Picture gender as a spectrum. Which side is which?

[verily-forsooth-egads]

I'm a synesthete, so maybe I'm overestimating how clearly other people picture these things in visual space, but I think it's worth a shot. If you're at one end of the spectrum, which direction do the other genders lie from there? If someone "leans feminine," are they leaning left or leaning right? Take a minute to think about it if you aren't sure.

 

FWIW, my spectrum shifts around in 3D space in a way mostly out of my control, but when I feel that I'm looking at it "straight on," it's definitely pink <-> blue. The difference between androgyny and lack of gender isn't represented by a spatial location so much as a sensation like tension in a string, and all the other genders are just floating off in space somewhere being all different colors. But that's just my weird brain talking. What about you?

[GingerRose]

8 minutes ago, verily-forsooth-egads said:

spectrum

Gender as a spectrum is agender to gender for me. Not male and female anymore left or right than another.

 

Agender/nonbinary------demigender----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------male&female

[Sarah-Sylvia]

Makes absolutely no difference to me.
One or the other, flip it around, it's all the same

Because I'm right-handed and my right arm is stronger, I sometimes viewed masculine on the right and feminine on the left. but when I made a diagram for gender I put female on the right and it felt perfectly fine there.

 

 

I associated colors with traits, not genders, so I don't really think of it that way either. Pink is a feminine color, I associate it with softness, but other than that I don't really put masculine with anything, I think.

[Artemis42]

I think two of these options are identical?

I usually don’t think about this too much but I think I picture it as male on the left and female on the right? And agender is just kinda hanging out on the side lol. No idea how to account for genders that are partially agender, or identities that encompass two or more genders simultaneously though.

However, in reference to myself specifically, I imagine male and masculine-leaning people as being across from me on the gender spectrum, not to my left. It’s weird.

Also, fellow synesthete heck yeah! Different types but still!

[verily-forsooth-egads]

31 minutes ago, Artemis42 said:

Also, fellow synesthete heck yeah! Different types but still!

Nice  My main type is grapheme–color.

[Artemis42]

14 hours ago, verily-forsooth-egads said:

Nice  My main type is grapheme–color.

Oh neat! Not so different after all, I have grapheme-colour and chromesthesia. Those are the ones I'm sure of, at least.

[Skycaptain]

I don't see gender as left and right 

[Homer]

I don't even know what gender is to begin with.

[AavaMeri]

I think that gender is a very confusing mathematical model that keeps evolving, yet it isn't ever complete.

By very basic level I visualize it as a some sort of two-dimensional field with "masculine-feminine" as one axis and "strongly gendered-not gendered" as the other axis. Men are close to the masculine end, women are close to feminine end, agender are close to not-gendered end. And the genders aren't always stationary data points on the model, instead some genders may move around the model (especially genderfluid and genderflux people). And theeeen there are some nooks of the model that just go away of the two-dimensional plane and mathematicians aren't quite sure how to express that with the mathematical model. One I can pull out is bigender: are the male and female axes curved up and touching each other some way? Going 3D? @___@

I do imagine "feminine-masculine" axis being the horizontal one, but it varies which side is where. The "strongly gendered-not gendered" is vertical, and strongly gendered is up and not gendered is down (because I usually like vertical axes to increase in amount when going up, here the feeling of having a gender increases).

[Zebrafinch]

The  visualisation of  gender i came up with a while ago was a  Venn diagram,  two circles, one  black,  one white, and the overlap as rainbow dots. 

[Raindrops]

Right is a warm colour and left is cold. I see female as on the right because it's often represented as pink. 😗

[erichamion]

Ready for some armchair psychology from somebody who has never taken any sort of psychology course (or gender studies, or any other relevant topic)? Ok, then.

 

There are so many common phrases that almost always put male/masculine first - man and woman, husband and wife, his and hers, brother and sister, boys and girls, sons and daughters, king and queen. Almost any time (not quite, but almost) we have a phrase that pairs the binary genders together, they're in that same order. "Ladies and gentlemen" is an exception. Sometimes "girls and boys" shows up, but it's less common than the reverse. But despite the exceptions, this is a strong pattern.

 

Native English speakers (and native speakers of any left-to-right language) tend to visualize motion or order as starting on the left and moving to the right.

 

That might be why I tend to  see male on the left and female on the right. Or I could be completely wrong because I have no idea what I'm talking about.

[Sean_Bird]

I visualize gender as a tangled ball of yarn. There's a mess of different factors that go into gender; culture, age, location, upbringing, family dynamic, etc. Saying that gender is a spectrum seems too clean for me.

 

But that's just me. ^^

[Phi!]

On 2/28/2021 at 5:55 AM, ER2742 said:

Ready for some armchair psychology from somebody who has never taken any sort of psychology course (or gender studies, or any other relevant topic)? Ok, then.

 

There are so many common phrases that almost always put male/masculine first - man and woman, husband and wife, his and hers, brother and sister, boys and girls, sons and daughters, king and queen. Almost any time (not quite, but almost) we have a phrase that pairs the binary genders together, they're in that same order. "Ladies and gentlemen" is an exception. Sometimes "girls and boys" shows up, but it's less common than the reverse. But despite the exceptions, this is a strong pattern.

 

Native English speakers (and native speakers of any left-to-right language) tend to visualize motion or order as starting on the left and moving to the right.

 

That might be why I tend to  see male on the left and female on the right. Or I could be completely wrong because I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Very interesting! And completely makes sense. Though I still saw it the other way round 😛

[a little annihilation]

Simply put I imagine that the spectrum from left to right is 

male-------demimale----------agender, nonbinary, and like genders----------demifemale---------female

and obviously there are other things that fall somewhere on the spectrum between the basic ones I put and that genders like bigender and genderfluid move around on it 

[CeciThorne]

I visualize gender in colors. Red for masculine and blue for feminine. So everybody is just a shade or hue of purple. No one is just red or blue like society wants.

[daveb]

19 minutes ago, CeciThorne said:

I visualize gender in colors. Red for masculine and blue for feminine. So everybody is just a shade or hue of purple. No one is just red or blue like society wants.

In that case I think I'm green.  

[sirenian]

errr...  So, what's the deal with the distribution of survey responses?

It looks clear that among AFAB folks who have replied so far, there's no real pattern for which way they visualize the spectrum.

What I'm curious about is the apparent difference between AFAB and AMAB folks.  Is it that the AMAB folks are, for whatever reason, just not replying to this survey?  Or is it that they are less likely to imagine such a visualization, and therefore make up the majority of responses for the fifth option?

[iff]

@verily-forsooth-egads

 

This poll is being locked and moved to the read only Census archive for it's respective year. As part of ongoing Census organisation, and in an attempt to keep the demographics of the polls current with the active user base at the time, the polls will last for one year from now on. However, members are allowed and even encouraged to restart new polls similar to the archived ones if they like them.

  

iff, Census Forum Moderator