2025 Theses Doctoral

The Social Cognitive Dynamics of Categorizing Sex and Gender

Wienk, Margaux Nicole Agnes

Beliefs about gender and sex have been changing, with identities that fall outside the gender/sex becoming increasingly recognized and visible. Such identities tend to fall under the umbrella of gender diversity, which refers to people whose gender identities do not overlap with sex assigned at birth. Although research has established that social categorization results from a dynamic interplay between target features (e.g., facial features, gender cues) and perceiver characteristics (e.g., attitudes, cognitive accessibility) that jointly determine the final explicit categorization, the same (underlying) dynamics for gender diverse identities are not well understood. This is of particular interest, given that for gender diverse individuals, target features such as sex-based appearance cues and gender identity cues may be incongruent. In this dissertation, I investigate the social cognitive dynamics underlying the gender categorization of gender diverse individuals.

In Chapter 1, I discuss the current literature on gender/sex and the process of social categorization. In Chapter 2, I use a two-way mouse-tracking paradigm, showing that compared to cisgender targets, transgender targets are more likely to be explicitly misgendered (i.e., categorized inconsistently with their gender identity). However, even if categorizing targets correctly, participants showed a reflexive form of misgendering, as indicated by larger deviations in mouse-tracking trajectories.

In Chapter 3, I experimentally manipulate the cognitive accessibility of gender diversity, demonstrating that it reduces explicit and reflexive misgendering. In Chapter 4, I introduce a three-way mouse-tracking task, focusing on non-binary targets and adding this category as a third intermediary response option, and show that reflexive misgendering is in the direction of the gender category congruent with sex-based appearance cues. Across studies, attitudes and beliefs about gender and sex and prejudice towards gender diverse individuals tended to be associated with explicit misgendering, but largely not with the reflexive misgendering.

Chapter 5 situates these findings in the broader literature, also discussing limitations and future directions. Taken together, this research contributes to the growing literature on social categorization and broader discussion on gender and sex, demonstrating that although perceiver characteristics such as attitudes predict people’s explicit categorization, the underlying cognitive dynamics were largely reflective of the broader (sociocultural) reflexive association between gender and sex.