Sounds Like There was No Sexual Orientation Discrimination? Attributions to Discrimination on the Basis of Auditory Gaydar.

Auditory gaydar happens when people's heterosexuality is called into question by their vocal characteristics. Auditory gaydar has been shown to prompt discrimination against both women and men interviewing for leadership positions. Two experiments tested whether attributional ambiguity makes auditory gaydar discrimination difficult to detect in such contexts. Either heterosexual participants (Study 1, n = 161) or heterosexual and sexual minority participants (Study 2, n = 238) heard short clips of straight- vs. lesbian/gay-sounding speakers, described as unsuccessful applicants for leadership positions. Participants explained the speakers' unsuccessful outcome in their own words and rated the likelihood that gender and sexual orientation discrimination caused that outcome. Attributions to gender discrimination were common whilst attributions to sexual prejudice were vanishingly rare. Women targets were rated more likely to have experienced gender discrimination, and lesbian/gay-sounding targets were rated more likely to have experienced sexual orientation discrimination by some participants (Study 1) or all participants (Study 2). We conclude that auditory gaydar may prompt discriminatory treatment in leadership hiring processes more readily than in prompts the recognition that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation has occurred.

The psychology of people with variable sex characteristics/intersex.

Psychological research on people with variable sex characteristics (VSC)/intersex is broadening from the traditional exploitation of this population to ask nature/nurture questions about sexuality and gender. Healthcare for this population has been highly controversial, prompting research on psychological outcomes, the life-span development of adults with VSC, and distress trajectories of parents of children with VSC. Psychological research on clinical psychologists' roles in multidisciplinary care teams, and on decision making about medical pathways informed by those teams, both inform the evaluation of contemporary healthcare. Research is broadening to consider schoolchildren with VSC, elite athletes with VSC, and public understanding of VSC. The growing interdisciplinary field of intersex studies provides critical resources for psychologists.

Public understanding of intersex: an update on recent findings.

Surgical interventions on infants with intersex characteristics are considered justified by some on the grounds that they carry a high risk of intolerable stigma. However, public understanding of intersex and its medicalization are under-researched. We review recent qualitative and quantitative studies of the understandings of intersex and its medicalization among people who have no particular professional or public experience of intersex. First, such laypeople reason about clinical dilemmas by drawing on values in similar ways as expert healthcare professionals do. Second, laypeople can over-estimate the utility of current 'umbrella terms,' including intersex, for people with direct familial experience of intersex. Third, beliefs about good and bad effects of medical intervention are affected by framing intersex as either a medical condition or the natural basis for a social identity. Fourth, sexual identity is the best evidenced predictor of opinions about early surgical intervention and its legal limitation on human rights grounds. We argue that possible stigmatizing reactions from the public may not be a solid basis on which to justify early surgical intervention on intersex characteristics.

Viral forgetting, or how to have ignorance in a syndemic.

This paper argues for the concept of viral forgetting to understand how and why the lessons of HIV were not easy to remember in the context of COVID. Building on recently drawn analogies between the two epidemics, we argue that new normative injunctions to 'flatten the curve' and 'stay at home' individualise responses to COVID that make memory of the first decade of HIV vital in recent viral times. Individualistic responses, including those that bind individuals to social identity groups, obscure the ways in which effective care for others and the self requires a recognition of the partiality of community, the inevitability of vulnerability, and a complex interpretation of scientific evidence and human ontology. We draw on Eve Sedgwick's thinking about ignorance and power to critique how political leadership in 2020, particularly in the USA, created chaos that suggested that an individualist masculine response to the epidemic was the only thing that could save us.

Stigmatization of 'gay-sounding' voices: The role of heterosexual, lesbian, and gay individuals' essentialist beliefs.

