gender orientation essay

Essay on Sexual Orientation And Gender Identity

Students are often asked to write an essay on Sexual Orientation And Gender Identity in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on Sexual Orientation And Gender Identity

What is sexual orientation.

Sexual orientation refers to who you are attracted to emotionally and physically. It can be towards the opposite sex (heterosexuality), the same sex (homosexuality), or both sexes (bisexuality).

What is Gender Identity?

Gender identity refers to how you identify yourself in terms of being male, female, or something else. It is different from biological sex, which is determined by your chromosomes and reproductive organs.

Understanding Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

Sexual orientation and gender identity are two distinct aspects of a person’s identity. One’s sexual orientation does not determine their gender identity, and vice versa.

Respecting Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

It is important to respect everyone’s sexual orientation and gender identity. Everyone deserves to be treated with respect and dignity, regardless of who they are attracted to or how they identify themselves.

250 Words Essay on Sexual Orientation And Gender Identity

Sexual orientation.

People can be attracted to people of the opposite sex, the same sex, or both sexes. Some people may feel attracted to people regardless of their sex or gender identity.

Sexual orientation is not a choice. People are born with their sexual orientation, and it is not something they can change.

Gender Identity

Gender identity refers to an individual’s deeply felt sense of being male, female, a blend of both, or neither. It is not the same as biological sex, which is assigned at birth based on physical characteristics.

People may identify with a gender that is different from the sex they were assigned at birth. This is called being transgender.

Transgender people may experience discrimination and prejudice because of their gender identity. They may be denied jobs, housing, and healthcare. They may also be subjected to violence and harassment.

Importance of Understanding and Respecting Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

No one should be discriminated against or harassed because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

We should all work to create a more inclusive and welcoming society for everyone.

500 Words Essay on Sexual Orientation And Gender Identity

Sexual orientation: an overview, gender identity: understanding self-perception.

Gender identity refers to an individual’s sense of being male, female, both, or neither, regardless of their biological sex assigned at birth. It is a complex and personal experience that involves a person’s innermost sense of self. Gender identity is distinct from sexual orientation and can be expressed through various aspects of a person’s life, such as their name, pronouns, and outward appearance.

Social Acceptance and Discrimination

Sexual orientation and gender identity have been topics of discussion and debate throughout history. While some societies have shown acceptance and understanding, others have faced discrimination and prejudice. Discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, often referred to as sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) discrimination, can manifest in various forms, including social exclusion, denial of rights, and even violence.

The Importance of Equality and Inclusion

Challenges and the way forward.

The journey towards full acceptance and equality for people of all sexual orientations and gender identities is ongoing. While progress has been made in many countries, challenges still exist. Efforts to educate and raise awareness about sexual orientation and gender identity are vital in combating discrimination and promoting understanding. Additionally, creating safe and supportive environments, both in schools and workplaces, is essential in fostering a sense of belonging and well-being among individuals from diverse backgrounds.

In conclusion, sexual orientation and gender identity are fundamental aspects of human diversity and should be recognized and respected. Promoting equality, inclusion, and acceptance for all individuals, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity, is a crucial step towards building a just and harmonious society.

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Understanding Gender, Sex, and Gender Identity

It's more important than ever to use this terminology correctly..

Posted February 27, 2021 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina

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Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene hung a sign outside her Capitol office door that said “There are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE. ‘Trust the Science!’” There are many reasons to question hanging such a sign, but given that Rep. Taylor Greene invoked science in making her assertion, I thought it might be helpful to clarify by citing some actual science. Put simply, from a scientific standpoint, Rep. Taylor Greene’s statement is patently wrong. It perpetuates a common error by conflating gender with sex . Allow me to explain how psychologists scientifically operationalize these terms.

According to the American Psychological Association (APA, 2012), sex is rooted in biology. A person’s sex is determined using observable biological criteria such as sex chromosomes, gonads, internal reproductive organs, and external genitalia (APA, 2012). Most people are classified as being either biologically male or female, although the term intersex is reserved for those with atypical combinations of biological features (APA, 2012).

Gender is related to but distinctly different from sex; it is rooted in culture, not biology. The APA (2012) defines gender as “the attitudes, feelings, and behaviors that a given culture associates with a person’s biological sex” (p. 11). Gender conformity occurs when people abide by culturally-derived gender roles (APA, 2012). Resisting gender roles (i.e., gender nonconformity ) can have significant social consequences—pro and con, depending on circumstances.

Gender identity refers to how one understands and experiences one’s own gender. It involves a person’s psychological sense of being male, female, or neither (APA, 2012). Those who identify as transgender feel that their gender identity doesn’t match their biological sex or the gender they were assigned at birth; in some cases they don’t feel they fit into into either the male or female gender categories (APA, 2012; Moleiro & Pinto, 2015). How people live out their gender identities in everyday life (in terms of how they dress, behave, and express themselves) constitutes their gender expression (APA, 2012; Drescher, 2014).

“Male” and “female” are the most common gender identities in Western culture; they form a dualistic way of thinking about gender that often informs the identity options that people feel are available to them (Prentice & Carranza, 2002). Anyone, regardless of biological sex, can closely adhere to culturally-constructed notions of “maleness” or “femaleness” by dressing, talking, and taking interest in activities stereotypically associated with traditional male or female gender identities. However, many people think “outside the box” when it comes to gender, constructing identities for themselves that move beyond the male-female binary. For examples, explore lists of famous “gender benders” from Oxygen , Vogue , More , and The Cut (not to mention Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head , whose evolving gender identities made headlines this week).

Whether society approves of these identities or not, the science on whether there are more than two genders is clear; there are as many possible gender identities as there are people psychologically forming identities. Rep. Taylor Greene’s insistence that there are just two genders merely reflects Western culture’s longstanding tradition of only recognizing “male” and “female” gender identities as “normal.” However, if we are to “trust the science” (as Rep. Taylor Greene’s recommends), then the first thing we need to do is stop mixing up biological sex and gender identity. The former may be constrained by biology, but the latter is only constrained by our imaginations.

American Psychological Association. (2012). Guidelines for psychological practice with lesbian, gay, and bisexual clients. American Psychologist , 67 (1), 10-42. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024659

Drescher, J. (2014). Treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender patients. In R. E. Hales, S. C. Yudofsky, & L. W. Roberts (Eds.), The American Psychiatric Publishing textbook of psychiatry (6th ed., pp. 1293-1318). American Psychiatric Publishing.

