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QuestionIs it true that girls are better at clocking Trans-identified men?
I often hear that men would mistake some trans-identified men like Lavern Cox for women while real women are usually better at seeing through their disguise.
Is there an explanation for that?
Absolutely, yes. I've had men show me photos of "girls" they think are hot, or who they've matched with on dating apps, that are very obviously trans and they've pushed back every time, disbelieving me. I always end up being right.
In one case a friend actually introduced me to a "woman" he'd just started seeing. I was surprised that he was openly letting people know that he dated MTFs but figured that's his business and I was a TRA back then so he probably figures I was safe to tell. A couple weeks later we went for drinks and he whispered to me "that girl I brought to the party told me she's a MAN". He was incredibly embarrassed and unsettled but it was so, so obvious to me even before this person had started talking that I couldn't understand how he didn't know. I really don't think this guy would lie about it either. But this "girl" he introduced me to was so clearly a diminutive gay man in a dress and heavy makeup!
I've also heard men speculate that certain butch lesbians are male (not in the FTM/identifying way either). Like they think these female-bodied and female-voiced masculine people are actually MTFs(??)
It's as if men can only see the superficial bit and not the bio stuff underneath.
As for why, I figure it's evolutionary. Women are far more likely to end up in danger if we can't immediately tell somebody's sex.
Yeah ... I think for men, it isn't really a problem, from an evolutionary point of view, when they mistake a man for a woman and have sex with him once in a while. (I mean, I don't think there's any female animals who get confused about which kind of other animal they should mate with, whereas the male of the species ... male bees fuck orchids that vaguely look like female bees, male cattle can easily be deceived into fucking a fake cow, et cetera. They don't invest much, so they can afford some mistakes.)
And danger isn't a factor for men, so their skill never really developed. (I wonder if that's different for insect species where the female bites the male's head off during mating ...)
Men can kill women with their bare hands in minutes if they're motivated to do so. After millions of years of evolution women are now really good at identifying potential threats. A female is exponentially less likely to try to kill your children and sexually assault you and coerce you into being his "wife".
In my experience, women are better at clocking faces. There's some research to back this up, too.
I think women are also generally more attuned to social cues. Often, even if a social media count doesn't directly reference being a TiM, I can tell by the type of things they post, especially porny anime, furry art, or other fetishy content.
I saw an ad for a woman's summer camp experience on FB one time. It showed a group of 8 people doing camp activities like singing around a campfire and canoeing. Even in a long shot where you couldn't see faces, the TIM was so obvious from his height, and his exaggerated and overly sexual body language. For example, when everyone else started clapping, he, for some reason, put his legs up in the air and spread them. As we women do.
There was a group photo of White House interns posted here a few weeks ago. There were dozens of people in the photo, but you could instantly pick out the TiM. It was his height, build, and face that gave it away first, but he also happened to be wearing a Mary Kay lady-esque pastel pink skirt that looked very out of place next to women in more typical professional attire.
For example, when everyone else started clapping, he, for some reason, put his legs up in the air and spread them. As we women do.
Lol.
Yes, as we women are wont to do. I daresay it can be difficult to do when a plane lands (you know how it's customary to clap when it lands) but other than that, it's pretty standard woman behavior. Along with pillow fights, of course.
Like he did a handstand?
No, everyone was sitting in a canoe, and he leaned back and raised his legs. In a totally weird and inappropriate way. In a sexual way.
Also in a way likely to induce capsizing it sounds like!
This very much ties into the whole drag queen as burlesque clown thing.
No, everyone was sitting in a canoe, and he leaned back and raised his legs. In a totally weird and inappropriate way.
Oh dear.
Men only see boobs and superficial shit when they look at women. They basically just objectify us, so anything that looks "feminine" is up for them to be horn dogs over. And also "no homo" culture goes strong, easier to pretend they're women then not.
Where as we usually see everyone as an individual. We also register threatening behaviours and body language, and anyone bigger then us. TiMs usually have an unsettling air about them, especially around women and vulnerable people.
Anecdotes not data, but I was in Thailand and we could pretty easily suss out the “lady boys” but the guys in our group couldn’t.
I also didn’t get the “twist” in Crying Game because I knew right away the “girlfriend” was male and I thought everyone was just gay. I was surprised when the Stephen Rhea character freaked out at the “reveal”.
Had the exact same experience as you in Thailand! I couldn't believe that the guys we were travelling with couldn't immediately tell. Like I'm sure some of them secretly knew and were into it but the majority just clearly, honestly couldn't tell who has male and who was female?? Which led to a bit of drama later on.