Voice-based sexual orientation (SO) judgements can prompt group-based discrimination. However, the relationships between stigmatization and essentialist beliefs about vocal cues to SO have not been researched. Two studies examined heterosexuals' and gay men's and lesbian women's essentialist beliefs about voice as a cue of SO to uncover essentialist beliefs' role in the perpetration and experience of stigma. In Study 1 (N = 363), heterosexual participants believed voice was a better cue to SO for men than for women, and participants' belief in the discreteness, immutability, and controllability of 'gay-sounding' voices was correlated with higher avoidant discrimination towards gay-sounding men. In Study 2 (N = 147), endorsement of essentialist beliefs about voice as a SO cue was associated with self-perceptions of sounding gay amongst gay men and lesbians. Sexual minority participants, especially gay men, who believed that they sounded gay reported more anticipation of rejection and engaged in vigilance in response. Essentialist beliefs about vocal cues to SO are relevant to explaining both the perpetration of stigma by heterosexuals and the experience of stigma for lesbians and gay men.

An experimental philosophical bioethical study of how human rights are applied to clitorectomy on infants identified as female and as intersex.

Clitorectomies performed on the genitals of infants identified as female and as intersex have been described both as similar procedures and as different procedures. The former types of surgery have been recognised more consistently as human rights abuses than the latter in recent decades. We tested social psychological explanations of why human rights are differently recognised when infants are described as 'intersex' or 'female'; 122 laypeople in the UK read one of two near-identical descriptions of clitorectomies performed on intersex or female infants and reported their agreement with 22 items about the human rights of such infants. Clitorectomies were perceived as violating human rights more by women than by men, and more so when infants were described as female than intersex. Endorsement of human rights was better predicted by several psychological variables when infants were described as female than as intersex. Less politically conservative participants, as assessed by a Right-Wing Authoritarianism measure, and participants who trusted medical authority more recognised human rights violations of female infants more than intersex infants. Results are discussed with respect to human rights efforts to protect infants from medically non-necessary genital surgery on the basis of membership in identity categories or possession of sex characteristics.

Love is heterosexual-by-default: Cultural heterosexism in default prototypes of romantic love.

Cultural heterosexist ideologies assume heterosexuality to be the default norm. Four studies investigated when concepts of romantic love are heterosexual-by-default (N = 685). In Studies 1-2, participants generated features of romantic love, in general (i.e., the default prototype) or among one of three sexual orientation-specific couples (lesbian, gay, or heterosexual). Heterosexual-identified participants' default prototypes were more similar to heterosexual than same-gender prototypes (Study 1). Lesbian- and gay-identified participants' default prototypes were more similar to both heterosexual and gay male than lesbian prototypes, whereas bisexual-identified participants' sexual orientation-specific prototypes were equivalently similar to the default (Study 2). However, heterosexual-identified participants rated presented features of love similarly across sexual orientation-specific conditions (Study 3). In a timed feature-verification task (Study 4), participants categorized fewer peripheral features of romantic love as relevant to same-gender than mixed-gender couples. Activating sexual orientation-specific representations affected subsequent default concepts of romantic love. We discuss implications for heterosexism theories and intervention.

Perceptions of coordinated movement.

BACKGROUND: Humans are highly social creatures who use others' movements to evaluate their social competencies. Smooth movement specifically signals an attractive, trustworthy or competent person. Those with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD), have peer relationship difficulties and lower sociometric preference scores. However, the relationship of perception of poor movement coordination to stereotyping has not been directly demonstrated. AIM: We aimed to describe typically developing individuals' social stereotyping of individuals with and without DCD from minimal visual cues. METHOD: 3D motion capture tracked the movement of four 'targets' (two adult males with DCD and two male controls) in a variety of everyday scenarios. Kinematic footage of the target's movements was presented as a point-light-display to 319 typically developing adults who used The Rating Scale of Social Competence to report perceptions of the target's social competencies. RESULTS: Targets with DCD were rated as having significantly lower social competence (M = 3.37, SD = 0.93) than controls (M = 3.46, SD = 0.89) t(269) = -5.656; p < 0.001, Cohen's d = 0.34. DISCUSSION: Humans incorporate minimal information on movement fluency to evaluate others' social competencies, including individuals with DCD. Such stereotyping may be automatic and may be an ill-understood mechanism sustaining persistent rejection by peers for individuals with DCD and higher rates of loneliness, isolation and mental disorders. In addition, our study expands research on competence-based stereotyping to a new applied domain, confirming the minimal cues needed to initiate stereotyping of the competencies of others.

Heroes against homophobia: does elevation uniquely block homophobia by inhibiting disgust?