Moleiro, C., & Pinto, N. (2015). Sexual orientation and gender identity: Review of concepts, controversies and their relation to psychopathology classification systems. Frontiers in Psychology , 6 .

Prentice, D. A., & Carranza, E. (2002). What women should be, shouldn't be, are allowed to be, and don't have to be: The contents of prescriptive gender stereotypes. Psychology of Women Quarterly , 26 (4), 269-281. https://doi.org/10.1111/1471-6402.t01-1-00066

Jonathan D. Raskin, Ph.D. , is a professor of psychology and counselor education at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

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Pride Month

A guide to gender identity terms.

Laurel Wamsley

"Pronouns are basically how we identify ourselves apart from our name. It's how someone refers to you in conversation," says Mary Emily O'Hara, a communications officer at GLAAD. "And when you're speaking to people, it's a really simple way to affirm their identity." Kaz Fantone for NPR hide caption

"Pronouns are basically how we identify ourselves apart from our name. It's how someone refers to you in conversation," says Mary Emily O'Hara, a communications officer at GLAAD. "And when you're speaking to people, it's a really simple way to affirm their identity."

Issues of equality and acceptance of transgender and nonbinary people — along with challenges to their rights — have become a major topic in the headlines. These issues can involve words and ideas and identities that are new to some.

That's why we've put together a glossary of terms relating to gender identity. Our goal is to help people communicate accurately and respectfully with one another.

Proper use of gender identity terms, including pronouns, is a crucial way to signal courtesy and acceptance. Alex Schmider , associate director of transgender representation at GLAAD, compares using someone's correct pronouns to pronouncing their name correctly – "a way of respecting them and referring to them in a way that's consistent and true to who they are."

Glossary of gender identity terms

This guide was created with help from GLAAD . We also referenced resources from the National Center for Transgender Equality , the Trans Journalists Association , NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists , Human Rights Campaign , InterAct and the American Psychological Association . This guide is not exhaustive, and is Western and U.S.-centric. Other cultures may use different labels and have other conceptions of gender.

One thing to note: Language changes. Some of the terms now in common usage are different from those used in the past to describe similar ideas, identities and experiences. Some people may continue to use terms that are less commonly used now to describe themselves, and some people may use different terms entirely. What's important is recognizing and respecting people as individuals.

Jump to a term: Sex, gender , gender identity , gender expression , cisgender , transgender , nonbinary , agender , gender-expansive , gender transition , gender dysphoria , sexual orientation , intersex

Jump to Pronouns : questions and answers

Sex refers to a person's biological status and is typically assigned at birth, usually on the basis of external anatomy. Sex is typically categorized as male, female or intersex.

Gender is often defined as a social construct of norms, behaviors and roles that varies between societies and over time. Gender is often categorized as male, female or nonbinary.

Gender identity is one's own internal sense of self and their gender, whether that is man, woman, neither or both. Unlike gender expression, gender identity is not outwardly visible to others.

For most people, gender identity aligns with the sex assigned at birth, the American Psychological Association notes. For transgender people, gender identity differs in varying degrees from the sex assigned at birth.

Gender expression is how a person presents gender outwardly, through behavior, clothing, voice or other perceived characteristics. Society identifies these cues as masculine or feminine, although what is considered masculine or feminine changes over time and varies by culture.

Cisgender, or simply cis , is an adjective that describes a person whose gender identity aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth.

Transgender, or simply trans, is an adjective used to describe someone whose gender identity differs from the sex assigned at birth. A transgender man, for example, is someone who was listed as female at birth but whose gender identity is male.

Cisgender and transgender have their origins in Latin-derived prefixes of "cis" and "trans" — cis, meaning "on this side of" and trans, meaning "across from" or "on the other side of." Both adjectives are used to describe experiences of someone's gender identity.

Nonbinary is a term that can be used by people who do not describe themselves or their genders as fitting into the categories of man or woman. A range of terms are used to refer to these experiences; nonbinary and genderqueer are among the terms that are sometimes used.

Agender is an adjective that can describe a person who does not identify as any gender.

Gender-expansive is an adjective that can describe someone with a more flexible gender identity than might be associated with a typical gender binary.

Gender transition is a process a person may take to bring themselves and/or their bodies into alignment with their gender identity. It's not just one step. Transitioning can include any, none or all of the following: telling one's friends, family and co-workers; changing one's name and pronouns; updating legal documents; medical interventions such as hormone therapy; or surgical intervention, often called gender confirmation surgery.

Gender dysphoria refers to psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one's sex assigned at birth and one's gender identity. Not all trans people experience dysphoria, and those who do may experience it at varying levels of intensity.

Gender dysphoria is a diagnosis listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Some argue that such a diagnosis inappropriately pathologizes gender incongruence, while others contend that a diagnosis makes it easier for transgender people to access necessary medical treatment.

Sexual orientation refers to the enduring physical, romantic and/or emotional attraction to members of the same and/or other genders, including lesbian, gay, bisexual and straight orientations.

People don't need to have had specific sexual experiences to know their own sexual orientation. They need not have had any sexual experience at all. They need not be in a relationship, dating or partnered with anyone for their sexual orientation to be validated. For example, if a bisexual woman is partnered with a man, that does not mean she is not still bisexual.

Sexual orientation is separate from gender identity. As GLAAD notes , "Transgender people may be straight, lesbian, gay, bisexual or queer. For example, a person who transitions from male to female and is attracted solely to men would typically identify as a straight woman. A person who transitions from female to male and is attracted solely to men would typically identify as a gay man."

Intersex is an umbrella term used to describe people with differences in reproductive anatomy, chromosomes or hormones that don't fit typical definitions of male and female.

Intersex can refer to a number of natural variations, some of them laid out by InterAct . Being intersex is not the same as being nonbinary or transgender, which are terms typically related to gender identity.

The Picture Show

Nonbinary photographer documents gender dysphoria through a queer lens, pronouns: questions and answers.

What is the role of pronouns in acknowledging someone's gender identity?

Everyone has pronouns that are used when referring to them – and getting those pronouns right is not exclusively a transgender issue.