Then when some of us were in Prague later that same year one of the guys got hit on by a hot woman with angular bone structure and was like "yeah no thanks, dude" and claimed he'd dodged a bullet despite her obviously being an actual female lmao. How are they so bad at it?!
Honestly, it’s bizarre they’re so bad at it but I guess it’s one of those cases of “disappointed but not surprised”. It definitely tracks that the movement was able to gain so much traction because in the end men want to be able to fetishize femininity and caricatures of women more even freely. Especially in this age of absolute porn addiction, most men literally have no idea about women past their shallow and strange stereotypes of us (not that they ever really have though, LOL). When a TIM wears pounds of makeup, bbl-fashion, and has endless surgeries to basically turn them into a pornified fantasy, a lot of men will be fooled because that’s the only women they watch most of the time. But let a woman naturally be tall, broad shouldered, angular bone structure, etc. even though they completely still read female, suddenly they’re “confused”. Just a bunch of males not knowing shit about us, per usual🙄
People keep saying evolution but I think men are just dumb.
Lol, that still tracks with evolution. Ancestral women—like most female mammals—pay a harsher penalty for being dumb than men. I’m being serious.
Mammalian mothers have to look after themselves and their offspring. For the vast majority of mammals, the female of the species does everything on their own. One stupid move can severely cost her and/or her helpless offspring—an investment that she’s already physically sacrificed a lot for and therefore can’t afford to be indifferent towards. The male half is really is only responsible for himself; if he’s prone to stupidly chasing a rabbit off a cliff, no innocent cubs will be starving because of that. No investments will go to waste.
We are the descendants of very smart and very resourceful single mothers
We are the descendants of very smart and very resourceful single mothers
I love this much ❤️
It doesn't answer your question directly but may add an interesting data point.
I was very butch presenting when I was 20. I was tall, flat chested, had zero makeup, and had a gender neutral name, which was quite common where I was born.
Some men were genuinely confused what I was. But not a single woman thought I was a man.
I became less GNC when I started graduate school.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0361923004001017?via%3Dihub
This study has two findings:
I can only hypothesize as to why... men are predators (for both men and women) so we need to recognize them. Women are at greater risk of danger from men so it's even more important for us to clock them.
As others have said, we are more attentive to men than they are to us, due to power imbalances and potential for violence. Only adding my own comment because (thanks to another Ovarite) I've now learned this phenomenon has a name: interpretive labor.
"The unique qualities of violence as a form of action means that human relations ultimately founded on violence create lopsided structures of the imagination, where the responsibility to do the interpretive labor required to allow the powerful to operate oblivious to much of what is going on around them, falls on the powerless, who thus tend to empathize with the powerful far more than the powerful do with them." - David Graeber, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.14318/hau2.2.007
Hmm that's interesting. Looking at human faces creates empathy, something men generally don't have for women. Could that be because we're mostly bodies to them? The headless woman phenomenon fits into this too.
Is that a reference to the proliferation of art that depicts female bodies without head or face?
Honestly, yes. I used to think it was a sex thing, like maybe men don't think about it further than "I'd tap that." Especially since most TIMs dress/adorn themselves according to fetishy trends like big lip filler.
But then I had an experience where the most obviously clockable TIM came to my gay male friend's community dinner event and neither him nor his husband clocked this person. I later made a comment pertaining to the fact that they were trans and both of them went, "Really??". My wife and I were like yes... this is, like, shockingly obvious...
So now IDK. Maybe there's something inherently in men that makes them worse at clocking them.
Mice and dogs can tell sex differences in humans, and they know the male of our species is more threatening. It would make sense that, due to strength differences, the females of our species would experience a higher level of threat on an instinct level and therefore be more attuned to even subtle indicators of sex.
I've surprised an alarming number of men by telling them I wear makeup... even by men I was just making out with (who had MFAs! Guys who should know paint when they see it!). And I do not do even remotely subtle, "natural" makeup, so I'd definitely buy it. They can't clock their hands in front of their own faces.
The "visual sex," everyone.
I guess that in light of this it kind of makes sense why they think breast implants are "hot." I have to admit some are nice. But in general, they always seem weird and fake to me. Even the "natural" ones seem a bit off (though I haven't seen any in the past decade or so that I specifically sought out so it could be they now look really natural). In the 90s, I started seeing porn magazines and the breasts often were obviously fake and looked like half-cantaloups attached to a lady's chest, what I've heard referred to on Ovarit as "bolt-ons." I do not understand how a man can find that attractive. It's so bizarre to me. But I guess if they can't clock sex as easily as women, it might make sense? It's kind of like how a lot of men prefer blondes because that's what advertising tells them is "sexy" and "feminine", though there is actually a plausible evolutionary reason for that as women are more likely to be blonde than men (I didn't know that until recently).
