Age of formation
There are several theories about how and when gender identity forms, and studying the subject is difficult because children's immature language acquisition requires researchers to make assumptions from indirect evidence. John Money suggested children might have awareness of and attach some significance to gender as early as 18 months to 2 years; Lawrence Kohlberg argued that gender identity does not form until age 3. It is widely agreed that core gender identity is firmly formed by age 3. At this point, children can make firm statements about their gender and tend to choose activities and toys which are considered appropriate for their gender (such as dolls and painting for girls, and tools and rough-housing for boys), although they do not yet fully understand the implications of gender. After age three, it is extremely difficult to change gender identity. Martin and Ruble conceptualize this process of development as three stages: (1) as toddlers and pre-schoolers, children learn about defined characteristics, which are socialized aspects of gender; (2) around the ages of five to seven years, identity is consolidated and becomes rigid; (3) after this "peak of rigidity", fluidity returns and socially defined gender roles relax somewhat. Barbara Newmann breaks it down into four parts: (1) understanding the concept of gender, (2) learning gender role standards and stereotypes, (3) identifying with parents, and (4) forming gender preference. According to UN agencies, discussions relating to comprehensive sexuality education raise awareness of topics, such as gender and gender identity.Factors influencing formation
Nature vs. nurture
Although the formation of gender identity is not completely understood, many factors have been suggested as influencing its development. In particular, the extent to which it is determined by socialization (environmental factors) versus innate (biological) factors is an ongoing debate in psychology, known as "nature versus nurture". Both factors are thought to play a role. Biological factors that influence gender identity include pre- and post-natal hormone levels. While genetic makeup also influences gender identity, it does not inflexibly determine it. Social factors which may influence gender identity include ideas regarding gender roles conveyed by family, authority figures, mass media, and other influential people in a child's life. When children are raised by individuals who adhere to stringent gender roles, they are more likely to behave in the same way, matching their gender identity with the corresponding stereotypical gender patterns. Language also plays a role: children, while learning a language, learn to separate masculine and feminine characteristics and subconsciously adjust their own behavior to these predetermined roles. The social learning theory posits that children furthermore develop their gender identity through observing and imitating gender-linked behaviors, and then being rewarded or punished for behaving that way, thus being shaped by the people surrounding them through trying to imitate and follow them. Large-scale twin studies suggest that rather than shared environmental factors (i.e., cultural factors), which have a negligible role, the development of both transgender and cisgender gender identities is due to innate genetic factors, with a small potential influence of unique environmental factors. John Money was instrumental in the early research of gender identity, though he used the term ''gender role''. He disagreed with the previous school of thought that gender was determined solely by biology. He argued that infants are born a blank slate and a parent could be able to decide their babies’ gender. In Money's opinion, if the parent confidently raised their child as the opposite sex, the child would believe that they were born that sex and act accordingly. Money believed that nurture could override nature. A well-known example in the nature-versus-nurture debate is the case of David Reimer, born in 1965, otherwise known as "John/Joan". As a baby, Reimer went through a faulty circumcision, losing his male genitalia. Psychologist John Money convinced Reimer's parents to raise him as a girl. Reimer grew up as a girl, dressing in girl clothes and surrounded by girl toys, but did not feel like a girl. After he tried to commit suicide at age 13, he was told that he had been born with male genitalia. Reimer stopped seeing Money, and underwent surgery to remove his breasts and reconstruct his genitals. In the early 1970s, Money reported that Reimer's sex reassignment to female was a success, influencing the academic consensus toward the nurture hypothesis, and for the following 30 years, it became standard medical practice to reassign intersex infants and male infants with micropenises to female. However in 1997, sexologist Milton Diamond published a follow-up, revealing that Reimer had rejected his female reassignment, and arguing against the blank slate hypothesis and infant sex reassignment in general. Diamond was a longtime opponent of Money's theories. Diamond had contributed to research involving pregnant rats that showed hormones played a major role in the behavior of different sexes. The researchers in the lab would inject the pregnant rat with testosterone, which would then find its way to the baby's bloodstream. The females that were born had genitalia that looked like male genitalia. The females in the litter also behaved like male rats and would even try to mount other female rats, proving that biology played a major role in animal behavior. One