"Pronouns are basically how we identify ourselves apart from our name. It's how someone refers to you in conversation," says Mary Emily O'Hara , a communications officer at GLAAD. "And when you're speaking to people, it's a really simple way to affirm their identity."

"So, for example, using the correct pronouns for trans and nonbinary youth is a way to let them know that you see them, you affirm them, you accept them and to let them know that they're loved during a time when they're really being targeted by so many discriminatory anti-trans state laws and policies," O'Hara says.

"It's really just about letting someone know that you accept their identity. And it's as simple as that."

Getting the words right is about respect and accuracy, says Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, deputy executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. Kaz Fantone for NPR hide caption

Getting the words right is about respect and accuracy, says Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, deputy executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality.

What's the right way to find out a person's pronouns?

Start by giving your own – for example, "My pronouns are she/her."

"If I was introducing myself to someone, I would say, 'I'm Rodrigo. I use him pronouns. What about you?' " says Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen , deputy executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality.

O'Hara says, "It may feel awkward at first, but eventually it just becomes another one of those get-to-know-you questions."

Should people be asking everyone their pronouns? Or does it depend on the setting?

Knowing each other's pronouns helps you be sure you have accurate information about another person.

How a person appears in terms of gender expression "doesn't indicate anything about what their gender identity is," GLAAD's Schmider says. By sharing pronouns, "you're going to get to know someone a little better."

And while it can be awkward at first, it can quickly become routine.

Heng-Lehtinen notes that the practice of stating one's pronouns at the bottom of an email or during introductions at a meeting can also relieve some headaches for people whose first names are less common or gender ambiguous.

"Sometimes Americans look at a name and are like, 'I have no idea if I'm supposed to say he or she for this name' — not because the person's trans, but just because the name is of a culture that you don't recognize and you genuinely do not know. So having the pronouns listed saves everyone the headache," Heng-Lehtinen says. "It can be really, really quick once you make a habit of it. And I think it saves a lot of embarrassment for everybody."

Might some people be uncomfortable sharing their pronouns in a public setting?

Schmider says for cisgender people, sharing their pronouns is generally pretty easy – so long as they recognize that they have pronouns and know what they are. For others, it could be more difficult to share their pronouns in places where they don't know people.

But there are still benefits in sharing pronouns, he says. "It's an indication that they understand that gender expression does not equal gender identity, that you're not judging people just based on the way they look and making assumptions about their gender beyond what you actually know about them."

How is "they" used as a singular pronoun?

"They" is already commonly used as a singular pronoun when we are talking about someone, and we don't know who they are, O'Hara notes. Using they/them pronouns for someone you do know simply represents "just a little bit of a switch."

"You're just asking someone to not act as if they don't know you, but to remove gendered language from their vocabulary when they're talking about you," O'Hara says.

"I identify as nonbinary myself and I appear feminine. People often assume that my pronouns are she/her. So they will use those. And I'll just gently correct them and say, hey, you know what, my pronouns are they/them just FYI, for future reference or something like that," they say.

O'Hara says their family and friends still struggle with getting the pronouns right — and sometimes O'Hara struggles to remember others' pronouns, too.

"In my community, in the queer community, with a lot of trans and nonbinary people, we all frequently remind each other or remind ourselves. It's a sort of constant mindfulness where you are always catching up a little bit," they say.

"You might know someone for 10 years, and then they let you know their pronouns have changed. It's going to take you a little while to adjust, and that's fine. It's OK to make those mistakes and correct yourself, and it's OK to gently correct someone else."

What if I make a mistake and misgender someone, or use the wrong words?

Simply apologize and move on.

"I think it's perfectly natural to not know the right words to use at first. We're only human. It takes any of us some time to get to know a new concept," Heng-Lehtinen says. "The important thing is to just be interested in continuing to learn. So if you mess up some language, you just say, 'Oh, I'm so sorry,' correct yourself and move forward. No need to make it any more complicated than that. Doing that really simple gesture of apologizing quickly and moving on shows the other person that you care. And that makes a really big difference."

Why are pronouns typically given in the format "she/her" or "they/them" rather than just "she" or "they"?

The different iterations reflect that pronouns change based on how they're used in a sentence. And the "he/him" format is actually shorter than the previously common "he/him/his" format.

"People used to say all three and then it got down to two," Heng-Lehtinen laughs. He says staff at his organization was recently wondering if the custom will eventually shorten to just one pronoun. "There's no real rule about it. It's absolutely just been habit," he says.

Amid Wave Of Anti-Trans Bills, Trans Reporters Say 'Telling Our Own Stories' Is Vital

But he notes a benefit of using he/him and she/her: He and she rhyme. "If somebody just says he or she, I could very easily mishear that and then still get it wrong."

What does it mean if a person uses the pronouns "he/they" or "she/they"?

"That means that the person uses both pronouns, and you can alternate between those when referring to them. So either pronoun would be fine — and ideally mix it up, use both. It just means that they use both pronouns that they're listing," Heng-Lehtinen says.

Schmider says it depends on the person: "For some people, they don't mind those pronouns being interchanged for them. And for some people, they are using one specific pronoun in one context and another set of pronouns in another, dependent on maybe safety or comfortability."

The best approach, Schmider says, is to listen to how people refer to themselves.

Why might someone's name be different than what's listed on their ID?

Heng-Lehtinen notes that there's a perception when a person comes out as transgender, they change their name and that's that. But the reality is a lot more complicated and expensive when it comes to updating your name on government documents.

"It is not the same process as changing your last name when you get married. There is bizarrely a separate set of rules for when you are changing your name in marriage versus changing your name for any other reason. And it's more difficult in the latter," he says.

"When you're transgender, you might not be able to update all of your government IDs, even though you want to," he says. "I've been out for over a decade. I still have not been able to update all of my documents because the policies are so onerous. I've been able to update my driver's license, Social Security card and passport, but I cannot update my birth certificate."

"Just because a transgender person doesn't have their authentic name on their ID doesn't mean it's not the name that they really use every day," he advises. "So just be mindful to refer to people by the name they really use regardless of their driver's license."

NPR's Danielle Nett contributed to this report.

