or maybe SHE is trans...

How to Tell If He's Gay or Straight

There is a highly accurate way a casual observer can tell if a man is gay: Just pay attention to his body type and the way he walks.

Both offer subtle cues about sexual orientation, but casual observers seem to be able to read those cues better in gay men than in lesbians, according to a study from researchers at UCLA, New York University and Texas A&M.

The study: Eight male and eight female volunteers, half of whom were gay and half of whom were straight, participated. Led by Kerri Johnson of UCLA, the team measured their hips, waists and shoulders. Then each volunteer walked on a treadmill for two minutes while being filmed by a 3D motion-capture system that allowed researchers to track the precise amount of shoulder swagger and hip sway in their gait.

The results: In terms of body motion or gait, gays and lesbians tended to have body types that were unusual for their gender. That is, gay men had hourglass figures, while the lesbians had more tubular bodies. In addition, the gay men tended to sway their hips, while the lesbian women swaggered their shoulders more than their straight counterparts.

The team then showed the treadmill videos -- with only the volunteers' backsides visible -- to 112 undergraduate observers. These students determined the volunteers' sexual orientation with an overall accuracy rate that exceeded chance, even though they could not see the volunteers' faces or the details of their clothing. Specifically, the students correctly categorized sexual orientation 60 percent of the time for men; however, their accuracy for women did not exceed what they would do just by chance.

"We already know that men and women are built differently and walk differently from each other and that casual observers use this information as clues in making a range of social judgments," Johnson said in a statement announcing the findings. "Now we've found that casual observers can use gait and body shape to judge whether a stranger is gay or straight with a small but perceptible amount of accuracy."

The findings build on recent research that shows that casual observers can often correctly identify sexual orientation with very limited information. A 1999 Harvard study, for example, found that just by looking at the photographs of seated strangers, college undergraduates were able to judge sexual orientation accurately 55 percent of the time.

"Studies like ours are raising questions about the value of the military's 'don't ask, don't tell' policy," Johnson said. "If casual observers can determine sexual orientation with minimal information, then the value in concealing this information certainly appears questionable. Given that we all appear to be able to deduce this information to some degree with just a glance, more comprehensive policies may be required to protect gays against discrimination based on their sexual orientation."

The study findings were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

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Andee is the Transgenderzone US moderator

Pure chance would suggest that they could guess sexual orientation 50% of the time. A success rate of 60% is not statistically significant, as they say in maths circles.

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The boobs are just a set of metaphors.

'Tubular bodies' indeed. Where did they find these people?

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so how does that work with a straight cross dresser then

pointless gratuitous and irrelevant

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Man [...] must count no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth." (Jean Paul Sartre, 1943)

What sort of social system would need to devise elaborate testing procedures to determine who is gay and who is not?

This is reminiscent of the McCarthyite witch hunts of the 1950s, when American psychologists fell over themselves to show a correlation between homosexuality and Communism.

From my own childhood, I remember being assured that homosexuals gave themselves away by wearing white socks...

so i wonder what bisexuals and pan sexuals and everyone else that doesnt fit into a neatly defined catagory walks like. this is if you extremely anti- diversity ask me, and pretty bloody subversive too. and attempt to slip sexual stereotyping past us in the form of a pseudo liberal study..... again.

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The Daily Turnout - King of the Throne Room

my transdar once went off the scale in the middle of birmingham new street. all of a sudden i was reading everybody as trans. it was really weird.

i also have a friend who assumes everybody is gay unless she finds out otherwise. i quite like this tactic.

I don't think so. I think it's a side-effect or a sing of being too involed into a trans stuff. I know it could happen, and it certainly would give a distorted idea of the world so I try to avoid this by not getting too much involved. TZone is the only place I really frequent and even here I try not to foucs on only TG stuff. Life is life and TGism is only one side of it (even if it influences so much in one's existance :/ )

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Andee is the Transgenderzone US moderator