A Man By Any Other Name

The other day I read the heartfelt online blog of a man who was questioning his masculinity. In particular, he was considering coming out as transgender. (He'd used a pink blog template with magenta accents, which sounds to me like a man with something to prove.) Most of us aren't transgender, after all, that's a serious and psychological state. But who hasn't questioned their gender at some point?

Years ago, I read in a newsletter that certain mental traits were associated with boys. Among them, "logic" and "spatial reasoning." Interestingly, those were the areas in which I scored the highest on all my grade school aptitude tests (I was, for many years, better at math than verbal on standardized tests). As I got older, "inability to communicate" and "immaturity" became male traits. Unlike most women, I never competed for men. But I often competed with them. As if this weren't enough, I could do more push-ups than any girl in my class, and my shoulders were always wider than my hips. I became convinced, for many years, that there was something inherently masculine about my brain.

But I wasn't interested in an all-out sex change. First off, there's the prickly question of sexual orientation. Obviously, I could never be a straight man. I'm not attracted to women (all those experiments failed). So, that's a no go. And I just don't have what it takes to be a gay man (after all, this is a population that frequents bathhouses, tosses around expressions like 'top' and 'bottom', and gave us the expression 'bareback.' Shudder.) Also, I don't follow sports.

I retired the question for a few years, but tonight, with an economics midterm on the horizon, I thought it was the perfect time to answer this question. I spent exhaustive hours taking online gender tests, and here are the results.

According to SparkLife, I am almost certainly a man. In fact, only 11% of Spark test takers are more masculine than I am, and these results are based on over 8 million people! (I don't get this result: I definitely checked 'no' when they asked if nuclear war would be, in a strange way, entertaining.)

According to a quiz on Blogthings, I communite like a man. However, another Blogthing told me my brain was 60% female. Yet a third told me 45% feminine and 55% masculine.

According to this more scientific-looking test, I have a "gender aptitude" of 105, which puts me in a category I don't like, so I'm going to ignore it.

This more frilly test told me I scored 60% femininity, 46% masculinity and 39% "uncertainty." What the hell is uncertainty? And why don't those percentages add up to 100?

This test, which seems a lot more scientific and also brings back nausea-inducing memories of high school aptitude tests, tells me my brain is largely female.

The results, of course, aren't conclusive. In fact, they're by and large useless. The only thing I carry away from this is the sad realization that my spatial reasoning has worsened with time (it took me ages to get the hang of that first angles exercise, on which I did worse than both men and women. But after I figured it out, I got it every time...) Actually, the only result I like is the following:

According to yet another Blogthing, I am 82% sexy. Who gives a fuck what gender you are when you have numbers like that?