Gaydar: can we detect the sexual orientation of others?

The popularly known as gaydar is a kind of sixth sense that allows to detect if someone is or is not homosexual at a single glance. There are plenty of people, both gay and straight, who claim to be able to deduce this information and have a "nose" for sexuality.

Psychologists, like good scientists, wonder what happens when someone affirms with such certainty that he knows the sexual orientation of others.

Is it a skill that we have developed by making homosexuality visible and building an identity around it? Could it be that our gaydar is actually not as foolproof as we think? And if so,what we base our judgments on when we are so sure that we have figured out what kind of people the other has sex with?

Gaydar based on facial features

There are different interpretations of how gaydar works.. One of the explanations says that the faces of heterosexuals and homosexuals, both men and women, are different. People, by detecting these morphological differences, would be able to discern sexual orientation.

This capacity has been taken to laboratory conditions on several occasions with moderately positive results. Even showing only specific features of the face such as the eyes, the nose or just the mouth, the participants are able to deduce the sexual orientation and get it right more than half the time.

This explanation is not without criticism. Many researchers believe that rather than trait characteristics, what participants judge is contextual information that is congruent with homosexual stereotypes. For example, the presence of a well-groomed beard, the emotional expressiveness of the face, etc., is the information that the subjects use to judge, rather than the morphology of the face. Unfortunately, we don't know for sure whether gaydar based on facial information responds to traits or stereotypical characteristics.

Gaydar based on stereotypes

Speaking of stereotypes, this is the second way that theorists and researchers propose as a means to deduce sexual orientation. From this perspective, gaydar is the phenomenon that occurs when the individual judges the other's sexuality based on how many stereotypes they meet. These stereotypes do not arise out of nowhere, but are socially constructed.. In addition to being hurtful or reductionist, homosexual stereotypes serve to form differential categories.

Social categories, although they may be useful because they allow us to organize reality in an economic way, generate prejudices. To differentiate between categories we need observable attributes that allow us to differentiate the categories with the naked eye. As homosexuality is not a tangible property, we attribute other features to this category. For example, the presence of feminine mannerisms and gestures, the careful appearance or the form of emotional expression. Although in some cases they may be true, they do not correspond to the entire homosexual population.

The gaydar could consist of a deduction through these stereotypes, which in addition to making us err on many occasions, they are harmful to the homosexual community due to their reductionism. Roughly speaking, although the presence of "homosexual characteristics" predicts sexual orientation, we leave out all those gays who do not meet the stereotype. Because of this, we only get confirmation that we have judged stereotypical gays well, leading to the delusion that our gaydar is infallible.

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scientific evidence

Although the studies in this regard are not many, the evidence is contradictory. As we have seen before, there is research that finds a slight effect on the correct differentiation of facial features of homosexuals and heterosexuals. However, inspection of the face does not explain the full functioning of the gaydar. The most complete explanation is offered by the path of stereotypes.

In this line, a study in this regard carried out a series of 5 experiments to examine the feasibility of hypotheses based on facial features and stereotypes. This study found no evidence in favor of recognition of sexual orientation through facial features. Moreover, it is hypothesized that the ability to recognize sexual orientation in previous studies that did find a effect has more to do with the way the subject is presented in the photo and the quality of the photograph, than the actual traits.

In this same study it is indeed found that, when judging orientation, the gaydar is based on stereotypes. People fall into stereotypes without realizing it, hence the feeling of the gaydar is more similar to an intuition that the subject does not know why he has, instead of a logical deduction. Likewise, in those trials in which the researchers affirm the existence of a gaydar, the participants make more judgments based on stereotypes, while when the investigator denies the existence of the gaydar, the judgments are much less stereotypical.

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Criticisms and dangers

The term itself may be perpetuating judgments based on stereotypes. We know that gaydar is nothing more than a biased and prejudiced form of intuition. When it is given a proper name, we forget that it is a phenomenon based on stereotypes. By granting it the status of sixth sense, its use is generalized and it is perceived as innocuous, when, paradoxically, stereotypes towards the homosexual population are perpetuated and increased. When talking about the gaydar we run the risk of legitimizing a social myth.

From the outset, any reasoning based on stereotypes is of little use when we are talking about a complex aspect of identity. Statistically speaking, for a stereotypically gay attribute (imagine “take care of your skin”) to be useful to identify homosexuals, it should be something that occurs 20 times more in the homosexual population than in the Heterosexual. For this reason, believing in the existence of a gaydar is typical of fallacious reasoning.

We cannot miss the opportunity to comment on how the maintenance of these stereotypes is harmful to social progress and the visibility of all forms of sexuality. For understand a phenomenon such as sexual orientation in all its complexity it is necessary to get rid of shortcuts. We know that as we categorize reality, that is how we see it. Stereotypes anchor us cognitively and do not allow us to see beyond the categories we know. The visibility of sexual diversity happens precisely through the break with these categories.

As with gender, it is not a question of stopping using categories, but of not attributing them rigid expectations or stereotypes that constrain the ways in which the identity of each. Overcome these cognitive barriers means being able to understand sexual orientation for what it is: a simple matter of preference in sexual relations regardless of the way you look, the gestures you use and how much you take care of your body. This is a sine qua non condition for integration.

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