Can You Guess Someone's Sexuality By Just Looking At Them?

A new video takes a hard look at "gaydar."

A new video is making a fascinating point about “gaydar” and the ability of people to accurately guess the sexuality of another person simply by the way that they look.

The project from Cut Video brings together people from all across the spectrum of queer identity and sexuality for a bit of a guessing game. The video appears to be making a macro-level point about judgements and assumptions based on appearance ― and how a person’s physical or aesthetic presentation may not be inherently tied to their sexual identity.

“As the participants in the video show us, ‘gaydar’ is actually a way we categorize our observations about others into a system of social assumptions ― and that those systems are completely arbitrary,” Christopher Chan, a visual anthropologist at Cut Video, told HuffPost. “It’s also completely awkward to voice those assumptions out loud, even if we make those micro-judgements every day. The experiment challenges us to articulate exactly how we make those judgements, and why they’re just as dangerously arbitrary in our own head as when they’re verbalized.”

Check out the video above. Want to read more about debunking “gaydar”? Head here.

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