Homophobia has decreased in past decades, but gut-level disgust towards gay men lingers. It has been suggested that disgust can be reduced by inducing its proposed opposite emotion, elevation. Research suggests elevation might reduce homophobia, but only general elevation (not elevation evoked by gay people) and general attitudes (rather than disgust) have been studied. Nor has elevation's effect on homophobia been differentiated from effects of related emotions, such as admiration or surprise. We pretested a series of news stories featuring either a gay man or a man of unspecified sexuality that were intended to distinctly elicit elevation, admiration, or surprise. We pre-registered the prediction that an elevation-inducing story would reduce negative attitudes by reducing disgust. In Study 1 (N = 593), participants who read elevation-inducing stories did not express more positive attitudes or less disgust towards gay men than those who read stories inducing admiration or surprise. The admiration stories elicited similar or lower levels of disgust than the elevation stories. Study 2 (N = 588), replicated the findings of Study 1 with improved stimuli and measures. Both studies suggest that elevation may not uniquely reduce homophobia, as elevation and admiration have similar effects on this prejudice.

How Has Cultural Heterosexism Affected Thinking about Divorce? Asymmetric Framing of Same-Gender and Mixed-Gender Divorces in News Media and in Minds.

Herek's notion of cultural heterosexism describes an ideology that works implicitly through language, and leads non-heterosexuals to be framed as "others." National statistics in many countries indicate group differences between same-gender and mixed-gender couples in divorce rates, and we used media accounts and individual interpretation of group differences in divorce to operationalize it here. We found qualified support for three hypotheses in two studies. In Study 1, analysis of 412 English-language news articles on divorce indicated that comparative statements overwhelmingly positioned same-gender couples as figure and mixed-gender couples as ground. In Study 2, 88 participants read about how same-gender couples differed from mixed-gender couples, or about how mixed-gender couples differed from same-gender couples in their reasons for dissolving relationships. Results indicated that participants showed higher perceived legitimacy of inequality, higher sexual prejudice, and higher estimates of global divorce rates in the former conditions. Analysis of participants' explanations of group differences in divorce rates indicated that they spontaneously contrasted mixed-gender couples against same-gender couples more of the time. As the media discourse focused on male couples (Study 1) and the effects of linguistic framing was evident only when male couples were described (Study 2), we discuss how these studies, which operationalized and evidenced cultural heterosexism, may point to the emergence of homonormative ideologies that recognized gay men more than lesbians in twenty-first century politics.

Histories of psychology after Stonewall: Introduction to the special issue.

This article introduces the special issue Fifty Years Since Stonewall: The Science and Politics of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity. Here, the commemoration of the 1969 Stonewall uprising frames our discussion of issues of representation that arise in commemorating events in general, and events in the history of psychology in particular. We describe how the articles in the special issue expand the existing narratives about the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender psychology that are centered in the United States, focused primarily on sexual orientation and often end, rather than begin, in the time of Stonewall. The international scope of the special issue can suggest new ways to particularize histories of psychology since Stonewall that are centered on the United States. We describe the ideological context that shapes the doing of psychology since Stonewall, the telling of the histories of that psychology, and how "the problem of speaking for others" arises in contexts of power, including the curation of the special issue itself. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Clitoral surgery on minors: an interview study with clinical experts of differences of sex development.

OBJECTIVES: Clitoral surgery on minors diagnosed with differences of sex development is increasingly positioned as a violation of human rights. This qualitative study identified how health professionals (HPs) navigate the contentious issues as they offer care to affected families. DESIGN: Qualitative analysis of audio-recorded semistructured interviews with HPs. All of the interviews were transcribed verbatim for theoretical thematic analysis. SETTING: Twelve specialist multidisciplinary care centres for children, adolescents and adults diagnosed with a genetic condition associated with differences of sex development. PARTICIPANTS: Thirty-two medical, surgical, psychological and nursing professionals and clinical scientists in 12 specialist centres in Britain and Sweden formed the interview sample. RESULTS: All interviewees were aware of the controversial nature of clitoral surgery and perceived themselves and their teams as non-interventionist compared with other teams. Data analyses highlighted four strategies that the interviewees used to navigate their complex tasks: (1) engaging with new thinking, (2) holding on to historical assumptions, (3) reducing the burden of dilemmas and (4) being flexible. In response to recent reports and debates that challenge clitoral surgery on minors, HPs had revised some of their opinions. However, they struggled to reconcile their new knowledge with the incumbent norms in favour of intervention as they counsel care users with variable reactions and expectations. The flexible approach taken may reflect compromise, but the interviewees were often trapped by the contradictory values and assumptions. CONCLUSIONS: If the pathology-based vocabularies and narratives about genital diversity could be modified, and normative assumptions are questioned more often, clinicians may be more adept at integrating their new knowledge into a more coherent model of care to address the psychosocial concerns that genital surgery purports to overcome.

