A note on "gender tests"

Deutsch: Anmerkungen zu Gender Tests

Not only do I consider gender tests unreliable and scientifically unsound, I consider them to be potentially dangerous for younger and less educated members of the community who might take the results seriously.

Here is why I consider these tests to be problematic:

1. Gender tests don't tell you anything you don't already know deep down

If you're taking the test, you obviously already know you have an issue. Confirmation and clarification should come from introspection and discussing your feelings with others, not from an online test.

2. Gender test scores can often be manipulated

Many of these tests have answers or choices on questions where it's clear which answer is considered to be indicative of a gender condition. Lots of these tests can give you different scores depending on when or how you take them.

3. Gender tests might be used as justification for important decisions

A quick test with a score is less work than serious introspection. Many seem to want justification for taking action, as a way to absolve themselves of some of the responsibilities of making an important decision. "Well, the gender test said I am a Type 14 transsexual, so I better get a divorce." Gender tests can actually encourage people to rely on a number or category as a reason for an important life decision rather than thinking carefully about what is best for them personally.

These tests have a danger of being used as a replacement for personal responsibility. Those who do not take personal responsibility for their actions and later have regrets are always looking for someone or something to blame. This kind of amateur benchmarking will always appeal to those who wish to avoid respnsibility for their decisions.

4. Gender tests are based on theories masquerading as universally accepted scientific truths

These tests are not based on rigorous scientific methodology, although they appear to be.

I applaud any attempts to further knowledge of transsexualism. I especially applaud work done by academics and others who undertake serious study. A scientifically recognized test that could indicate transsexualism, whether it was a physical or mental test, could allow transition to begin much sooner in life. However, there is no definitive answer at this time about the causes of transsexualism. Theories abound, but none of them have been conclusively proven based on repeatable scientific methodology.

That means that any gender test is fundamentally flawed, since they are not based on conclusive scientific evidence.

5. Gender tests will give false positives and false negatives if given to enough people

Any test invariably results in "false positives" and "false negatives." A taker may then commit to a course of action based on false results.

Even tests for things like HIV and cancer occasionally misdiagnose people. Someone sick is tested to be healthy, and vice versa. History is rife with examples of brilliant scientists and inventors who failed in school, great athletes who get cut from a team, and so on.

Every now and then someone undertakes transition and later regrets it. I would contend that the vast majority of these people had unrealistic expectations about what transition can and can't do to improve one's life. Others put off transition and later regret it. This is often because of denial or fears of the outcome, even if transition will make them happier in the end. Ultimately, people who have regrets almost always spent too little time thinking things through and without doing deep introspection about their feelings. A gender test encourages the most shallow type of introspection before reaching a conclusion-- a dangerous temptation for those who resist thinking about their deepest feelings and needs.

A reader has pointed out that gender tests do not account for other types of developmental and neurological variability. For instance, someone with non-verbal develomental differences may have difficulty associating faces to things, including associating faces to names, and emotions to facial body language, etc. These are items upon which some gender tests base their questions and scores.

6. Gender test results are used by some as competitive forms of hierarchical ranking

I have actually seen people bragging that they got a higher or more female score than someone else, or a more intense type of dysphoria rating than someone else.

There are a lot of people in the world who put a great deal of stock in standardized scores. They seem to want to quantify where they stand among other people:

• Grades in school
• Standardized scholastic aptitude tests (SAT, ACT, GRE, LSAT, GMAT, etc.)
• IQ tests
• Mensa
• "Rate your mate" quizzes in magazines
• Beauty pageant scoring systems
• amihotornot.com

For some, it seems to be a competitive thing. For others, a number seems to give some sort of validity to their feelings about themselves. With gender identity and degree of dysphoria, these tests lay a veneer of "hard science" over something that can't be quantified easily or accurately.

7. Gender tests propose rigid categories that are in reality arbitrary and fluid

Categories have limitations. There are always exceptions and people who don't fit into neat categories.

There are also a lot of folks who want to pigeonhole people into a system of classification. Unfortunately, these classifications are often arbitrary in nature, and there are always exceptions or people who don't neatly fit into a given system. For instance, dividing people by clear racial lines becomes blurred when mixed-race people are included, and dividing people into either male or female doesn't take into account all the intersexed people in the world. The gay/straight binary doesn't leave room for bisexual or asexual.

Classifications and categories can have their uses, but there is ultimately a point where any classification system fails. There will always be an exception, and the simpler the categories seem, the more likely there will be exceptions.

See my page on the uses and limitations of transgender categories for more on this subject.

Introduction

When I was in grade school, there was a test kids used to tell if someone was a boy or girl by how they looked at their fingernails. Supposedly if you look at your nails with fingers bent and palm facing you, you were male, and if you looked at them with fingers outstretched and the back of your hand facing you, you were female.

