Pronouns, Faces, and Voices: How Gender Identity Labels and Phenotypic Cues Influence Anticipated Anxiety and Avoidance

When perceivers encounter novel others, perceptual cues to gender (vocal tones, facial structure) and gender labels (e.g., pronouns) can influence impression formation. However, most work examining gender cues and impression formation examines the effects of either a perceptual cue or a gender label on judgments of others. The current work aimed to understand how perceptual cues from others’ faces (Study 1) or voices (Study 2) combined with binary (e.g., she/her) and nonbinary (e.g., they/them) gender labels influence perceivers’ anticipated anxiety and avoidance. Both studies found that perceptual cues and gender labels interacted to inform anticipated anxiety and avoidance. For binary gender labels, cue-label pairings that diverged from societal expectations of gender (e.g., he/him paired with feminine faces or voices) led perceivers to report greater anticipated anxiety and avoidance than pairings consistent with societal expectations (e.g., he/him paired with masculine faces or voices). For nonbinary gender labels, findings were inconsistent across studies. Faces paired with nonbinary pronouns led to more anticipated anxiety and avoidance when the faces were masculine or androgynous vs. feminine. These findings did not extend to voices. This work provides initial evidence that gender labels and perceptual cues to gender may interact to influence perceivers’ anticipated anxiety and avoidance, thereby providing insights into gender-based impression formation that may be consequential for biases toward and discriminatory treatment of gender-diverse individuals.