Talk:Gender identity/Archive 1

Earliest Materials
Off to a very nice start!

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Should GI and GR articles be merged?
Folks may be interested in Sexual identity - someone's created a couple of articles on this topic... I'm not sure, but it seems it might have a bias... Martin 16:07 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Would a merge to gender role and identity be a good thing? When disambiguating gender I often have difficulty deciding whether to link here or to gender role. Martin 11:59, 19 Sep 2003 (UTC)

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If you are really talking about merging gender role and gender identity, then that is not such a bad idea. But it must be done with a clear understanding of why John Money formulated these terms. Unfortunately, Money's insights sometimes run ahead of his ability to formulate things clearly. He started with the idea of gender and gender identity and then added the idea of gender role in order to "patch" his original formulation.

What looks simple when people with penises wear trousers and people with vaginas wear skirts and there are no other possibilities becomes very confusing when there turn out to be more than XX and XY chromosomal combinations, when things can happen prenatally to make the brain of an XX person become masculinaized, the brain of an XY person end up as feminine, etc., etc., when things can happen prenatally to make the external genitalia of an XX person look more-or-less male, the external genitalia of an XY person look more-or-less female -- with many shades of ambiguity between male and female possible, and, on top of all that, when post-natal social construction can cause an XX person to behave in ways (including roles in society) that are traditionally reserved for XY people, and vice-versa.

Patrick0Moran 14:41, 19 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Martin brought up the question of whether to merge gender role and gender identity. That would be the way that would fit in best with the way John Money, who started this whole line of analysis, originally defined these terms. But other people have used these terms, some responsibily and some just by grabbing them as buzz words and running with them to wherever they wanted to go. So I think it would be easier to get the two articles clearly formulated. Eventually one might want to have an article on what Money called "Gender-identity/role" -- a term that, to me, is very confusing but which reflects his insistence that gender identity and gender role are two aspects of the same thing.

There is another complexity since an individual has his gender identity and he creates for himself (after observing how others in his society do it) his own gender role. But then society comes along and decrees gender roles that are acceptable to the sexes. A person with female genitalia may have the gender identity of a man and may wear trousers, hawk and spit, etc., and so members of the society at large will suppose, on the basis of appearances, that the individual has male genitalia. When the female genitalia are revealed there will be more or less intense social recriminations depending on the society and the individuals involved.

In short, we go from sex (a component of gender identity) to gender identity, to gender role -- all within the individual -- then to a comparison of that gender role with a "standard" gender role, a reasoned conclusion about the gender identity of the person under observation, and at least an implicit judgment of what genitalia the person will have. If a person goes to negotiate a loan in a limo with uniformed driver, wearing a $1000 suit, and gets a phone call from "Buffet in Omaha" while in the bank president's office -- and then after the loan is made it is disclosed that the "substantial member of the community" put all the expenses for creating this fascade on a credit card, the bank is likely to feel deceived and vengeful. The same kind of thing can happen when a person represents "herself" as a woman and then is discovered not to fit the expectations of others who have invested time and other resources on the theory that they have been dealing with a female. Patrick0Moran 04:37, 23 Oct 2003 (UTC)


 * Patrick, I've tried not to say anything about a number of your edits on similar articles, I've even tried to help work things out, but I can't even begin to tell you how POV and offensive the above analogy is to the transgendered.

What I wrote was not intended to slam transgendered people. It was intended as an indication of why some societies (and some people in some societies that are generally more accepting) react so harshly to transgendered people. Some societies cannot deal with anything that is not either black or white. The Lakota deal with transgendered people much more humanely than do many other groups. They make space in their scheme of things for a third gender identity and a third gender role. What I said above was that what is highly individualized (gender identity) is reduced to an external appearance based on fairly standardized components (gender role, which includes clothing that is labeled "men's shoes," "women's shoes", etc.), encounters a society that has more or less rigid ideas about what is appropriate for males to wear and what is appropriate for females to wear, and is judged by some member or members of that society as a symbolic representation of the sex of the individual. When these people then find that their expectation is not supported, they can get quite upset.

