2013/08/01 by Y. Gávriel Ansara, Peter Hegarty · 2 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Empirical research #English language #Epistemology #Feminism #Gender Roles and Identity Studies #Gender Studies in Language #Gender studies #Ideology #Language and gender #Law #Linguistics #Mathematics education #Political science #Politics #Project commissioning #Psychology #Publishing #Social and Intergroup Psychology #Social psychology #Social science #Sociology
paper · doi:10.5172/mra.2013.7.2.160
openalex publication_date 2013/08/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
The American Psychological Association (APA) Publication Manual (2010) cautions authors against generic masculine language, which uses ‘he’ and ‘man’ for all people. This misgendering designates people as members of a gender category with which they do not identify. Misgendering may occur to anyone, but is a particularly common experience of people typically labelled as ‘trans’. Misgendering is a form of cisgenderism, the discriminatory ideology that delegitimises people’s own designations of their bodies and genders. We analysed four empirical papers with the highest current impact factors in English sexist language research: Moulton, Robinson, and Elias (1978); Hyde (1984); Gastil (1990); and Gannon, Luchetta, Rhodes, Pardie, and Segrist (1992). We applied a cisgenderism framework to identify limitations of defining sexist language chiefly as masculine generics. We then discuss actual experiences of misgendering that current sexist language research overlooks. We explore how the adoption of non-cisgenderist research methods can reduce misgendering and benefit Feminist research.