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Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender

Feminism is said to be the movement to end women’s oppression (hooks 2000, 26). One possible way to understand ‘woman’ in this claim is to take it as a sex term: ‘woman’ picks out human females and being a human female depends on various biological and anatomical features (like genitalia). Historically many feminists have understood ‘woman’ differently: not as a sex term, but as a gender term that depends on social and cultural factors (like social position). In so doing, they distinguished sex (being female or male) from gender (being a woman or a man), although most ordinary language users appear to treat the two interchangeably. In feminist philosophy, this distinction has generated a lively debate. Central questions include: What does it mean for gender to be distinct from sex, if anything at all? How should we understand the claim that gender depends on social and/or cultural factors? What does it mean to be gendered woman, man, or genderqueer? This entry outlines and discusses distinctly feminist debates on sex and gender considering both historical and more contemporary positions.

1.1 Biological determinism

1.2 gender terminology, 2.1 gender socialisation, 2.2 gender as feminine and masculine personality, 2.3 gender as feminine and masculine sexuality, 3.1.1 particularity argument, 3.1.2 normativity argument, 3.2 is sex classification solely a matter of biology, 3.3 are sex and gender distinct, 3.4 is the sex/gender distinction useful, 4.1.1 gendered social series, 4.1.2 resemblance nominalism, 4.2.1 social subordination and gender, 4.2.2 gender uniessentialism, 4.2.3 gender as positionality, 5. beyond the binary, 6. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the sex/gender distinction..

The terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ mean different things to different feminist theorists and neither are easy or straightforward to characterise. Sketching out some feminist history of the terms provides a helpful starting point.

Most people ordinarily seem to think that sex and gender are coextensive: women are human females, men are human males. Many feminists have historically disagreed and have endorsed the sex/ gender distinction. Provisionally: ‘sex’ denotes human females and males depending on biological features (chromosomes, sex organs, hormones and other physical features); ‘gender’ denotes women and men depending on social factors (social role, position, behaviour or identity). The main feminist motivation for making this distinction was to counter biological determinism or the view that biology is destiny.

A typical example of a biological determinist view is that of Geddes and Thompson who, in 1889, argued that social, psychological and behavioural traits were caused by metabolic state. Women supposedly conserve energy (being ‘anabolic’) and this makes them passive, conservative, sluggish, stable and uninterested in politics. Men expend their surplus energy (being ‘katabolic’) and this makes them eager, energetic, passionate, variable and, thereby, interested in political and social matters. These biological ‘facts’ about metabolic states were used not only to explain behavioural differences between women and men but also to justify what our social and political arrangements ought to be. More specifically, they were used to argue for withholding from women political rights accorded to men because (according to Geddes and Thompson) “what was decided among the prehistoric Protozoa cannot be annulled by Act of Parliament” (quoted from Moi 1999, 18). It would be inappropriate to grant women political rights, as they are simply not suited to have those rights; it would also be futile since women (due to their biology) would simply not be interested in exercising their political rights. To counter this kind of biological determinism, feminists have argued that behavioural and psychological differences have social, rather than biological, causes. For instance, Simone de Beauvoir famously claimed that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, and that “social discrimination produces in women moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to be caused by nature” (Beauvoir 1972 [original 1949], 18; for more, see the entry on Simone de Beauvoir ). Commonly observed behavioural traits associated with women and men, then, are not caused by anatomy or chromosomes. Rather, they are culturally learned or acquired.

Although biological determinism of the kind endorsed by Geddes and Thompson is nowadays uncommon, the idea that behavioural and psychological differences between women and men have biological causes has not disappeared. In the 1970s, sex differences were used to argue that women should not become airline pilots since they will be hormonally unstable once a month and, therefore, unable to perform their duties as well as men (Rogers 1999, 11). More recently, differences in male and female brains have been said to explain behavioural differences; in particular, the anatomy of corpus callosum, a bundle of nerves that connects the right and left cerebral hemispheres, is thought to be responsible for various psychological and behavioural differences. For instance, in 1992, a Time magazine article surveyed then prominent biological explanations of differences between women and men claiming that women’s thicker corpus callosums could explain what ‘women’s intuition’ is based on and impair women’s ability to perform some specialised visual-spatial skills, like reading maps (Gorman 1992). Anne Fausto-Sterling has questioned the idea that differences in corpus callosums cause behavioural and psychological differences. First, the corpus callosum is a highly variable piece of anatomy; as a result, generalisations about its size, shape and thickness that hold for women and men in general should be viewed with caution. Second, differences in adult human corpus callosums are not found in infants; this may suggest that physical brain differences actually develop as responses to differential treatment. Third, given that visual-spatial skills (like map reading) can be improved by practice, even if women and men’s corpus callosums differ, this does not make the resulting behavioural differences immutable. (Fausto-Sterling 2000b, chapter 5).

In order to distinguish biological differences from social/psychological ones and to talk about the latter, feminists appropriated the term ‘gender’. Psychologists writing on transsexuality were the first to employ gender terminology in this sense. Until the 1960s, ‘gender’ was often used to refer to masculine and feminine words, like le and la in French. However, in order to explain why some people felt that they were ‘trapped in the wrong bodies’, the psychologist Robert Stoller (1968) began using the terms ‘sex’ to pick out biological traits and ‘gender’ to pick out the amount of femininity and masculinity a person exhibited. Although (by and large) a person’s sex and gender complemented each other, separating out these terms seemed to make theoretical sense allowing Stoller to explain the phenomenon of transsexuality: transsexuals’ sex and gender simply don’t match.

Along with psychologists like Stoller, feminists found it useful to distinguish sex and gender. This enabled them to argue that many differences between women and men were socially produced and, therefore, changeable. Gayle Rubin (for instance) uses the phrase ‘sex/gender system’ in order to describe “a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention” (1975, 165). Rubin employed this system to articulate that “part of social life which is the locus of the oppression of women” (1975, 159) describing gender as the “socially imposed division of the sexes” (1975, 179). Rubin’s thought was that although biological differences are fixed, gender differences are the oppressive results of social interventions that dictate how women and men should behave. Women are oppressed as women and “by having to be women” (Rubin 1975, 204). However, since gender is social, it is thought to be mutable and alterable by political and social reform that would ultimately bring an end to women’s subordination. Feminism should aim to create a “genderless (though not sexless) society, in which one’s sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with whom one makes love” (Rubin 1975, 204).

