Preprint
A Withheld Label Is Not a Withheld Gender: What Describing People by Appearance Was Meant to Achieve, Which of Its Goals the Gender-Association Evidence Defeats, and the Parity Test the Accessibility Case Still Needs
(c) 2026 Pranay Mahendrakar. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Life of Research When a model describes a person whose gender it cannot know, a widely shared recommendation is to describe appearance ("short hair", "a defined jawline") instead of asserting an identity ("she", "a man"). A September 2026…