Framework for Understanding Gender Identity

Sex vs. Gender Video

Sex refers to biology—genitalia, chromosomes, hormones, and so on. Sex is all objectively determined. Gender, however, is subjective, according to the lecture: gender is how you “move through the world,” and how you see yourself as well as how others see you. In the lecture Dr. BP even admits that these concepts are confusing and that even though it is important to understand the distinctions between the two, it is easy to confuse them.

I would have to agree with that statement—especially when it comes to “identifying” others. So, for instance, what happens if a person who is objectively a man—i.e., his biological sex is male—moves through the world identifying as a woman. He identifies as a woman and wants to be seen as a woman. Yet, another person, identifies him still as a male. This entire situation seems explosive and like a giant conflict waiting to happen. The person who wants to emphasize gender over sex will say that he has a right to identify as he likes. But what about the right of another person to identify that same individual as he prefers? This seems very stressful to me. And then there is the added conflict of, say, a situation like the current one in the media, where there is a male swimmer that identifies as a woman at a US college and that swimmer is dominating in the female swimming competitions. Other female swimmers feel the male has a biological advantage over them and that it shows in the competitions—even though the male has been undergoing hormone therapy and so on. This is the type of conflict I am envisioning when this separation of sex and gender is really emphasized. I am wondering if this separation is a recent development in our society, or if it has been one that people have generally recognized for a long time in the past.

Clearly hormones affect behavior, which means biology does impact how we see ourselves or see others, for men and women alike, as the PPT in Week 3 shows. And if a person who wants to identify as a sex other than that which he was born with then gets hormone therapy to be more biologically like that sex he wants to identify as—I am not seeing what gender really is other than a subjective interpretation of things. So is the subjective elevated over the objective when it comes to appreciating the psychology of gender—or is there something else going on?

This is a topic I would like to explore in more detail, especially as it applies to my final paper, which I might focus on sex, gender, and suicide or sex, gender and crime. I am interested in the conflict aspect of this discussion, and how it relates to the sociology of sex and gender. It seems like we are using terms that reflect something more of an ideology that not everyone has embraced or really wants to embrace. So how does this tension get resolved—and how does it affect people at the individual level?

Theories of Gender Development, Week 4

This was an interesting lecture that definitely got me thinking about Freud and how men and women think about sex and the orgasm. I thought this was interesting, considering how focused on sex Freud was with his own psychoanalysis theory. I myself don’t have a problem with the female orgasm being different from the male orgasm. Obviously, they are different, and that’s just the way it is—it’s part of the biological difference between men and women. I don’t think there’s any good reason for men or women to feel insecure about this difference either. I don’t like the macho attitude of some men who take the position that they don’t care whether their female mate has an orgasm. That kind of attitude is really too self-centered.

But it is something that is socially learned, kind of the way kids socially learn about gender. Of course, as Dr. BP points out—it’s not all social learning. There are cognitive development theories that explain how kids learn about gender, too, and I think they also help to explain how adults think about gender as well. It really is a nature AND a nurture phenomenon—not a nature VS. nurture phenomenon. That is something I like to keep in mind when thinking about how we develop, and how we obtain the perspectives we have.

We all see and learn from those around us, and that is true when it comes to understanding gender and how we model for gender. We think of our own parents a lot of times and draw our conclusions from what we pick from the example they give us. Or we have our own friends and experiences to draw on—and at the same time, as we age we go through developments. In our teenage years there are a lot of hormones going through our bodies for the first time and it really causes a big change in us. And so that is a lot to process.

So this really plays in with the rest of the lectures from the Week in the sense that we are all conforming or not conforming in some degree to “norms” that are established in different ways—by peers, groups or media, as Bandura has pointed out. If there are boys with long hair, this is not a big deal in my opinion. In fact, some people even really like to see boys with long hair—and I have some friends who are that way. I myself don’t mind it, but others in certain groups or of a certain generation will see it as feminine. I think the big takeaway is that norms change from time to time and place to place, and there is no set in stone idea of what a real man or real woman should be, unless one ascribes to a particular ideology or framework. Obviously, someone who loves John Wayne is going to think real men should act a certain way—probably much differently from someone who loves Oprah. These are different frameworks for understanding gender.

Works Cited

Bandura, Albert, et al. "Self?efficacy beliefs as shapers of children's aspirations and

career trajectories." Child development 72.1 (2001): 187-206.

Transgender Experiences and Masculinity and Femininity

Gender is interesting in that the terms themselves are so representative of clashing viewpoints on the subject. For instance, gender binary refers to “the categorization of gender into two distinct, opposite sexes” (Transgender Experiences). If someone is applying this category, that person is likely to dismiss the concept of transgender as something that does not or should not exist. Yet in a class on gender, these terms are part of a discussion on Gender 101. So how do we navigate this obviously contentious realm, where there are potential pitfalls and people are going to get upset regardless—for not everyone is going to agree with these terms. For instance, I never heard of “cisgender” before—but I guess I am “cisgender” because I identify exclusively as the sex assigned at birth. But if sex is biological—how is it “assigned”? I thought sex was objectively determined because it is biological—one has genitalia, hormones, etc. So this doesn’t seem like something that is “assigned” by doctors or parents or any third party: it is one’s biology. Gender, it could be argued, is assigned—and yet, earlier in the week it was stated that gender is how one moves through the world, how one sees oneself and how others see one—so this is not necessarily something that is “fixed” or “assigned” either. So I really think these terms or not very effective at clearing up some of the confusion I have. If anything, they just make an already confusing topic and make it even more confusing for me.