Inclusive gender cognition: Exploring gender categorization with diverse gender identities

Abstract

Research on gender cognition has mostly approached gender as a binary construct, examining the perceptions of and perspectives from people whose identities conform to the gender binary (e.g., cisgender and gender conforming children and adults) and excluding the perceptions of perspectives from people with more diverse gender identities (e.g., transgender and gender diverse children and adults). However, the exclusion of diverse gender identities from research on gender cogniton, particularly gender categorization, is a disservice to our science. Across three manuscripts, I seek to illustrate that including transgender and gender diverse identities—both as participants and as targets—in research examining gender categorization can improve our understanding of how humans think about gender throughout the lifespan and help us to better understand the experiences of transgender and gender diverse people. In the first section of this dissertation, I demonstrate the importance of including diverse gender identities as targets in research examining gender categorization in adulthood. I tested whether the preexisting knowledge that someone is transgender, regardless of physical appearance, can impact social categorization. I showed that simply knowing that someone is transgender can impact how people categorize a person’s gender, as participants were more likely to misgender the exact same faces when labelled as transgender than when labelled as cisgender. I theorize that the assigned sex of transgender targets was salient to participants when thinking about these targets, leading them to misgender transgender targets more frequently. Furthermore, as we found that knowledge that a person’s gender identity does not align with their assigned sex (i.e., that they are transgender) reduces the accuracy of gender categorization, we showed that the mere presence of verbal cues to gender identity and assigned sex can influence speeded gender categorization, demonstrating the importance of including diverse gender identities as targets in research. In the second section of this dissertation, I demonstrate the importance of including diverse gender identities—as both targets and as participants—in research examining gender categorization in childhood. In the first paper of this section, I first examined the extent to which children apply beliefs about discreteness of gender categories to transgender people. By including binary-identifying transgender children (for whom assigned sex and gender identity do not align with society’s expectations) as targets, we were able to distinguish between assigned sex and gender identity as factors in children’s view of gender categories as discrete. I showed that 6- to 11-year-old children viewed targets that had different gender identities as different kinds of people, whether they were cisgender or transgender, suggesting that children view differences in gender identity as more important in determining discrete gender categories than assigned sex. In this paper, I also examined whether being transgender was related to the degree to which children endorsed the belief that gender categories are discrete. I showed that the tendency to view race and gender categories as discrete may emerge regardless of individual differences in experience with gender, as transgender children viewed gender categories as similarly discrete to cisgender children. This may indicate that perceptions of gender categories may be a uniquely robust aspect of gender cognition not impacted by individual differences in gender experience, showing the importance of including diverse gender identities as participants. Also demonstrating the importance of including diverse gender identities as participants in research on gender categorization, In the second paper of this section, I examined whether gender diverse children’s tendency to notice and remember the gender of others (i.e., encode gender) differs from that of gender conforming children. I showed that the tendency to encode gender may also emerge regardless of individual differences in gender experience, as I show that gender diverse children as young as three years old, like gender conforming children, encode binary gender. This may suggest that gender encoding may emerge due to shared cultural learning experiences surrounding gender. Taken together, these three manuscripts provide evidence that including more gender diversity within research on gender categorization can overall improve our understanding of how humans think about gender throughout the lifespan and help us to better understand the experiences of transgender and gender diverse people. By being more inclusive of diverse gender identities within our research—both as participants and as targets—we can take a step forward in improving the quality of research on gender categorization.