Implicit Bias, Gender - And Why We Are All Culprits

Madhu is a ‘Hijra’, part of India’s transgender community, comprised of transpeople, eunuchs, intersex persons and other sexual minorities. At the time of our first interaction, I was an undergraduate student based in the city of Chennai, capital of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Madhu was a spokesperson for her community in the city, often dealing with student groups and NGOs to tackle the slew of problems with which the community was constantly grappling. A recurring theme was finding gainful employment outside of prostitution – something into which Hijras were often coerced, owing to rampant hiring discrimination based on their sexuality.

The first time I met Madhu was at a meeting organized by a student group at my university with herself and some of her colleagues, to discuss these problems at length and derive viable solutions.  

Madhu’s personality was as vibrant as her bottle-green sari and the large vermillion bindhi on her forehead. It was not long until we were engrossed in her story. With candour, she recounted how she had never felt at home in her formerly male body, a sense that began revealing itself to her more acutely from the start of her teenage years. When she told her family of her desire to physically transition into a woman, they disowned her. She then fled from her village to the city, and underwent the excruciating pain of non-medical castration, nearly facing death in the process.

A week after our heart-to-heart with Madhu, I had a thought. At the start of the meeting, I realised, I had made mental references to Madhu as ‘him’ and ‘he’ — but as the meeting concluded, Madhu was forever after, ‘her’.

I wondered: was it possible that I had pre-existing, implicit biases towards Madhu (and perhaps all transwomen), that caused me to think of her as a man, even prior to meeting her? What were the implications of these biases, and could I remedy them?

Years later, I found clues to these questions in an ostensibly unlikely place: the world of Behavioral Science.