In some earlier interpretations, like Rubin’s, sex and gender were thought to complement one another. The slogan ‘Gender is the social interpretation of sex’ captures this view. Nicholson calls this ‘the coat-rack view’ of gender: our sexed bodies are like coat racks and “provide the site upon which gender [is] constructed” (1994, 81). Gender conceived of as masculinity and femininity is superimposed upon the ‘coat-rack’ of sex as each society imposes on sexed bodies their cultural conceptions of how males and females should behave. This socially constructs gender differences – or the amount of femininity/masculinity of a person – upon our sexed bodies. That is, according to this interpretation, all humans are either male or female; their sex is fixed. But cultures interpret sexed bodies differently and project different norms on those bodies thereby creating feminine and masculine persons. Distinguishing sex and gender, however, also enables the two to come apart: they are separable in that one can be sexed male and yet be gendered a woman, or vice versa (Haslanger 2000b; Stoljar 1995).

So, this group of feminist arguments against biological determinism suggested that gender differences result from cultural practices and social expectations. Nowadays it is more common to denote this by saying that gender is socially constructed. This means that genders (women and men) and gendered traits (like being nurturing or ambitious) are the “intended or unintended product[s] of a social practice” (Haslanger 1995, 97). But which social practices construct gender, what social construction is and what being of a certain gender amounts to are major feminist controversies. There is no consensus on these issues. (See the entry on intersections between analytic and continental feminism for more on different ways to understand gender.)

2. Gender as socially constructed

One way to interpret Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born but rather becomes a woman is to take it as a claim about gender socialisation: females become women through a process whereby they acquire feminine traits and learn feminine behaviour. Masculinity and femininity are thought to be products of nurture or how individuals are brought up. They are causally constructed (Haslanger 1995, 98): social forces either have a causal role in bringing gendered individuals into existence or (to some substantial sense) shape the way we are qua women and men. And the mechanism of construction is social learning. For instance, Kate Millett takes gender differences to have “essentially cultural, rather than biological bases” that result from differential treatment (1971, 28–9). For her, gender is “the sum total of the parents’, the peers’, and the culture’s notions of what is appropriate to each gender by way of temperament, character, interests, status, worth, gesture, and expression” (Millett 1971, 31). Feminine and masculine gender-norms, however, are problematic in that gendered behaviour conveniently fits with and reinforces women’s subordination so that women are socialised into subordinate social roles: they learn to be passive, ignorant, docile, emotional helpmeets for men (Millett 1971, 26). However, since these roles are simply learned, we can create more equal societies by ‘unlearning’ social roles. That is, feminists should aim to diminish the influence of socialisation.

Social learning theorists hold that a huge array of different influences socialise us as women and men. This being the case, it is extremely difficult to counter gender socialisation. For instance, parents often unconsciously treat their female and male children differently. When parents have been asked to describe their 24- hour old infants, they have done so using gender-stereotypic language: boys are describes as strong, alert and coordinated and girls as tiny, soft and delicate. Parents’ treatment of their infants further reflects these descriptions whether they are aware of this or not (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 32). Some socialisation is more overt: children are often dressed in gender stereotypical clothes and colours (boys are dressed in blue, girls in pink) and parents tend to buy their children gender stereotypical toys. They also (intentionally or not) tend to reinforce certain ‘appropriate’ behaviours. While the precise form of gender socialization has changed since the onset of second-wave feminism, even today girls are discouraged from playing sports like football or from playing ‘rough and tumble’ games and are more likely than boys to be given dolls or cooking toys to play with; boys are told not to ‘cry like a baby’ and are more likely to be given masculine toys like trucks and guns (for more, see Kimmel 2000, 122–126). [ 1 ]

According to social learning theorists, children are also influenced by what they observe in the world around them. This, again, makes countering gender socialisation difficult. For one, children’s books have portrayed males and females in blatantly stereotypical ways: for instance, males as adventurers and leaders, and females as helpers and followers. One way to address gender stereotyping in children’s books has been to portray females in independent roles and males as non-aggressive and nurturing (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 35). Some publishers have attempted an alternative approach by making their characters, for instance, gender-neutral animals or genderless imaginary creatures (like TV’s Teletubbies). However, parents reading books with gender-neutral or genderless characters often undermine the publishers’ efforts by reading them to their children in ways that depict the characters as either feminine or masculine. According to Renzetti and Curran, parents labelled the overwhelming majority of gender-neutral characters masculine whereas those characters that fit feminine gender stereotypes (for instance, by being helpful and caring) were labelled feminine (1992, 35). Socialising influences like these are still thought to send implicit messages regarding how females and males should act and are expected to act shaping us into feminine and masculine persons.

Nancy Chodorow (1978; 1995) has criticised social learning theory as too simplistic to explain gender differences (see also Deaux & Major 1990; Gatens 1996). Instead, she holds that gender is a matter of having feminine and masculine personalities that develop in early infancy as responses to prevalent parenting practices. In particular, gendered personalities develop because women tend to be the primary caretakers of small children. Chodorow holds that because mothers (or other prominent females) tend to care for infants, infant male and female psychic development differs. Crudely put: the mother-daughter relationship differs from the mother-son relationship because mothers are more likely to identify with their daughters than their sons. This unconsciously prompts the mother to encourage her son to psychologically individuate himself from her thereby prompting him to develop well defined and rigid ego boundaries. However, the mother unconsciously discourages the daughter from individuating herself thereby prompting the daughter to develop flexible and blurry ego boundaries. Childhood gender socialisation further builds on and reinforces these unconsciously developed ego boundaries finally producing feminine and masculine persons (1995, 202–206). This perspective has its roots in Freudian psychoanalytic theory, although Chodorow’s approach differs in many ways from Freud’s.

Gendered personalities are supposedly manifested in common gender stereotypical behaviour. Take emotional dependency. Women are stereotypically more emotional and emotionally dependent upon others around them, supposedly finding it difficult to distinguish their own interests and wellbeing from the interests and wellbeing of their children and partners. This is said to be because of their blurry and (somewhat) confused ego boundaries: women find it hard to distinguish their own needs from the needs of those around them because they cannot sufficiently individuate themselves from those close to them. By contrast, men are stereotypically emotionally detached, preferring a career where dispassionate and distanced thinking are virtues. These traits are said to result from men’s well-defined ego boundaries that enable them to prioritise their own needs and interests sometimes at the expense of others’ needs and interests.