criticism of the Reimer case is that Reimer lost his penis at the age of eight months and underwent sex reassignment surgery at seventeen months, which possibly meant that Reimer had already been influenced by his socialization as a boy. Bradley et al. (1998) report the contrasting case of a 26-year-old woman with XY chromosomes whose penis was lost and who underwent sex reassignment surgery between two and seven months of age (substantially earlier than Reimer), whose parents were also more committed to raising their child as a girl than Reimer's, and who remained a woman into adulthood. She reported that she had been somewhat tomboyish during childhood, enjoying stereotypically masculine childhood toys and interests, although her childhood friends were girls. While she was bisexual, having had relationships with both men and women, she found women more sexually attractive and they featured more in her fantasies. Her job at the time of the study was a blue-collar occupation that was practiced almost exclusively by men. Griet Vandermassen argues that since these are the only two cases being documented in scientific literature, this makes it difficult to draw any firm conclusions from them about the origins of gender identity, particularly given the two cases reached different conclusions. However, Vandermassen also argues that transgender people support the idea of gender identity as being biologically rooted, as they do not identify with their anatomical sex despite being raised and their behaviour reinforced according to their anatomical sex. One study by Reiner et al. looked at fourteen genetic males who had sufferedBiological factors
Several prenatal, biological factors, including genes and hormones, may affect gender identity. It has been suggested that gender identity is controlled by prenatal sex steroids, but this is hard to test because there is no way to study gender identity in animals. According to biologist Michael J. Ryan, gender identity is exclusive to humans. In a position statement, the Endocrine Society stated "The medical consensus in the late 20th century was that transgender and gender incongruent individuals suffered a mental health disorder termed “gender identity disorder.” Gender identity was considered malleable and subject to external influences. Today, however, this attitude is no longer considered valid. Considerable scientific evidence has emerged demonstrating a durable biological element underlying gender identity. Individuals may make choices due to other factors in their lives, but there do not seem to be external forces that genuinely cause individuals to change gender identity."Transgender and transsexuality
Some studies have investigated whether or not there is a link between biological variables and transgender or transsexual identity. Several studies have shown that sexually dimorphic brain structures in transsexuals are shifted away from what is associated with their birth sex and towards what is associated with their preferred sex. The volume of the central subdivision of the bed nucleus of a stria terminalis or BSTc (a constituent of the basal ganglia of the brain which is affected by prenatal androgens) of transsexual women has been suggested to be similar to women's and unlike men's, but the relationship between BSTc volume and gender identity is still unclear. Similar brain structure differences have been noted between gay and heterosexual men, and between lesbian and heterosexual women. Another study suggests that transsexuality may have a genetic component. Research suggests that the same hormones that promote the differentiation of sex organs in utero also elicit puberty and influence the development of gender identity. Different amounts of these male or female sex hormones within a person can result in behavior and external genitalia that do not match up with the norm of their sex assigned at birth, and in a person acting and looking like their identified gender.Social and environmental factors
Social scientists tend to assume that gender identities arise from social factors. In 1955, John Money proposed that gender identity was malleable and determined by whether a child was raised as male or female in early childhood. Money's hypothesis has since been discredited, but scholars have continued to study the effect of social factors on gender identity formation. In the 1960s and 1970s, factors such as the absence of a father, a mother's wish for a daughter, or parental reinforcement patterns were suggested as influences; more recent theories suggesting that parental psychopathology might partly influence gender identity formation have received only minimal empirical evidence, with a 2004 article noting that "solid evidence for the importance of postnatal social factors is lacking." A 2008 study found that the parents of gender-dysphoric children showed no signs of psychopathological issues aside from mild depression in the mothers. It has been suggested that the attitudes of the child's parents may affect the child's gender identity, although evidence is minimal.Parental establishment of gender roles
