertheless, it still comes from my female brain.  Many of us essentially live in two worlds, the male world because of our physical being and female world because of our mental being.  To me that simply means that though female, all that I do and think is influenced by my male existence.  That will determine how I express myself in whatever manner by the years I've lived in my male persona.  At 60 years, my persona may appear to be more masculine that someone at 20 years, though we are both in fact female (transsexual or transgendered, however we describe ourselves).  I hope this makes sense...

[noeleena]

Hi,

I know what your trying to say,

My self i would not know what a male brain is like , well yes i do its a bit bigger than a normal female brain ,and it works a bit different because of how our bodys are configgered ,

now for us  child bearing,  hormones and our different parts organs and a lot more beside makes us different and that starts at concecption or if you like our program ,

Now yes we do have a different style if you like and how we see things and react and more so our Emotions very very different in many ways yet some femaleare more male like in many aspects so dont just think we are all the same we are not and we can be so different .

I was born with a hard wired female brain though not 100 % and i would not say i was , around 96 %  because i was born with out my womb and some of us are  due to being intersex, so we come different in many ways ,

Writing ,   could never write let alone put words together as for other detail like grammer or compoitsion and explaning my self in words reason being i have major dyslexa as youll see, i try and some times i get it right other wise..........

Im just a female and i dont know any different and how that plays out i let others judge on that , though i am accepted for who i am  and the way i am so ,

Hey im different , and thats it really ,you know it would be nice to be feminine ,  i am as far as being female is concerned just not with my looks yet people look past how i look and just accept myself  i dont need to explain my self any more done that Nation Wide , and people do  know about myself and its not a concern that they have ,  they see a female they accept a female and that covers every  thing i do ,

Of cause the most importaint detail..... is...... you accept your  self ,
I have confidence in my self as a woman, and im strong enough to carry my self where ever i go and what i do , so you take all of the person as a whole and from that comes acceptance from others as they see you ......the real person .

...noeleena...

[Carlita]

That's very veryyyy subjective.

I think I write with a "female brain" because ultimately that's who I am, so if I am female, my brain must be female too, right?

There's actually website where you can analyze pieces of your writing (with more than 300 words)  and see if it comes in a "female" or "male" style http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php#Analyze

I find it a bit sexist, it's very appropriating. The people who created gender guesser claim that it is accurate about 60-70% of time, and I have tested and checked pieces of writing from men and women, and there were lots who came in the wrong gender. So I really don't know.

It's so hard to distinguish such thing, it's too conceptual, variable and subjective. Just because I perceive my writing to be feminine and Gender Guesser validates my belief doesn't mean other people see in the way I see myself.

Because I write for a living, I've been really fascinated by this subject and addicted to the various algorithms that claim to be able to detect the gender of a writer. What I've discovered is ...

- When I write a straightforward piece of journalism, it comes out male. But  a cis-woman writing that kind of stuff would likely come out male, too, because one of the big things the algorithms look for is whether you use basic pronouns like 'a' or 'the' before a noun (male), or you more often make them possessive: 'his', 'hers' etc. In news-reporting, you stick to the facts, Jack, so there are lots of 'a's and 'the's. Also, women talk and write about other women much more than men talk or write about women, so 'she' and 'her' are high-scoring female words. But women - as any feminist could tell you - don't feature nearly as much in the news as men. So again, journalism automatically skews towards a male style.

- When I'm writing fiction, action-sequences also come out very male ... because, uh, they are. Most times if there's a fight scene, or a gun-battle it's guy-on-guy (not always, but more often than not), and the way one writes an action scene is very pared-down, keeping it structurally simple, concentrating on very clear descriptions of what is going on. Again: male.

BUT ...

- When I write romantic scenes, they score very high on the female scale, and ...
- When I write chatty emails to friends, especially female friends, or post on sites like this one - particularly if I'm discussing personal, or emotional issues, then again, I'm off the chart female.

So the more I'm writing as myself, from the heart, the more female I am. Which I love!!

And before you ask: I put this post (up to the last sentence, above) into Hacker Factor, which judges prose under two categories: formal (professional letters/memos, books, reporting) and informal (posts, messages to friends, chat, etc). As formal prose it scored (by an overwhelming margin): FEMALE ... but as informal prose it was overwhelmingly: MALE.

Go figure! 

[Katherine]

I'm always curious about tests, for fun if nothing else, so I fed different pieces of my writing to the Gender Guesser, some work related and some more personal. It's probably worth mentioning that when I have time, I really enjoy writing and may even get around to writing a book some day. However, I'm also an engineer by training (life sciences though, not one of those horrible "binary" disciplines .. :-) )  but still trained to think more or less in a logical manner...

