# QueerGen: How LLMs Reflect Societal Norms on Gender and Sexuality in Sentence Completion Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20731 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20731/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [The Woman Worked as a Babysitter: On Biases in Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01326/) (2019)
- [Documenting Large Webtext Corpora: A Case Study on the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08758/) (2021)
- [Men Also Like Shopping: Reducing Gender Bias Amplification using Corpus-level Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09457/) (2017)
- [AI and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15366/) (2021)
- [Mitigating Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing: Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08976/) (2019)
- [Challenges in Detoxifying Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07445/) (2021)
- [RedditBias: A Real-World Resource for Bias Evaluation and Debiasing of Conversational Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03521/) (2021)
- [Reducing Sentiment Bias in Language Models via Counterfactual Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03064/) (2019)
- [Deceiving Google's Perspective API Built for Detecting Toxic Comments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08138/) (2017)
- [Theories of "Gender" in NLP Bias Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02526/) (2022)
- ["I'm fully who I am": Towards Centering Transgender and Non-Binary Voices to Measure Biases in Open Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09941/) (2023)
- [Disclosure and Mitigation of Gender Bias in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11190/) (2024)
- [Welcome to the Modern World of Pronouns: Identity-Inclusive Natural Language Processing beyond Gender](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11923/) (2022)
- [MISGENDERED: Limits of Large Language Models in Understanding Pronouns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03950/) (2023)
- [Fairness and Robustness in Invariant Learning: A Case Study in Toxicity Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06485/) (2020)
- [Unpacking the Interdependent Systems of Discrimination: Ableist Bias in NLP Systems through an Intersectional Lens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00521/) (2021)
- [Dataset for Identification of Homophobia and Transophobia in Multilingual YouTube Comments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00227/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Fairness Metrics in the Presence of Dataset Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09245/) (2018)
- [Detecting Harmful Online Conversational Content towards LGBTQIA+ Individuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10032/) (2022)
- [QueerBench: Quantifying Discrimination in Language Models Toward Queer Identities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12399/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Do Language Models Know Their Slang? Queer Slang Understanding in User-Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04847/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper examines how Large Language Models (LLMs) reproduce societal norms, particularly heterocisnormativity, and how these norms translate into measurable biases in their text generations. We investigate whether explicit information about a subject's gender or sexuality influences LLM responses across three subject categories: queer-marked, non-queer-marked, and the normalized "unmarked" category. Representational imbalances are operationalized as measurable differences in English sentence completions across four dimensions: sentiment, regard, toxicity, and prediction diversity. Our findings show that Masked Language Models (MLMs) produce the least favorable sentiment, higher toxicity, and more negative regard for queer-marked subjects. Autoregressive Language Models (ARLMs) partially mitigate these patterns, while closed-access ARLMs tend to produce more harmful outputs for unmarked subjects. Results suggest that LLMs reproduce normative social assumptions, though the form and degree of bias depend strongly on specific model characteristics, which may redistribute, but not eliminate, representational harms.