Ridiculous, huh?

There's a funny gender test in Chapter 11 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where Huck is clocked at an old woman's home while dressed as a girl. She tosses Huck a piece of lead to throw at rats that scurry through the house, and he catches the lead by clasping his knees together. When Huck throws the piece of lead at the next rat, the old woman busts him. Luckily for Huck, she assumes he's a runaway apprentice and gives him pointers on female comportment:

"Throw stiff-armed from the shoulder, like there was a pivot there for it to turn on, like a girl; not from the wrist and elbow, with your arm out to one side, like a boy. And, mind you, when a girl tries to catch anything in her lap she throws her knees apart; she don't clap them together, the way you did when you catched the lump of lead."

Ridiculous, huh? Still there are people who think that sex difference can be reduced to a matter of comportment or determined by stereotypical behavior.

A note on horoscopes

Changing the subject, let me talk about horoscopes for a second as an example of another pseudoscientific attempt to classify people and predict their behavior. Everyone falls into one of twelve categories, depending on when you were born and the alignment of the planets. Based on these categories, people are said to possess certain traits. Capricorns act this way, and Cancers act that way. People tend to dismiss the parts of a zodiac descriptor that don't really match their traits and remember the ones that do. In science, this is called confirmation bias.

There are even people who base their actions each day on a horoscope. That's about as smart as basing your actions on a gender test.

Now, let's look at the three most widely discussed tests embraced by some in the community: the Bem, the Moir-Jessel, and the COGIATI.

The Bem Sex Role Inventory

The BSRI or Bem Sex Role Inventory is the product of Sandra Lipsitz Bem, who began researching sex roles since the early '70's. The Bem test indicates the degrees of absorption of cultural definitions of gender, as reflected in the user's personality.

• Bem, S. L. (1974). The measurement of psychological androgyny. Journal of Counseling & Clinical Psychology, 42, 155-162.
• Bem Sex - Role Inventory. Bem, Sandra L. USA: Consulting Psychologists Press; 1981.

Cynthia Connor and colleagues summarize Bem's findings in an interesting article titled "Intrinsic Motivation and Role Adaptability with Regards to Drama Students:"

The possession of both masculine and feminine characteristics has important consequences for behavior (Bem, S. L., 1974). An expanded behavioral repertoire gives androgynous individuals superior sex-role adaptability in comparison to sex-typed individuals. The androgynous individual is able to adapt to a variety of situations. Sex-typed people internalize societies sex-appropriate behaviors as being desirable and exclude cross-sexed behaviors from their behavioral repertoires. Sandra Bem’s pioneering research on the dimensions of masculinity and femininity led to the development of the Bem Sex Role Inventory, (1974). The Bem Sex Role Inventory measures masculinity and femininity as two discriminable dimensions. The androgynous individual scores high on both dimensions. Sex-typed individuals score high on one dimension and reject while rejecting the characteristics of the other dimension. Androgynous people enact their masculine and feminine on different occasions (Vonk, R. & Ashemore, R. D., 1993). In describing their masculine, feminine and gender neutral attributes sides, Androgynous subjects use more situational qualifiers to explain their behavior. This supports Sandra Bem’s theory that androgyny is manifested as situational flexibility (1975).

After continued research into androgyny, Bem developed a cognitive schema theory of sex role behavior (Cook, E. P. 1985). Androgyny is a particular way of processing information. Androgynous individuals do not use sex-role related schemas to guide their information processing. Gender schematic individuals divide the world into masculine and feminine. They use traditional sex-role standards in their processing of information. Gender schema theory does not emphasize the degree to which an individual is masculine or feminine, but rather the extent to which they process new information along in terms of sex roles (Hargreaves, D. J. & Colley, A. M., 1987).

This inventory (BSRI) provides independent assessments of masculinity and femininity in terms of the respondent's self-reported possession of socially desirable, stereotypically masculine and feminine personality characteristics. This can also be seen as a measurement of the extent to which respondents spontaneously sort self-relevant information into distinct masculine and feminine categories. The self administering 60-item questionnaire measures masculinity, femininity, androgyny, and undifferentiated, using the Masculinity and Femininity scales.

While Bem's theories are very interesting, the test itself for use in transsexuals is problematic for several reasons:

• Reliance on gender stereotypes which can be recognized as male or female by the test taker.
• Self-reporting by the test taker based on the above can influence the outcome.
• While Bem asserts that androgynous takers will score high on both scales, this may not be true for transsexuals. Many TS women are extraordinarily invested in culturally defined sex-appropriate behaviors, and a baseline has not been established for transsexuals.

Other Bem resources:

http://www.garysturt.free-online.co.uk/bem.htm (detailed explanation)

http://www.mindgarden.com/Assessments/Info/beminfo.htm (description)

http://www.mindgarden.com/Assessments/name(a-c).htm (hard and electronic copies of the test)

The Moir-Jessel Brain Sex Test

The "brain sex" concept put forth by Moir and Jessel is far more troubling to me than the Bem research.