Negotiating Theory When Doing Practice: A Systematic Review of Qualitative Research on Interventions to Reduce Homophobia.

We performed a systematic review of qualitative research on interventions to reduce homophobia. Specifically, we conducted a thematic analysis of participant feedback given in 30 qualitative and mixed-methods studies. Participants often described interventions as "eye-opening." However, they also criticized many interventions for their mismatch with the social, historical, or institutional context in which they were conducted. Some participants rejected the interventions altogether, describing them as offensive or disgusting. We drew three conclusions. First, participants not only were actively making sense of the interventions but also were often aware of philosophical and political tensions (especially liberal vs. queer approaches). Second, participants sometimes used the perceived inadequacy of the intervention for the local context as an argument to resist change. Finally, tensions in participant feedback (eye-opening vs. disgusting) can be read as evidence that reducing homophobia is "dirty work": such work is both vital for society and despised by many.

Shaping parents, shaping penises: How medical teams frame parents' decisions in response to hypospadias.

INTRODUCTION: Psychological research provides insights into how parents approach medical decisions on behalf of children. The medical decision of concern here is the surgical alteration of a hypospadic penis, whose urethral opening does not appear at the tip. Hypospadias surgery is routinely carried out in infancy, despite criticism by international organizations concerned about children's rights. The focus of this study is on the framing of hypospadias surgery. OBJECTIVES: The objective was to examine how health professionals frame hypospadias and hypospadias surgery in medical and non-medical ways. DESIGN: This was a qualitative study designed to build on the experimental research of Streuli et al. who investigated how medical versus non-medical information affects decision-making about non-essential childhood genital surgery. METHODS: Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 32 health professionals. Theoretically informed thematic analysis was used to examine how health professionals talk about hypospadias surgery and about supporting parents to make treatment decisions. RESULTS: The analysis suggests that medical professionals' engagement with parents underestimates the effect of framing in influencing parental decisions about hypospadias surgery. Some psychological specialists in this area are actively framing hypospadias in ways that enable some parents to choose a non-medical pathway. Psychologically informed ways of talking about a child's genital difference focus on psychological qualities, including affect, well-being, and unconditional positive regard. CONCLUSIONS: The best interests of children with hypospadias may well be served when psychological pathways are highlighted, providing opportunities to support the flourishing of children whose genital appearance raises the question of medical intervention. Statement of Contribution What is already known on this subject? Framing significantly affects medical decision-making in ways that people typically fail to perceive. Parents frequently consent to non-essential hypospadias (penile) surgery for their sons, despite the risks and ethical concerns. What does this study add? Medical teams could do more to consider framing when counselling parents about their son's hypospadias. Psychological specialists can help parents to frame their son's penile difference in terms of well-being and love. The best interests of children with hypospadias may be served by highlighting psychological care pathways.

Commemoration in crisis: A discursive analysis of who 'we' and 'they' have been or become in ceremonial political speeches before and during the Greek financial downturn.

This study analyses the discourse of statements of the leaders of two Greek political parties commemorating the restoration of Greek democracy on 24 July 1974; the ruling party New Democracy and the opposition, Coalition of the Radical Left. We focus on how these leaders act as entrepreneurs of their identities by constructing their ingroups in broad or narrow terms and their outgroups in vague or specific terms. These constructions were ventured during a period of relative political stability (2008) and instability (2012), and we focus on how ingroup prototypes and group boundaries are narrated across Greece's past, present and future in ambiguous or concrete terms. The study aligns the social identity approach to political leadership with studies on political discourse and 'the rhetoric of we'. We view commemorative statements as historical charters and respond to calls for discourse analysis to take greater account of historical context. The findings suggest concrete hypotheses about how leaders with different amounts of political support might define, as identity entrepreneurs, who 'we' are, and who 'we' are not in democratic contexts marked by stability or crisis.