Honestly this is why I laugh when women believe men that say they prefer "natural" women. No tf they don't, they don't even know what a natural woman looks like. Every dude that says this thinks Kim and Kylie are "natural" and follows nothing but heavily made up, edited, plastic surgeried women on insta and TikTok. Like don't listen to men's words, they're stupid and they're liars. Pay attention to their actions, that's where you'll find the truth.
It's pretty common knowledge that men who say they like "natural" women just mean "I don't like blue eyeshadow".
I don't think their brains even attempt to process "natural" or not, their dicks always take the reins. It's not so much a "male or female?" or a "natural or made up?" as it is "would I attempt to screw it?"
A man may tell you (a goodly number told me!) that they can't stand foundation, lipstick or perfume, and implore you not to wear it in their presence. This is because if they get up close and personal with a woman who is wearing it, they'll take the evidence of their dalliance home to their wives.
I don't know but I know that my brain can tell immediately, before I consciously register it. I don't know how men are not the same way. They're dumbasses
Look, the ability to work out who is male has been inbuilt over thousands of years. They can try to confuse us by saying the wrong pronoun but that just makes women less safe. We need to know who is male. We can tell by sight, sound, by smell and by pheromones. It's instinctual - as a woman you can't stop it happening- your survival relies on it! I sat on the beach on holiday waiting for my son and (male) partner to come back from a walk - I found I could distinguish at a very long distance who was male and even if it was a young or old man!
Absolutely. I've clocked numerous TIPs (almost all TIMs) on tv that my husband would never clock.
Absolutely agree with other answers here, but also anecdotally, there seem to be more TIFs that I have a harder time clocking than TIMs, and of the men I know, some of whom seem to struggle with clocking TIMs that seem pretty obvious to me, but they also seem to be more adept at clocking TIFs than TIMs. And I wonder if some of it can be attributed to recognizing imposters attempting to present themselves as part of your group. That it rings false when someone's trying to mimic you and you pick up on more than you would if they were trying to mimic someone else. Maybe kind of similar to how I can hear a fake accent that sounds more or less 'right' to me while someone actually from anywhere near that part of the world is just cringing (and hopefully laughing), meanwhile I hear them put on an 'American' accent and it tends to be equally funny and wrong and uncanny valley at best, with very few exceptions. That it's harder to fake your way into a group than to fake your way out of being recognized as belonging to it.
anecdotally, there seem to be more TIFs that I have a harder time clocking than TIMs, and of the men I know, some of whom seem to struggle with clocking TIMs that seem pretty obvious to me, but they also seem to be more adept at clocking TIFs than TIMs.
Wow, now THAT is interesting.
Women are definitely better at clocking them but there are also women who seem to try to suppress this natural instinct and I sometimes wonder if this has any impact in the long run.
I was on a date with a woman once and there was an obvious TIM at a table nearby. She gestured towards him and asked me if it was a man or woman. I immediately said man. She asked how I could tell. She obviously clocked him, because she wouldn’t have asked the question about him and only him otherwise, but something was making her doubt herself. If you doubt yourself too much do you end up gaslighting yourself and potentially making yourself unsafe?
Females are better at clocking because females are more attuned to recognizing threats. I'm pretty sure this is true for both female humans and female animals
Yeah, and my guess is women have to recognise danger much quicker. How much I will train, the chance I will lose from a 6 ft dude is almost 100%. Only with technique on point, dude not having technique on point and a lot of luck I could win. Could, not would.
A month or two back I posted about a man in the women's restroom at Costco. He was coming out of a cubicle. I don't know what made me turn my head and actually look at him, but I think I saw a tall broad shouldered figure in my peripheral vision and immediately felt that ain't right. I don't usually look at people in restrooms or make eye contact. My sensors were immediately alerted. This was a man presenting as a male, not a TIM.
In general, men have higher sex drives than women, and this drive makes them less picky when identifying targets to lust after. This makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Ancestral men quick to exclude masculine-looking women from their mating pool would have had less reproductive fitness than men who found a diverse range of women attractive.
As a result, any cue of potential femaleness is enough for men to register someone as a woman. Especially men who think of women in terms of one-dimensional stereotypes.
