How Do We Decipher Sex in Daily Life?

[Hypatia]

How Do We Decipher Sex in Daily Life?
http://contexts.org/socimages/2009/02/12/how-do-we-decipher-sex-in-daily-life/

If you are like most people, you find, perhaps to your own bewilderment, that the first individual seems male despite the female pubic hair pattern and apparent female genitalia and the second individual seems female despite the presence of a penis and scrotum.  Kimmel suggests that this is because, in our daily life, we habitually judge individuals as male or female on the basis of their secondary sex characteristics (e.g., body shape, facial hair, breasts) and social cues (e.g., hair length) and not, so much, their primary sex characteristics (i.e., their genitalia).  In that sense, Kimmel argues, social cues and secondary sex characteristics "matter" more when it comes to social interaction and gender is really about gender (socially constructed ideas about masculinity and femininity), not so much about sex (penises and vaginas).

[V M]

This is interesting. I have noticed this rather often but didn't quite know how to explain it. Even when I would act all hard ass masculine, People would pick up on my fem. persona. This was frustrating for me when I was young and in denial of my femininity. Then I realized that I was a boy who was perceived as a girl trying to act like a boy. Then I asked myself, "Why am I trying to act like a boy and nearly getting killed? I like being a girl." So along the road to self acceptance I began to happily skip 

[Hazumu]

We 'gender' strangers in an instant.  We gender them at 500 meters, at night, in the fog, and under other bad vision conditions.

The porn actor Buck Angel genders as male.

Pre-op transwomen gender as female.  The pre-op status, though, attracts 'admirers'.  But the admirers generally still gender the pre-ops as female.

On the weight of such phenomena, I have little hope for a genderless society.  We all might as well learn to live with a society that sees gender as dimorphic.

Karen