Chodorow thinks that these gender differences should and can be changed. Feminine and masculine personalities play a crucial role in women’s oppression since they make females overly attentive to the needs of others and males emotionally deficient. In order to correct the situation, both male and female parents should be equally involved in parenting (Chodorow 1995, 214). This would help in ensuring that children develop sufficiently individuated senses of selves without becoming overly detached, which in turn helps to eradicate common gender stereotypical behaviours.

Catharine MacKinnon develops her theory of gender as a theory of sexuality. Very roughly: the social meaning of sex (gender) is created by sexual objectification of women whereby women are viewed and treated as objects for satisfying men’s desires (MacKinnon 1989). Masculinity is defined as sexual dominance, femininity as sexual submissiveness: genders are “created through the eroticization of dominance and submission. The man/woman difference and the dominance/submission dynamic define each other. This is the social meaning of sex” (MacKinnon 1989, 113). For MacKinnon, gender is constitutively constructed : in defining genders (or masculinity and femininity) we must make reference to social factors (see Haslanger 1995, 98). In particular, we must make reference to the position one occupies in the sexualised dominance/submission dynamic: men occupy the sexually dominant position, women the sexually submissive one. As a result, genders are by definition hierarchical and this hierarchy is fundamentally tied to sexualised power relations. The notion of ‘gender equality’, then, does not make sense to MacKinnon. If sexuality ceased to be a manifestation of dominance, hierarchical genders (that are defined in terms of sexuality) would cease to exist.

So, gender difference for MacKinnon is not a matter of having a particular psychological orientation or behavioural pattern; rather, it is a function of sexuality that is hierarchal in patriarchal societies. This is not to say that men are naturally disposed to sexually objectify women or that women are naturally submissive. Instead, male and female sexualities are socially conditioned: men have been conditioned to find women’s subordination sexy and women have been conditioned to find a particular male version of female sexuality as erotic – one in which it is erotic to be sexually submissive. For MacKinnon, both female and male sexual desires are defined from a male point of view that is conditioned by pornography (MacKinnon 1989, chapter 7). Bluntly put: pornography portrays a false picture of ‘what women want’ suggesting that women in actual fact are and want to be submissive. This conditions men’s sexuality so that they view women’s submission as sexy. And male dominance enforces this male version of sexuality onto women, sometimes by force. MacKinnon’s thought is not that male dominance is a result of social learning (see 2.1.); rather, socialization is an expression of power. That is, socialized differences in masculine and feminine traits, behaviour, and roles are not responsible for power inequalities. Females and males (roughly put) are socialised differently because there are underlying power inequalities. As MacKinnon puts it, ‘dominance’ (power relations) is prior to ‘difference’ (traits, behaviour and roles) (see, MacKinnon 1989, chapter 12). MacKinnon, then, sees legal restrictions on pornography as paramount to ending women’s subordinate status that stems from their gender.

3. Problems with the sex/gender distinction

3.1 is gender uniform.

The positions outlined above share an underlying metaphysical perspective on gender: gender realism . [ 2 ] That is, women as a group are assumed to share some characteristic feature, experience, common condition or criterion that defines their gender and the possession of which makes some individuals women (as opposed to, say, men). All women are thought to differ from all men in this respect (or respects). For example, MacKinnon thought that being treated in sexually objectifying ways is the common condition that defines women’s gender and what women as women share. All women differ from all men in this respect. Further, pointing out females who are not sexually objectified does not provide a counterexample to MacKinnon’s view. Being sexually objectified is constitutive of being a woman; a female who escapes sexual objectification, then, would not count as a woman.

One may want to critique the three accounts outlined by rejecting the particular details of each account. (For instance, see Spelman [1988, chapter 4] for a critique of the details of Chodorow’s view.) A more thoroughgoing critique has been levelled at the general metaphysical perspective of gender realism that underlies these positions. It has come under sustained attack on two grounds: first, that it fails to take into account racial, cultural and class differences between women (particularity argument); second, that it posits a normative ideal of womanhood (normativity argument).

Elizabeth Spelman (1988) has influentially argued against gender realism with her particularity argument. Roughly: gender realists mistakenly assume that gender is constructed independently of race, class, ethnicity and nationality. If gender were separable from, for example, race and class in this manner, all women would experience womanhood in the same way. And this is clearly false. For instance, Harris (1993) and Stone (2007) criticise MacKinnon’s view, that sexual objectification is the common condition that defines women’s gender, for failing to take into account differences in women’s backgrounds that shape their sexuality. The history of racist oppression illustrates that during slavery black women were ‘hypersexualised’ and thought to be always sexually available whereas white women were thought to be pure and sexually virtuous. In fact, the rape of a black woman was thought to be impossible (Harris 1993). So, (the argument goes) sexual objectification cannot serve as the common condition for womanhood since it varies considerably depending on one’s race and class. [ 3 ]

For Spelman, the perspective of ‘white solipsism’ underlies gender realists’ mistake. They assumed that all women share some “golden nugget of womanness” (Spelman 1988, 159) and that the features constitutive of such a nugget are the same for all women regardless of their particular cultural backgrounds. Next, white Western middle-class feminists accounted for the shared features simply by reflecting on the cultural features that condition their gender as women thus supposing that “the womanness underneath the Black woman’s skin is a white woman’s, and deep down inside the Latina woman is an Anglo woman waiting to burst through an obscuring cultural shroud” (Spelman 1988, 13). In so doing, Spelman claims, white middle-class Western feminists passed off their particular view of gender as “a metaphysical truth” (1988, 180) thereby privileging some women while marginalising others. In failing to see the importance of race and class in gender construction, white middle-class Western feminists conflated “the condition of one group of women with the condition of all” (Spelman 1988, 3).

Betty Friedan’s (1963) well-known work is a case in point of white solipsism. [ 4 ] Friedan saw domesticity as the main vehicle of gender oppression and called upon women in general to find jobs outside the home. But she failed to realize that women from less privileged backgrounds, often poor and non-white, already worked outside the home to support their families. Friedan’s suggestion, then, was applicable only to a particular sub-group of women (white middle-class Western housewives). But it was mistakenly taken to apply to all women’s lives — a mistake that was generated by Friedan’s failure to take women’s racial and class differences into account (hooks 2000, 1–3).