I can give you an example of how upset people can get in comparison to the degree of mismatch between gender role items and sex. I went to a major "mart" to get a pair of boots to replace the ultra-lightweight boots that I'd worn out. I saw a pair that I liked except that they were a kind of yellow-brown that I figured would look lousy the minute I spilled some oil or whatever on them. I asked the lady clerk if she had any other boots like that. She said, angrily, "Those are women's boots!" The fact was that they were in the men's section, they were labeled as men's boots, and they were identical with another pair that I eventually found when they got a new shipment except that they were that light, "feminine" color. Why was this salesperson reacting to the color of dye that was used to treat the lighter pair of boots?

There can be a powerful negative reaction to a woman who dresses as a man in a business context. I would say that it is silly, except that so many people discount the abilities and contributions of women simply because they are women. And, I think, many of these people will interpret a woman's wearing men's clothing as an attempt to "unfairly" claim men's prerogatives. So, silly or not, people who live in such a society have to be aware that the negative reactions to dress are symptomatic of the deeper problem of sexism.


 * Also, several of your statements simply incorrectly define key terms, most notably sex, gender, gender identity, transsexual, and gender dysphoria. I'm not sure where this misinformation has come from, but I really do think that it would be best if articles made every effort to use terms as they are defined elsewhere within the Wikipedia, because disputes have already been worked out there, also for continuity, if nothing else.  Also, gender neutral pronouns might be nice for these topics, if you don't mind.  -- Paige 05:04, 23 Oct 2003 (UTC)

The article on sex defines the word correctly, I think. I'll look again to see whether I've twisted my tongue somewhere, but not at 3:15 a.m.

I think I am using gender the way that John Money defined it. He was the one who took it out of the realm of grammar and used it to name a category broader than sex.

Gender identity is, after all, what I am proposing to explain better, which indicates that I have some feeling that the present article is not sufficient.

As for transsexual, that is a second term that I think is a bit sticky. I haven't done a detailed search to see how it has changed over time, but it appears that it started out as a term to describe the course of change through which a person who started out with the feeling that his/her sexual organs were discordant with his/her internal sense of self then sought and received medical treatment to change the sexual organs to match the internal sense of self. But later on (I guess) it came to refer to people who had a realization that they wanted to change but had not yet started such a course of change, and/or anybody somewhere along the way to that change. I think I noticed when I was writing the draft above that I didn't know how to deal with the slippage and fix my words so that they would call up the right pictures.

Gender dysphoria? Doesn't that mean being unhappy with the gender with which society's assessment of one's genitalia has stuck one with? Again, when I've had some sleep I'll try to understand what you find "incorrectly defined" about what I've said. I read over that Wikipedia entry just before drafting the following, so I guess my memory is shot for good.

Patrick0Moran 07:44, 23 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Draft Revision
I would like to suggest the following material be substituted for the present GI article:

In sociology, gender identity describes the gender with which a person identifies (i.e, whether one conceives oneself to be a man, a woman, or describes oneself to oneself in some less conventional way), but also can be used to refer to the gender that other people attribute to the individual on the basis of what they know from gender role indications (clothing, hair style, etc.). There would be no need for the term if individuals with female external genitalia would always consider themselves girls or women, and individuals with male external genitalia would always consider themselves boys or men. The most easily understood cases in which it becomes necessary to distinguish between sex and gender are those in which the external genitalia of a boy or a man are surgically removed. When such a thing happens through accident or through deliberate intent, the libido and the ability of express oneself in sexual activity are changed, but the individual does not for that reason cease to regard himself as a boy or a man. One such case is reported in As Nature Made Him by John Colapinto. It details the persistence of a male gender identity and the stubborn adherence to a male gender role of a person whose penis had been totally destroyed shortly after birth as the result of a botched circumcision, and who had subsequently been surgically reassigned by constructing female genitalia. So the term "gender identity" is broader than the sex of the individual as determined by examination of the external genitalia.

The related term, "gender role", has two meanings that in individual cases may be divergent: First, people's gender roles are the totality of the ways by which they express their gender identities. Second, people's gender roles may be defined as the kinds of activities that society determines to be appropriate for individuals possessing their kind of external genitalia. There are probably as many shades and complexitites of sexual identity and gender identity as there are human beings, and there are an equal number of ways of working those gender identities out in the intricacies of daily life. Societies, however, tend to assign some classes of social roles to "male" individuals (as society perceives their sexes), and some classes of social roles to "female" individuals (again understanding that society will base such judgments on external genitalia). In some societies, there are other classes of social roles for, e.g., surgically neutered males. (See Hijra (India).) Complications arise when society insists that an individual adopt a manner of social expression (gender role) that the individual feels is inconsistant with what he or she is (gender identity).