Parents who do not support gender nonconformity are more likely to have children with firmer and stricter views on gender identity and gender roles. Recent literature suggests a trend towards less well-defined gender roles and identities, as studies of parental coding of toys as masculine, feminine, or neutral indicate that parents increasingly code kitchens and in some cases dolls as neutral rather than exclusively feminine. However, Emily Kane found that many parents still showed negative responses to items, activities, or attributes that were considered feminine, such as domestic skills, nurturance, and empathy. Research has indicated that many parents attempt to define gender for their sons in a manner that distances the sons from femininity, with Kane stating that "the parental boundary maintenance work evident for sons represents a crucial obstacle limiting boys options, separating boys from girls, devaluing activities marked as feminine for both boys and girls, and thus bolstering gender inequality and heteronormativity." Many parents form gendered expectations for their child before it is even born, after determining the child's sex through technology such as ultrasound. The child thus is born to a gender-specific name, games, and even ambitions. Once the child's sex is determined, most children are raised in accordance with it to be a man or a woman, fitting a male or female gender role defined partly by the parents. When considering the parents' social class, lower-class families typically hold traditional gender roles, where the father works and the mother, who may only work out of financial necessity, still takes care of the household. However, middle-class "professional" couples typically negotiate the division of labor and hold an egalitarian ideology. These different views on gender from a child's parents can shape the child's understanding of gender as well as the child's development of gender. Within a study conducted by Hillary Halpern it was hypothesized, and proven, that parent behaviors, rather than parent beliefs, regarding gender are better predictors for a child's attitude on gender. It was concluded that a mother's behavior was especially influential on a child's assumptions of the child's own gender. For example, mothers who practiced more traditional behaviors around their children resulted in the son displaying fewer stereotypes of male roles while the daughter displayed more stereotypes of female roles. No correlation was found between a father's behavior and his children's knowledge of stereotypes of their own gender. It was concluded, however, that fathers who held the belief of equality between the sexes had children, especially sons, who displayed fewer preconceptions of their opposite gender.Intersex people
Estimates of the number of people who are intersex range from 0.018% to 1.7%, depending on which conditions are counted as intersex. An intersex person is one possessing any of several variations in sex characteristics including chromosomes, gonads, sex hormones, or genitals that, according to the UNGender variance and non-conformance
Gender identity can lead toHistory and definitions
Definitions
The terms ''gender identity'' and ''core gender identity'' were first used with their current meaning—one's personal experience of one's own gender—sometime in the 1960s."The term 'gender identity' was used in a press release, November 21, 1966, to announce the new clinic for transsexuals at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. It was disseminated in the media worldwide, and soon entered the vernacular. ... gender identity is your own sense or conviction of maleness or femaleness." To this day they are usually used in that sense, though a few scholars additionally use the term to refer to the sexual orientation and sexual identity categories '' gay'', '' lesbian'' and '' bisexual''. Gender expression is distinct from gender identity in that gender expression is how one chooses to physically express their gender through one's "name, pronouns, clothing, hair style, behavior, voice or body features." It is thus distinct from gender identity in that it is the physical expression of an internal sense of gender but may not necessarily portray a person's gender identity and may vary "according to racial/ethnic background, socio-economic status and place of residence."Early medical literature
In late-19th-century medical literature, women who chose not to conform to their expected gender roles were called "inverts", and they were portrayed as having an interest in knowledge and learning, and a "dislike and sometimes incapacity for needlework". During the mid-1900s, doctors pushed for corrective therapy on such women and children, which meant that gender behaviors that were not part of the norm would be punished and changed. The aim of this therapy was to push children back to their "correct" gender roles and thereby limit the number of children who became transgender.Freud and Jung's views
In 1905, Sigmund Freud presented his theory of psychosexual development in '' Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality'', giving evidence that in the pregenital phase children do not distinguish between sexes, but assume both parents have the same genitalia and reproductive powers. On this basis, he argued that bisexuality was the original sexual orientation and that heterosexuality was resultant of repression during the phallic stage, at which point gender identity became ascertainable. According to Freud, during this stage, children developed an Oedipus complex where they had sexual fantasies for the parent ascribed the opposite gender and hatred for the parent ascribed the same gender, and this hatred transformed into (unconscious) transference and (conscious) identification with the hated parent who both exemplified a model to appease sexual impulses and threatened to castrate the child's power to appease sexual impulses. In 1913,1950s and 1960s
