GENDER IDENTITY

Gender identity

Gender Identity

Gender identity is defined as a set of behaviors, attitudes, symbolism, and meanings that develop during the psycho-sexual development. It is a long process of imitation, education and learning model is based on representations that the child internalizes the way he should think and behave as a sexual being. The sex we identify male or female, but this does not mean that we can qualify for male or female. This gender identity, built throughout our lives in a constant interaction between the biological and socio-cultural, yet is crucial to our position in relation to another (Maccoby, 1990).

Most gender scholars today agree that gender is a socially constructed category of identity. This means that gender is something that is created by discourse, roles, and norms that are agreed upon by a given society. In lay conversation, gender is often conflated with the term sex, which is said to be biological and based on a person's chromosomal makeup, DNA, and genitalia. The most common categories of sex are male, female, and intersex (individuals), but there are myriad other “sexes” out there, existing in liminal spaces and identity formations . Gender, which is not necessarily correlated to biological sex, is judged on a continuum of how a person identifies himself or herself on a spectrum of masculine-androgynous-feminine. Different schools of thought have produced different ways to think about gender and identity. This entry discusses several of these views

Gender and Sex

Gender in holistic term is different from sex and refers the characteristics, relationships, personality traits, behavioral patterns, attitudes, values, relative power and influence that a society or cultures describes as masculine or feminine.

World health organization defines gender as economic, social, and cultural attributes and opportunities associated with being a male or female. While sex refers to physical characteristics of the body and the sexual act itself, gender refers to psychological differences, social and cultural relations between men and women. The term "sex" is ambiguous. The distinction between sex and gender is vital because many differences between males and females are not biological in origin. It thought that sex differences are genetic, but this is not entirely correct (Maccoby, 1990). It is useful therefore, to distinguish between sex, physiological or biological sense of the term, and gender is a cultural construct, is a relation variable, contingent and therefore changing (a series of learned behavior patterns).

Kohlberg's Cognitive Development Theory

Gender Labeling

Gender labeling refers to recognizing oneself as male or female, kinds from twenty four months can sort male and female pictures with from thirty one months, they can identify themselves as being in one of the two sex classes. Children categorize as male and female based on physical characteristics i.e. clothing, hair style etc.

Gender Stability

In the second stage i.e. gender stability; children accept the fact males will remain males and females as females throughout. This generally occurs at the age of four and five although; kids do have certain gaps left in their understanding and misperception lies as to whether superficial ...