Spelman further holds that since social conditioning creates femininity and societies (and sub-groups) that condition it differ from one another, femininity must be differently conditioned in different societies. For her, “females become not simply women but particular kinds of women” (Spelman 1988, 113): white working-class women, black middle-class women, poor Jewish women, wealthy aristocratic European women, and so on.

This line of thought has been extremely influential in feminist philosophy. For instance, Young holds that Spelman has definitively shown that gender realism is untenable (1997, 13). Mikkola (2006) argues that this isn’t so. The arguments Spelman makes do not undermine the idea that there is some characteristic feature, experience, common condition or criterion that defines women’s gender; they simply point out that some particular ways of cashing out what defines womanhood are misguided. So, although Spelman is right to reject those accounts that falsely take the feature that conditions white middle-class Western feminists’ gender to condition women’s gender in general, this leaves open the possibility that women qua women do share something that defines their gender. (See also Haslanger [2000a] for a discussion of why gender realism is not necessarily untenable, and Stoljar [2011] for a discussion of Mikkola’s critique of Spelman.)

Judith Butler critiques the sex/gender distinction on two grounds. They critique gender realism with their normativity argument (1999 [original 1990], chapter 1); they also hold that the sex/gender distinction is unintelligible (this will be discussed in section 3.3.). Butler’s normativity argument is not straightforwardly directed at the metaphysical perspective of gender realism, but rather at its political counterpart: identity politics. This is a form of political mobilization based on membership in some group (e.g. racial, ethnic, cultural, gender) and group membership is thought to be delimited by some common experiences, conditions or features that define the group (Heyes 2000, 58; see also the entry on Identity Politics ). Feminist identity politics, then, presupposes gender realism in that feminist politics is said to be mobilized around women as a group (or category) where membership in this group is fixed by some condition, experience or feature that women supposedly share and that defines their gender.

Butler’s normativity argument makes two claims. The first is akin to Spelman’s particularity argument: unitary gender notions fail to take differences amongst women into account thus failing to recognise “the multiplicity of cultural, social, and political intersections in which the concrete array of ‘women’ are constructed” (Butler 1999, 19–20). In their attempt to undercut biologically deterministic ways of defining what it means to be a woman, feminists inadvertently created new socially constructed accounts of supposedly shared femininity. Butler’s second claim is that such false gender realist accounts are normative. That is, in their attempt to fix feminism’s subject matter, feminists unwittingly defined the term ‘woman’ in a way that implies there is some correct way to be gendered a woman (Butler 1999, 5). That the definition of the term ‘woman’ is fixed supposedly “operates as a policing force which generates and legitimizes certain practices, experiences, etc., and curtails and delegitimizes others” (Nicholson 1998, 293). Following this line of thought, one could say that, for instance, Chodorow’s view of gender suggests that ‘real’ women have feminine personalities and that these are the women feminism should be concerned about. If one does not exhibit a distinctly feminine personality, the implication is that one is not ‘really’ a member of women’s category nor does one properly qualify for feminist political representation.

Butler’s second claim is based on their view that“[i]dentity categories [like that of women] are never merely descriptive, but always normative, and as such, exclusionary” (Butler 1991, 160). That is, the mistake of those feminists Butler critiques was not that they provided the incorrect definition of ‘woman’. Rather, (the argument goes) their mistake was to attempt to define the term ‘woman’ at all. Butler’s view is that ‘woman’ can never be defined in a way that does not prescribe some “unspoken normative requirements” (like having a feminine personality) that women should conform to (Butler 1999, 9). Butler takes this to be a feature of terms like ‘woman’ that purport to pick out (what they call) ‘identity categories’. They seem to assume that ‘woman’ can never be used in a non-ideological way (Moi 1999, 43) and that it will always encode conditions that are not satisfied by everyone we think of as women. Some explanation for this comes from Butler’s view that all processes of drawing categorical distinctions involve evaluative and normative commitments; these in turn involve the exercise of power and reflect the conditions of those who are socially powerful (Witt 1995).

In order to better understand Butler’s critique, consider their account of gender performativity. For them, standard feminist accounts take gendered individuals to have some essential properties qua gendered individuals or a gender core by virtue of which one is either a man or a woman. This view assumes that women and men, qua women and men, are bearers of various essential and accidental attributes where the former secure gendered persons’ persistence through time as so gendered. But according to Butler this view is false: (i) there are no such essential properties, and (ii) gender is an illusion maintained by prevalent power structures. First, feminists are said to think that genders are socially constructed in that they have the following essential attributes (Butler 1999, 24): women are females with feminine behavioural traits, being heterosexuals whose desire is directed at men; men are males with masculine behavioural traits, being heterosexuals whose desire is directed at women. These are the attributes necessary for gendered individuals and those that enable women and men to persist through time as women and men. Individuals have “intelligible genders” (Butler 1999, 23) if they exhibit this sequence of traits in a coherent manner (where sexual desire follows from sexual orientation that in turn follows from feminine/ masculine behaviours thought to follow from biological sex). Social forces in general deem individuals who exhibit in coherent gender sequences (like lesbians) to be doing their gender ‘wrong’ and they actively discourage such sequencing of traits, for instance, via name-calling and overt homophobic discrimination. Think back to what was said above: having a certain conception of what women are like that mirrors the conditions of socially powerful (white, middle-class, heterosexual, Western) women functions to marginalize and police those who do not fit this conception.

These gender cores, supposedly encoding the above traits, however, are nothing more than illusions created by ideals and practices that seek to render gender uniform through heterosexism, the view that heterosexuality is natural and homosexuality is deviant (Butler 1999, 42). Gender cores are constructed as if they somehow naturally belong to women and men thereby creating gender dimorphism or the belief that one must be either a masculine male or a feminine female. But gender dimorphism only serves a heterosexist social order by implying that since women and men are sharply opposed, it is natural to sexually desire the opposite sex or gender.

Further, being feminine and desiring men (for instance) are standardly assumed to be expressions of one’s gender as a woman. Butler denies this and holds that gender is really performative. It is not “a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is … instituted … through a stylized repetition of [habitual] acts ” (Butler 1999, 179): through wearing certain gender-coded clothing, walking and sitting in certain gender-coded ways, styling one’s hair in gender-coded manner and so on. Gender is not something one is, it is something one does; it is a sequence of acts, a doing rather than a being. And repeatedly engaging in ‘feminising’ and ‘masculinising’ acts congeals gender thereby making people falsely think of gender as something they naturally are . Gender only comes into being through these gendering acts: a female who has sex with men does not express her gender as a woman. This activity (amongst others) makes her gendered a woman.