There is a very small group of people who do not believe that their gender corresponds to their biological sex. One reason for such discordances is that some individuals have a chromosomal sex that has not been expressed in the external genitalia because of hormonal or other abnormal conditions during critical periods in gestation. Such a person may appear to others to be of one sex, but may recognize himself or herself as belonging to the other sex.

Some people find that their gender identity does not correspond to their external genitals. As indicated above, in some cases the reason for this discord is easy to find in the history of the individual. In some cases an individual has a male (XY) chromosomal sex, but (for a variety of possible reasons) the individual's genitalia have not grown naturally and appear to be entirely female. In other cases an individual has a female (XX) chromosomal sex, but hormonal imbalances during a critical period in gestation cause the body of this individual to become masculinized. The chromosomal sex, and the truth about the internal genitalia of the individual, may become manifest at puberty as when, in the case of an individual who is chromosomally female, menstruation and other changes appear in the individual who, up to that point, has been regarded as a boy.

The formation of a gender identity is a complex process that starts with conception, but which involves critical growth processes during gestation and even learning experiences after birth. There are points of differentiation all along the way, but language and tradition in most societies insist that every individual be categorized as either a man or a woman. When multiplicity is arbitrarily reduced to absolute dichotomy, conflicts are sure to result.

When, for instance, the gender identity of a person makes him a man, but his genitals are female, he may experience what is called gender dysphoria, i.e., a deep unhappiness caused by his experience of himself as a man and his lack of male genitals. In recent decades it has become possible to surgically supply such an individual with external male genitalia. (It is, of course, impossible to create functioning testicles for such a person.) A person who experiences gender dysphoria may, then, seek medical intervention and become surgically "reassigned".

An alternative, for some people, has been to retain the genitalia that they were born with, but to adopt a gender role that is consonant with what they perceive as their gender identity. In doing so they may defy the expectations of society. There is an emerging vocabulary for those who defy traditional gender identity - see transgender and genderqueer.

Sometimes the connection between gender identity and gender role is unclear. The original oversimplification was that there are unambiguously male human being and unambiguously female human beings, that they are clearly men and clearly women, and that they should behave in all important ways as men and women "naturally" behave. Investigations in biology and sociology have strongly supported the view that "the sex between the ears is more important than the sex between the legs", and the implication has been that people with masculine gender identities will truthfully give external representation of their gender identities by adopting gender roles that are appropriate to men, and, similarly, that people with feminine gender identities will adopt gender roles that are appropriate to women. It may be very difficult to determine, however, whether a specific drag queen is someone who has a female gender identity and is learning a female gender role, or whether that person is someone with a male gender identity who enjoys mimicing a female gender role to entertain others, to taunt the more rigid members of his society, or for some other reason, such as to repudiate the value or validity of rigid gender roles. Some, such as RuPaul, refuse to be categorized.

Patrick0Moran 04:37, 23 Oct 2003 (UTC)


 * Also, please stop putting reassigned in quotes. It is very condescending.  -- Paige 05:07, 23 Oct 2003 (UTC)


 * Another problem is, in the debate surrounding sexual identity, when asked if the term was just another word for a number of articles we already had here, you claimed it was not the same as those...including gender identity. Yet that article begins: "Sexual identity is the sex with which a person identifies..."  How can both terms be this, yet not be the same?  Once again, as I said in that earlier discussion, this is extremely confusing for the reader...and when you reader is someone who has had to explain these topics to lay people for most of her life, like myself, and I'm still confused by your writing, that may be problematic, wouldn't you agree?  --  Paige 05:16, 23 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I read your comment, wrote what follows, looked back at the article, and then almost decided to change "sex" to "gender," but it's more complicated than that. The problem arises because, in the thinking of most people, there is no difference between sex and gender. I've got to think about it some more. Something has to be done, you're right. But "gender identity is the gender you identify with" sounds like a circular definitition even though it isn't... It's too late to think clearly right now.

