Little research focuses on children's reasoning about people whose gender is perceived as uncertain. Five- to 8-year-olds viewed a target with a gender uncertain appearance. The target had trait or preference similarities with a character from a binary, specified gender (i.e., boy, girl) and appearance similarities with another character that had an uncertain gender. Half of the participants heard gender uncertainty labels (i.e., “We're not sure about this person. This person doesn't look like a boy or a girl.”) or gender specification labels (i.e., “This person is a boy.”) for each character. The remaining participants heard miscellaneous character information. Children inferred whether the target favored the same novel activity as the character with similar traits or preferences, but with a specified gender, or the gender uncertain character. Seven- and 8-year-olds made more trait-based predictions than 5- and 6-year-olds, but both age groups made unsystematic predictions in response to preferences, suggesting that some viewed preferences and others viewed gender as reflective of broader similarities among people in this context. A follow-up study with 5- and 6-year-olds conveyed gender uncertainty more directly through identification (i.e., “This person is not a boy or a girl.”) and revealed that children consistently made preference-based, but not trait-based, predictions about the target. The present findings reveal that children do not reason about gender uncertainty in the same way that they reason about the binary gender categories, which highlights the need to further investigate children's understanding of gender beyond the typical boy and girl dichotomy.

中文翻译：

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儿童对具有性别类别不确定性的个体的归纳推理

很少有研究关注儿童对性别被认为不确定的人的推理。5 到 8 岁的孩子看到了一个性别不确定的目标。目标与来自二进制、特定性别（即男孩、女孩）的角色具有特征或偏好相似性，并且与具有不确定性别的另一个角色具有相似性。一半的参与者听到了性别不确定标签（即，“我们不确定这个人。这个人看起来不像男孩或女孩。”）或性别规范标签（即，“这个人是男孩。” ”）为每个字符。其余的参与者听到了各种各样的字符信息。孩子们推断目标是否喜欢与具有相似特征或偏好但具有特定性别的角色相同的新颖活动，或性别不确定的性格。7 岁和 8 岁的孩子比 5 岁和 6 岁的孩子做出更多基于特征的预测，但两个年龄段的人都对偏好做出了不系统的预测，这表明有些人认为偏好，而另一些人则认为性别反映了更广泛的相似性在这种背景下的人们之间。一项针对 5 岁和 6 岁儿童的后续研究通过识别更直接地传达了性别不确定性（即，“这个人不是男孩也不是女孩。”）并揭示了孩子们一直对目标做出基于偏好而不是基于特征的预测。目前的研究结果表明，儿童对性别不确定性的推理方式与他们对二元性别类别的推理方式不同，这突出表明需要进一步调查儿童对性别的理解，超越典型的男孩和女孩二分法。