Description: The purpose of the Moir-Jessel Brain Sex Test is "to determine whether your brain functions within the normal range for a male or a female." This test gives two scores of which the participant selects the correct one for their sex. The interpretation of these scores, breaks the male and female scores each into three categories.

• Males scoring less than 0 are "Extremely Masculine."
• Males scoring between 0 and 60 are "Normal Males."
• Males scoring greater than 60 are "Feminine Males."
• Females scoring less than 50 are "Masculine Female."
• Females scoring between 50 to 100 is "Normal Female."
• Females scoring greater than 100 is "Extremely Feminine."

Anne Lawrence states: "The book BRAIN SEX, from which the test is derived, is a sloppy piece of pop science, full of oversimplifications, unsupported inferences, and speculations presented as though they were facts." She adds, "The test has not been validated by actual samples of male and female subjects... [T]he test has never been validated with a sample of transsexuals, either."

I agree about the lack of scientific validity in this extremely controversial book. I would also add that science can be used, or misused, for social purposes. Valid observations can be used to draw absurd conclusions, like the concept of "social Darwinism" put forth by racists and proponents of eugenics.

Moir and Jessel's Brain Sex is to sexism what Murray and Herrnstein's The Bell Curve is to racism: a veneer of scientific methodology laid over an agenda that is sexist at its very core. I find the fact that this book is warmly embraced by many transgender women to be a highly troubling commentary on our community's attitude toward gender stereotypes.

To argue that social inequalities between the sexes is based on brain structure is simply misogyny draped in a labcoat.

COGIATI (Combined Gender Identity And Transsexuality Inventory)

First off, I like and respect Jennifer, who created the COGIATI. I think her site is great. However, I disagree in the strongest and most respectful terms with her on the usefulness and validity of her COGIATI test. Because it is based in part on Brain Sex, the COGIATI is as troubling as the book that influenced its creation.

Description: The COGIATI was written by Jennifer Diane Reitz. It is composed of questions purportedly based on neurological or social sex differentiation and scored thus:

Some questions are reworkings of Bem and Moir-Jessel questions. As Jennifer writes:

The COGIATI is a prototype. It was designed for only one target: the curious, unsure, pre-operative POTENTIAL Male-To-Female transsexual (not a post-op, not someone who is already certain, not a Female-To-Male, not anyone else who fails to fit the stated definition target). Further, it was constructed for that given target only because no scientifically and medically based test for such people exists. None. Anywhere. I saw that there was a void, no physicians were filling it, and so I set to work. The COGIATI is a challenge to the scientific and medical community to follow my example, and do a better job than I.

While this is a noble cause, I believe the danger of this amateur attempt is the fundamentally sexist premise on which it is based. Jennifer's rationale for using stereotypes [emphasis mine]:

"Women are better at some skills, on average, and men are better at some skills, on average, but there is some crossover too. There is crossover, because mistakes happen during development in the womb. Males and females are clumsily constructed, because Nature is not perfect. Nature is sloppy. So there is crossover, and sometimes, occasionally you will have a female mathematical genius with superb spacial [sic] skills."

First, I think "mistakes" is a very loaded term and a value judgment about the diversity of humanity. Second, stereotypes and scientific precision do not mix well. Stereotypes fail when you try to apply them to individuals, which is why the COGIATI fails when applied to individuals. As Anne Lawrence notes: "According to Ms. Reitz, typical male-to-female transsexuals are hopeless at math and science, love to sit close to strangers and be hugged by them, can't park cars, can't tell directions, get lost easily, suffer from migraines, are not assertive, and (of course) do not eroticize their own femininity."

People will see what they want to see. Those who swear to the test's accuracy are the ones who got the result they wanted.

Anne Lawrence states: "I think that both the COGIATI and the Moir-Jessel tests are little more than pseudo-scientific nonsense, and that anyone trying to figure out his or her gender identity issues would be well advised to ignore both."

I agree with this assessment. Because this test takes Brain Sex to be a valid scientific platform upon which to base its premise, it is as flawed at its core as the Brain Sex book is.

For a little comic relief, I recommend taking the DIANATI, a very funny spoof on the COGIATI.

Conclusion

These gender tests should be considered to be like horoscopes, rate your mate quizzes, biorhythms, etc. and should be taken for entertainment purposes only.

With that in mind, another silly test to take for entertainment purposes only is TheSpark.com's Gender Test. And before you write me an angry note about this piece, you may want to know that I scored in the 99th percentile on their Bitch Test (now called the Wench Test).

Seriously, though...

Confirmation and clarification of your gender issues should come from introspection and discussing your feelings with others, not from an online test.