During the 1950s and '60s, psychologists began studying gender development in young children, partially in an effort to understand the origins of homosexuality (which was viewed as a mental disorder at the time). In 1958, the Gender Identity Research Project was established at the UCLA Medical Center for the study of intersex and transsexual individuals. PsychoanalystButler's views
In the late 1980s, Judith Butler began lecturing regularly on the topic of gender identity, and in 1990, they published '' Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity'', introducing the concept of gender performativity and arguing that both sex and gender are constructed.Present views
Medical field
Transgender people sometimes wish to undergo physical surgery to refashion their primary sexual characteristics, secondary characteristics, or both, because they feel they will be more comfortable with different genitalia. This may involve removal of penis, testicles or breasts, or the fashioning of a penis, vagina or breasts. In the past, sex assignment surgery has been performed on infants who are born with ambiguous genitalia. However, current medical opinion is strongly against this procedure on infants, and recommends that the procedure be only conducted when medically necessary. Today, sex reassignment surgery is performed on people who choose to transition so that their external sexual organs will match their gender identity. In the United States, it was decided under the Affordable Care Act thatGender dysphoria and gender identity disorder
Gender dysphoria (previously called "gender identity disorder" or GID in the DSM) is the formal diagnosis of people who experience significant dysphoria (discontent) with the sex they were assigned at birth and/or the gender roles associated with that sex: "In gender identity disorder, there is discordance between the natal sex of one's external genitalia and the brain coding of one's gender as masculine or feminine." The '' Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders'' (302.85) has five criteria that must be met before a diagnosis of gender identity disorder can be made, and the disorder is further subdivided into specific diagnoses based on age, for exampleInternational human rights law
Measurement
No objective measurement or imaging of the human body exists for gender identity, as it is part of one's subjective experience. Numerous instruments for assessing gender identity as a clinical measure exist, including questionnaire-based, interview-based and task-based assessments. These have varying effect sizes among a number of specific sub-populations. Gender identity measures have been applied in clinical assessment studies of people with gender dysphoria or intersex conditions.Terminology
Before the , the term ''gender'' was used exclusively as a grammatical category. The terms ''male'' and ''man'', or ''female'' and ''woman'', were used more or less interchangeably when referring to people of one sex or the other. As the term ''gender'' took on new meaning following the work of John Money,Binary gender identities
While academic usage of terms ''man'' and ''woman'' began to diverge at the same time, and become more restricted to concepts related to gender, this distinction was not universal (and still isn't) even in academic usage, and even less so in more informal writing or in speech, which often conflate the two.Non-binary gender identities
Some people, and some societies, do not construct gender as a binary in which everyone is either a boy or a girl, or a man or a woman. Those who exist outside the binary fall under the umbrella terms '' non-binary'' or ''genderqueer''. Some cultures have specific gender roles that are distinct from "man" and "woman." These are often referred to as '' third genders''.Fa'afafine
In Samoan culture, or Faʻa Samoa, fa'afafine are considered to be a third gender. They are anatomically male but dress and behave in a manner considered typically feminine. According to Tamasailau Sua'ali'i (''see references''), fa'afafine in Samoa at least are often physiologically unable to reproduce. Fa'afafine are accepted as a natural gender, and neither looked down upon nor discriminated against. Fa'afafine also reinforce their femininity with the fact that they are only attracted to and receive sexual attention from straight masculine men. They have been and generally still are initially identified in terms of labour preferences, as they perform typically feminine household tasks. The Samoan Prime Minister is patron of theHijras
''Hijras'' are officially recognized as third gender in the Indian subcontinent, being considered neither completely male nor female. Hijras have a recorded history in the Indian subcontinent since antiquity, as suggested by the Kama Sutra. Many ''hijras'' live in well-defined and organised all-''hijra'' communities, led by a guru. These communities have consisted over generations of those who are in abject poverty or who have been rejected by or fled their family of origin. Many work asKhanith
TheTwo-spirit identities
Many indigenous North American Nations had more than two gender roles. Those who belong to the additional gender categories, beyond cisgender man and woman, are now often collectively termed "two-spirit" or "two-spirited". There are parts of the community that take "two-spirit" as a category over an identity itself, preferring to identify with culture or Nation-specific gender terms.See also
* List of gender identities * Social construction of gender * Identity (social science) * Sex and gender distinction * Neuroscience of sex differences * Queer studies * Queer theoryReferences
Further reading
*External links