Evolution doesn't want them to miss a single sexual opportunity. Just in case.
Which reminds me of how, now matter how obviously I'm taking the piss, men respond to flirtation as genuine. Every time.
I think, like many others have said, we are naturally predisposed to identify men as they are the sex that are a threat to us.
I also think that we practice it more than men. I used to run in a pretty dark, park area in an evening. Where I live women tend to be covered, especially with long dresses, and men also are covered in long dress-like robes (men from various different cultures but all wearing, basically, long skirts).
As I ran I would constantly be checking what sex groups in the park were. I think being a woman probably made me more able to do this in the dark based on very little information, but also I know that when my husband runs he thinks about his running, he doesn’t think about the sex of the people around him. He would also probably be quite good at guessing the sex, but my practice makes me better at it.
Makes tend to be intoxicated for more of their lives.
Also let’s be honest they run on weaponised incompetence eg. ‘I didn’t realise she was a ladyboy and I didn’t realise I had gonorrhoea and I forgot to put on a condom.’
Women are bwttwr at noticing details than men, women will notice 12 while man will notice 6
Science has shown men see women as just a body/sexual traits, while women see people for more of the whole. This likely also explains why one can't clock as well, since basic feminine traits/features are enough to generally fill their perception
It's an evolutionary thing. Women have to recognize danger quickly because we can't fight it or run from it as well as a man could. Men are only on the lookout for mating opportunities to keep their lineage going. Women have to instantly see any sign that a stranger may be dangerous, and as all men are a danger to us, we are built around the ability to immediately sex other humans correctly for our own survival. Men are built around whether the stranger can be impregnated. A shallow glance to see boobs and butt is all that evolution decreed they require.
I read somewhere that for women (and perhaps also men), the instinctive gendering of other (not sure if that's the right term) is actually driven by male recognition, meaning that our brains are not determining whether someone is female or male but rather whether someone is male or not.
I actually realized this the other day.
I was walking somewhere in a hurry and without thinking I rushed past this woman from behind. She looked at me quickly and then had this look of relief like "oh, it's just a woman."
She was checking to make sure I wasn't a man running up on her. She wasn't even alone and it was broad daylight but she still had her vigilance cranked up to 100.
I should have known better but I was in a hurry and had my own stuff going on. Sorry, lady, nonetheless!
Men think women walk around oblivious but we are always aware of and checking for the men around us, even if we don't always show it like that woman did.
That makes sense. We are hardwired to recognise a threat, and to females, male=threat.
Please share the source if you can find it again sometime!
I tried searching for it again, but I can't remember where I found it. I think it was some kind of scientific paper I somehow stumbled upon (through ovarit maybe). I might have come across it while reading something about how the brain uses people's gait to gender strangers, meaning humans could recognize the sex of strangers by point light walkers. Tried searching for that, but could only find this one: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16366787/, which I don't have access to.
Yeah men risk very little by accidentally screwing the wrong person so they don't have to put much thought into it. Ever the sexual optimists/opportunists, they'd hate to miss an opportunity.
I've seen more than one TiM complain that "straight" men are willing to have sex with them, but don't want to actually date them.
Yeah this seems pretty common. When I hung out with TIMs they weren't short of male attention on apps but none were successful with lesbians (lmao I wonder why) and none of the ones attracted to men could find a man willing to settle down with them after hooking up.
Obviously there's an element of shame there for a lot of those men which might prevent them from pursuing a relationship but I do think some of them are honestly just hetero (or as hetero as men get) and porn-brained. A friend of mine's husband is a "former" sex addict who hooked up with with feminine TIMs at the height of his addiction and he seems genuinely disgusted by it now. He described it as purely a taboo-driven fetish like being into workplace exhibitionism or tentacle rape porn (yes he said these things out loud to his wife's friend).
Male sexuality confuses the fuck out of me tbh.
Yeah. I think shame is part of it, but (and I've said this before on here) I think there are some men who are so porn-brained that you can't meaningfully say they're gay, straight, or bi. Everyone and everything just becomes a prop in sex that is ultimately masturbatory, whether or not another person is involved. I've actually seen posts from the MyPartnerIsTrans subreddit in which women complain that it feels like their TiM partners are just using them to masturbate.
ETA
I think there's less than meets the eye, not more. Men will have sex with people they aren't attracted to and don't even like, just to have sex.
Tentacle rape porn? Men were a mistake for sure.
I used to hear the same thing from some of my gay male friends.