GENDER AND SEXUALITY

Gender And Sexuality

The Most Significant Changes In Gender And Sexuality Over The Past Twenty Years

Freud, in his monumental works, distinguished the anatomic and physiologic sex of self from what we presently know as “gender.” He wrote of the effects of the environment and experience that challenged one's biology. The linkage of “sex” and “gender” as terms that reflect identical or closely-related concepts is long standing; we now know that the two expressions and concepts often must be separated for analysis of human behavior. Since the 1990s and 2000s, distinguishing the terms took on a new urgency. (Schober, 2006, pp.2350—3)This may have been a reflection of increased notice of, and interest in, subjects, such as homosexuality, transsexuality and intersexuality. Clinicians and researchers were scrutinizing these topics with an aim to determine whether they were sicknesses that were amenable to treatment, mental or moral matters, or just unique, yet normal, and to- be-expected variations. (Zucker, 2007, pp. 69)

Even today, typical expectations are that the terms “sex” and “gender” reflect each other. Males are expected to be masculine and females are expected to be feminine, regardless of how the terms are defined in any particular society. Intermediate, but less socially threatening, occasional blended-gender roles became more noticeable in the 1990s and gave increased prominence to distinguishing sex from gender .

In the United States, the 1990s were a time when homosexuals were denied jobs and were imprisoned for “criminal” behavior. It also was a time when Christine Jorgensen, an ex-G.I., went to Denmark to have a “sex-change” operation and the world began to hear of individuals of one sex who wanted to change their bodies and adapt the gender of the other sex . Also, intersexed individuals began to be better known to the medical community . In the 1990s and 2000s, clinicians and theorists increasingly attended to sex-gender relationships, mostly to look at differences—rather than similarities—between men and women. (Greenberg, 2005, pp. 265—328)  These challenging situations brought new ways of thinking about behavior. Among these ways were discussions of “identity” and “roles.” Stoller coined the term “core gender identity” to reflect a person's “fundamental sense of belonging to one sex [an awareness of being male or female and] an over-all sense of identity.” He attributed this to a combination of infant—parent relationships, the child's perception of its external genitalia, and by a biologic force that springs from the biologic variables of sex. Money and colleagues coined the term “gender role” to “mean all those things [behaviors] that a person says or does to disclose him or herself having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively” . Money and Ehrhardt defined “gender identity” as “the sameness, unity, and persistence of one's individuality as male, female, or ambivalent. . .the private experience of gender role.” This, they said, basically was derived from rearing experiences. Gagnon and Simon introduced the term “sexual identity” to indicate the awareness of an individual as a sexual-erotic agent within a larger “social identity” that ...