Vaginal Construction and Treatment Providers' Experiences: A Qualitative Analysis.

STUDY OBJECTIVE: To investigate specialist clinicians' experiences of treating vaginal agenesis. DESIGN: Semi-structured interviews. SETTING: Twelve hospitals in Britain and Sweden. PARTICIPANTS: Thirty-two health professionals connected to multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) including medical specialists and psychologists. INTERVENTIONS AND MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Theoretical thematic analysis of recorded verbatim data. RESULTS: The gynecologist and psychologist interviewees share certain observations including the importance of psychological readiness for and appropriate timing of treatment. Three overlapping themes are identified in our theoretical analysis of the MDT clinicians' talk: (1) the stigma of vaginal agenesis and the pressure to be "normal" can lead patients to minimize the time, effort, physical discomfort, and emotional cost inherent in treatment. (2) Under pressure, treatment might be presented to patients with insufficient attention to the potential psychological effect of the language used. Furthermore, the opportunity to question what is "normal" in sex is generally not taken up. It can be challenging to help the women to transcend their medicalized experiences to come to experiencing their bodies as sexual and enjoyable. (3) The reality of treatment demands, which are not always adequately processed before treatment, can lead to discontinuation and even disengagement with services. CONCLUSION: The MDT clinicians in this study emphasized the importance of psychological input in vaginal construction. However, such input should proactively question social norms about how women's genitalia should appear and function. Furthermore, rather than steering patients (back) to treatment, the entire MDT could more explicitly question social norms and help the women to do the same. By shifting the definition of success from anatomy to personal agency, the clinical focus is transformed from treatment to women.

Long live the King! Beginnings loom larger than endings of past and recurrent events.

Events are temporal "figures", which can be defined as identifiable segments in time, bounded by beginnings and endings. But the functions and importance of these two boundaries differ. We argue that beginnings loom larger than endings by attracting more attention, being judged as more important and interesting, warranting more explanation, and having more causal power. This difference follows from a lay notion that additions (the introduction of something new) imply more change and demand more effort than do subtractions (returning to a previous state of affairs). This "beginning advantage" is demonstrated in eight studies of people's representations of epochs and events on a historical timeline as well as in cyclical change in the annual seasons. People think it is more important to know when wars and reigns started than when they ended, and are more interested in reading about beginnings than endings of historical movements. Transitional events (such as elections and passages from one season to the next) claim more interest and grow in importance when framed as beginnings of what follows than as conclusions of what came before. As beginnings are often identified in retrospect, the beginning advantage may distort and exaggerate their actual historical importance.

On the failure to notice that White people are White: Generating and testing hypotheses in the celebrity guessing game.

Drawing together social psychologists' concerns with equality and cognitive psychologists' concerns with scientific inference, 6 studies (N = 841) showed how implicit category norms make the generation and test of hypothesis about race highly asymmetric. Having shown that Whiteness is the default race of celebrity actors (Study 1), Study 2 used a variant of Wason's (1960) rule discovery task to demonstrate greater difficulty in discovering rules that require specifying that race is shared by White celebrity actors than by Black celebrity actors. Clues to the Whiteness of White actors from analogous problems had little effect on hypothesis formation or rule discovery (Studies 3 and 4). Rather, across Studies 2 and 4 feedback about negative cases-non-White celebrities-facilitated the discovery that White actors shared a race, whether participants or experimenters generated the negative cases. These category norms were little affected by making White actors' Whiteness more informative (Study 5). Although participants understood that discovering that White actors are White would be harder than discovering that Black actors are Black, they showed limited insight into the information contained in negative cases (Study 6). Category norms render some identities as implicit defaults, making hypothesis formation and generalization about real social groups asymmetric in ways that have implications for scientific reasoning and social equality. (PsycINFO Database Record