Maybe I didn't say that clearly enough. A person has his/her assessment of his/her sex. That assessment may include information not available to the other kids in the locker room, teachers, etc. A person may know, for instance, that he actually has ovaries instead of undescended testicles, and if prosthetic testicles have been provided nobody else may be the wiser. But he will know that his sexual status includes the fact that he will never fertilize an ovum and father a child. A person can be mistaken about his/her sexual identity. One of Anne Fausto-Sterling's books starts out by recounting the story of a world-class athlete who participated all her life as a woman until, after winning an important competition had to go through a chromosomal check on sex, when it was discovered that she was chromosomally XY. I think it was a mistake to pin the issue of sexual status on that single test, but the XY status was certain one important factor about her sexual identity of which she was ignorant.

Gender identity is not the sex with which a person identifies, it's the gender with which a person identifies. "I know I have a penis and testicles, but I'm a woman trapped in a man's body." Basic level, male sex is the ability to produce sperm, and that's what this person has. But there is something about brain or psyche or spirit or however you want to conceptualize it that says, "No, that's not me. I belong with other women."


 * Paige, I do not believe Patrick0Moran is using quotes around the word reassigned with the intention of being condescending; I believe he is using the quotation marks either to (1) distinguish that the term may be used differently in this context than it is in the larger public, or (2) indicate that it is the specific term under discussion in that part of the article. Please keep in mind that this is a touchy subject, and even when an individual is trying their hardest, the various affected individuals will likely have differing reactions to the same thing.

Actually, I was putting quotation marks around the word "reassigned" because of the way (or so it seems to me) that John Money and some other people in the field trivialize the change they make in people who have no say in what becomes of them. To me it is one of those terms like "sanitize" is when it's applied to the population of some village of subsistance farmers somewhere, and where it really means to use firearms to wipe everybody out. It's not a trivial decision like assigning some individual to one school district and then assigning him/her to some other school district. It's a terribly grave decision, and it should have a fittingly grave and non-cosmetic term. I just don't know the word.


 * Also, are there conventions on gender neutral pronouns? I typically use "s/he" or the grammatically incorrect "they," and occasionally "one" or "an individual."  Is there a particular other way which is more acceptable?

This is another area where I have tried to stick to plural pronouns because language forces us into imputing either male sex or masculine gender or female sex or feminine gender to every individual. What is the appropriate pronoun for a person whose experience of self is as neither man nor woman nor boy nor girl? To use "it" sounds utterly dehumanizing...


 * Patrick, I actually like your original first paragraph better than the one you suggest here. But I do not have as vested an interest, so perhaps others can be a better judge of what is appropriate.


 * --zandperl 05:29, 23 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I'm really woozy now. Which "original first paragraph"? I think the fewer vested interests one has the easier it is to be objective. But, on the other hand, completely interest-free people probably won't move a muscle. ;-)

Patrick0Moran 07:44, 23 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Discussion of Specific Points in Dispute

 * Also, several of your statements simply incorrectly define key terms, most notably sex, gender, gender identity, transsexual, and gender dysphoria. I'm not sure where this misinformation has come from, but I really do think that it would be best if articles made every effort to use terms as they are defined elsewhere within the Wikipedia, because disputes have already been worked out there, also for continuity, if nothing else. Also, gender neutral pronouns might be nice for these topics, if you don't mind. -- Paige 05:04, 23 Oct 2003 (UTC)

It's always possible that I've misspoken somewhere, but here are definitions that I would accept. What is your objection, if any, to each of the following?

From the article on sex:

The members of many species of living things are divided into two or more categories called sexes. These categories refer to complementary groups that combine genetic material in order to reproduce. This process is called sexual reproduction. Typically, a species will have two sexes: male and female The female sex is defined as the one that produces the larger gamete (i.e., reproductive cell).

From the article on gender:

Social scientists use gender to refer to a particular social identity, status, and cluster of roles, that are often (but not exclusively) assigned on the basis of sex.