Anyway, as all of my input material could be considered formal ie. fiction, non-fiction, essays, reports, I only looked at the "Formal" results. End of the day, my professional writing was classed as "Weak Male" and my personal writing as "Weak Female" and I just loved the little remark  "Weak emphasis could indicate European".

Hi Donna,
I usually stay away from these "gender" tests because they often seem easy to manipulate to get the response you're looking for.  Anyway, I entered two of my responses on this forum into this Guesser.  The shorter response indicated "female" for informal and "male" for former.  The longer response was shown as "weak female" for both informal and formal.  I'm sure my military career couldn't have possibly been an influence on my writing style    It was an interesting test as is the information on how it was developed.  Hugs.
Kathy

[PaleDragoness]

I was reading through and I just have a question.

First is that I've been told all my life that how I talk, walk, act, just in general I seem very feminine, but I don't feel that way because of what I look and feel like right now. Also when I write, from previous postings on this site, I am very very descriptive if need be. Pretty much I can't describe it with my mouth, but I can write just about anything in great detail as I think it.

Does any of this or can any of this equate to a female writing style or thinking? If this didn't make any sense just let me know. Right now I just got up so the brain isn't full sway as of yet.

[BunnyBee]

I'm always annoyed by how little I write - one or two sentence replies while everyone else is penning paragraphs - but I do all my Susan's contributions on a phone so maybe I have an excuse?
Anyway - in my longer-form writing (read: novel!), I do focus a lot on characters' thoughts and less on their actions. So I feel like I'm vindicated even if my online writing is terse to the point of comedy.

That and, I can remember even back when I was twelve-ish, some folks I was playing games with thought I was a girl just because of how I communicated in chat. At the time I was inwardly quite pleased with myself, but didn't say anything.

Writing in one or two sentences is actually just normal internet writing for either sex.  I find if I ever go on for more than a paragraph I start losing people, and a paragraph is really pushing it.  I would say though, if you can get your point across concisely, you are being a more effective communicator, which is a skill!  Not always easy.

I don't know if my writing is more male or female.  My casual style is very different from my formal style, for sure.  I also know my writing style has really evolved over the past few years (not something I consciously tried to do) I don't even recognize myself in older things I wrote.  I don't know what that means...

[Jera]

I also know my writing style has really evolved over the past few years (not something I consciously tried to do) I don't even recognize myself in older things I wrote.  I don't know what that means...

It means you have grown and evolved as a person, which is a very good thing. This happens to a lot of people.

[BunnyBee]

It means you have grown and evolved as a person, which is a very good thing. This happens to a lot of people.

  Maybe.

Do you all believe in that gender guesser thing?  I was thinking of pasting in some of my old posts and seeing what it thought of my writing, strictly out of curiosity, but I am like Zoe and it's hard to find many I have made with enough words to make a good sample.

[Allyda]

Well, I can only go by what others who read my writing tell me, and most of my friends tell me even long before transition I write like a girl. I tend to use a lot of adjectives in my writing which I've been told is, even when I was in high school, a more feminine trait. In addition my handwriting is inherently female as I tend to use circles over i's and j's rather than dots, and so forth, which I still do to this day because it comes natural.

However, when it comes to gender guessing websites I tend not to put much stock in them because writing styles are as diverse as grains of sand, and one can drive one's self crazy pondering over them trying to decide whether their writing meets a stereotypical female or male standard. I've been a member here now for a while and y'all have read some of my posts, so I'll let you be the judges as to whether my typewritten posts tend to have more female or male attributes.

Allie

[SilentRain]

I believe that this stereotypes how only a fraction of people communicate. We all act completely different, and sometimes we tell people they seem strange, or weird to us. (Like me, people call me weird.)This creates a type of negative diversity. Furthermore, writing is a type of expression, and we cannot judge people on how they transfer information into our minds. Sterotyping people into "we act like a girl" and "we act like a boy" or "we act like a type of person" only creates diffeterence in society. In order to become a more culturally accepting society, we need to rid away sayings like "you act like a girly girl" and let people be who they want to be.As for trans men and women, I believe people should just be who they truly want to be. For those worrying about "passing," can't you just say you're a tomboy or a sensitive male? There is no need for one to be a stereotypical person, if someone questions you, then put them on the spot! It's normal for males and females to do what they want, even if they want to cross "boundary" lines.