From specialists:

gender identity: Francis Mark Mondimore, A Natural History of  Homosexuality, p. 108: "Individuals' genetic sex can

differ from their anatomic sex and from their gender identity (the individual's self-identity as a man or as a woman)."

transsexual: Anne Fausto-Sterling, in Sexing the Body, p. 253, speaks of "the modern-day transsexual, a person who uses surgery and hormones to transform his or her birth genitals."

transsexual: Francis Mark Mondimore, A Natural History of Homosexuality,  explains the origin of the word: "The Latin root for 'across' was combined with 'sex' to describe these individuals, who express the desire to cross over the seemingly uncrossable biological divide between male and female and become the opposite sex.... Transsexualism is a rare condition.... The defining characteristic is the desire to relinquish the role of the gender defined by one's anatomy and take up the identity of the opposite sex: anatomic males who desire to have the body and identity of a woman, or anatomic females who desire to have the body and identity of a man."

transexual: John Money, Gay, Straight, and In-Between, p. 88: "In contemporary usage, the term transexualism is used as a name for the sex-reassignment method of rehabilitation, as well as for the syndrome treated by means of sex reassignment."


 * Re the term transsexual: Why not look at the definition for transsexualism from the Wikipedia entry? Fausto-Sterling's definition of transsexualism doesn't encompass the desire for a transsexual to transition, neither does Money, who even spells it wrong. The point of desire is even expressed in the DSM-IV, if you're looking for more concretely established information. Dysprosia 07:08, 25 Oct 2003 (UTC)


 * That article has:

"A transsexual is a person who establishes a permanent identity with the opposite gender to his or her birth sex. The stereotypical explanation is of a "man trapped in a woman's body" or vice versa. A transsexual makes or desires to make a transition from their birth sex to that of the opposite sex, with some type of medical alteration to their body."


 * That definition looks o.k. to me. There are two spellings, and I prefer the one with two Ss. Sometimes people try to improve what is alread simple enough. Patrick0Moran 15:34, 25 Oct 2003 (UTC)
 * Unrelated point - I think the spelling with one "s" is incorrect; examine the etymology. Dysprosia 15:43, 25 Oct 2003 (UTC)
 * I have to agree with you on the spelling. I wouldn't use it myself. Patrick0Moran 20:31, 25 Oct 2003 (UTC)

gender dysphoria: Francis Mark Mondimore, op. cit., p. 185:  "Transsexual persons suffer from a profound unappiness and discomfort about their gender identity called 'gender dysphoria' (dysphoria is a clinical term used to describe any unpleasant psychological state). "

gender dysphoria: John Money, Gay, Straight, and In-Between, p. 88. "The syndrome of transexualism is known also as gender dysphoria according to a system of nomenclature that is based on concepts of patients' inner feelings and convictions, as an alternative to more empirical and objective evidence."

gender dysphoria: John Money, Lovemaps, p. 284: "the state, as subjectively experienced, of incongruity between the genital anatomy and the gender-identity/role (G-I/R), particularly in the syndromes of transexualism and transvestism."

One other thing, there are some good examples from real life of the "dangers of gender transgression" in Fausto-Sterling's book mentioned above, p. 110. "In a recent court case, a mother charged that her son, a transvestite, died because paramedics stopped treating him after discovering his male genitals." There are some very strange feelings engendered by behavioral expectations related to sex and gender that begin to be set up practically at birth. One female nurse escaped a mass murderer who killed every other woman in her dorm because she went into the women's restroom. The killer called to her to come out, but he refrained from going into the restroom after her. It may be helpful to examine why societies universally, or almost universally, establish requirements that make it easy to determine one's sex without viewing one's genitals. Note that the paramedics did not inquire into their patient's gender identity. The acted when the saw male genitals on a person who was out in society dressed as a woman.

Patrick0Moran 05:55, 24 Oct 2003 (UTC)

- (Moved comment on transsexual/transexual definition to that location.

Patrick0Moran 15:32, 25 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I've removed "As indicated above, in some cases the reason for this discord is easy to find in the history of the individual. In some cases an individual has a male (XY) chromosomal sex, but (for a variety of possible reasons) the individual's genitalia have not grown naturally and appear to be entirely female. In other cases an individual has a female (XX) chromosomal sex, but hormonal imbalances during a critical period in gestation cause the body of this individual to become masculinized. The chromosomal sex, and the truth about the internal genitalia of the individual, may become manifest at puberty as when, in the case of an individual who is chromosomally female, menstruation and other changes appear in the individual who, up to that point, has been regarded as a boy. " - the details were mentioned in the previous paragraph, and this para is going slightly offtopic and should be in intersex perhaps. Dysprosia 07:13, 31 Oct 2003 (UTC)