The constitutive acts that gender individuals create genders as “compelling illusion[s]” (Butler 1990, 271). Our gendered classification scheme is a strong pragmatic construction : social factors wholly determine our use of the scheme and the scheme fails to represent accurately any ‘facts of the matter’ (Haslanger 1995, 100). People think that there are true and real genders, and those deemed to be doing their gender ‘wrong’ are not socially sanctioned. But, genders are true and real only to the extent that they are performed (Butler 1990, 278–9). It does not make sense, then, to say of a male-to-female trans person that s/he is really a man who only appears to be a woman. Instead, males dressing up and acting in ways that are associated with femininity “show that [as Butler suggests] ‘being’ feminine is just a matter of doing certain activities” (Stone 2007, 64). As a result, the trans person’s gender is just as real or true as anyone else’s who is a ‘traditionally’ feminine female or masculine male (Butler 1990, 278). [ 5 ] Without heterosexism that compels people to engage in certain gendering acts, there would not be any genders at all. And ultimately the aim should be to abolish norms that compel people to act in these gendering ways.

For Butler, given that gender is performative, the appropriate response to feminist identity politics involves two things. First, feminists should understand ‘woman’ as open-ended and “a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or end … it is open to intervention and resignification” (Butler 1999, 43). That is, feminists should not try to define ‘woman’ at all. Second, the category of women “ought not to be the foundation of feminist politics” (Butler 1999, 9). Rather, feminists should focus on providing an account of how power functions and shapes our understandings of womanhood not only in the society at large but also within the feminist movement.

Many people, including many feminists, have ordinarily taken sex ascriptions to be solely a matter of biology with no social or cultural dimension. It is commonplace to think that there are only two sexes and that biological sex classifications are utterly unproblematic. By contrast, some feminists have argued that sex classifications are not unproblematic and that they are not solely a matter of biology. In order to make sense of this, it is helpful to distinguish object- and idea-construction (see Haslanger 2003b for more): social forces can be said to construct certain kinds of objects (e.g. sexed bodies or gendered individuals) and certain kinds of ideas (e.g. sex or gender concepts). First, take the object-construction of sexed bodies. Secondary sex characteristics, or the physiological and biological features commonly associated with males and females, are affected by social practices. In some societies, females’ lower social status has meant that they have been fed less and so, the lack of nutrition has had the effect of making them smaller in size (Jaggar 1983, 37). Uniformity in muscular shape, size and strength within sex categories is not caused entirely by biological factors, but depends heavily on exercise opportunities: if males and females were allowed the same exercise opportunities and equal encouragement to exercise, it is thought that bodily dimorphism would diminish (Fausto-Sterling 1993a, 218). A number of medical phenomena involving bones (like osteoporosis) have social causes directly related to expectations about gender, women’s diet and their exercise opportunities (Fausto-Sterling 2005). These examples suggest that physiological features thought to be sex-specific traits not affected by social and cultural factors are, after all, to some extent products of social conditioning. Social conditioning, then, shapes our biology.

Second, take the idea-construction of sex concepts. Our concept of sex is said to be a product of social forces in the sense that what counts as sex is shaped by social meanings. Standardly, those with XX-chromosomes, ovaries that produce large egg cells, female genitalia, a relatively high proportion of ‘female’ hormones, and other secondary sex characteristics (relatively small body size, less body hair) count as biologically female. Those with XY-chromosomes, testes that produce small sperm cells, male genitalia, a relatively high proportion of ‘male’ hormones and other secondary sex traits (relatively large body size, significant amounts of body hair) count as male. This understanding is fairly recent. The prevalent scientific view from Ancient Greeks until the late 18 th century, did not consider female and male sexes to be distinct categories with specific traits; instead, a ‘one-sex model’ held that males and females were members of the same sex category. Females’ genitals were thought to be the same as males’ but simply directed inside the body; ovaries and testes (for instance) were referred to by the same term and whether the term referred to the former or the latter was made clear by the context (Laqueur 1990, 4). It was not until the late 1700s that scientists began to think of female and male anatomies as radically different moving away from the ‘one-sex model’ of a single sex spectrum to the (nowadays prevalent) ‘two-sex model’ of sexual dimorphism. (For an alternative view, see King 2013.)

Fausto-Sterling has argued that this ‘two-sex model’ isn’t straightforward either (1993b; 2000a; 2000b). Based on a meta-study of empirical medical research, she estimates that 1.7% of population fail to neatly fall within the usual sex classifications possessing various combinations of different sex characteristics (Fausto-Sterling 2000a, 20). In her earlier work, she claimed that intersex individuals make up (at least) three further sex classes: ‘herms’ who possess one testis and one ovary; ‘merms’ who possess testes, some aspects of female genitalia but no ovaries; and ‘ferms’ who have ovaries, some aspects of male genitalia but no testes (Fausto-Sterling 1993b, 21). (In her [2000a], Fausto-Sterling notes that these labels were put forward tongue–in–cheek.) Recognition of intersex people suggests that feminists (and society at large) are wrong to think that humans are either female or male.

To illustrate further the idea-construction of sex, consider the case of the athlete Maria Patiño. Patiño has female genitalia, has always considered herself to be female and was considered so by others. However, she was discovered to have XY chromosomes and was barred from competing in women’s sports (Fausto-Sterling 2000b, 1–3). Patiño’s genitalia were at odds with her chromosomes and the latter were taken to determine her sex. Patiño successfully fought to be recognised as a female athlete arguing that her chromosomes alone were not sufficient to not make her female. Intersex people, like Patiño, illustrate that our understandings of sex differ and suggest that there is no immediately obvious way to settle what sex amounts to purely biologically or scientifically. Deciding what sex is involves evaluative judgements that are influenced by social factors.

Insofar as our cultural conceptions affect our understandings of sex, feminists must be much more careful about sex classifications and rethink what sex amounts to (Stone 2007, chapter 1). More specifically, intersex people illustrate that sex traits associated with females and males need not always go together and that individuals can have some mixture of these traits. This suggests to Stone that sex is a cluster concept: it is sufficient to satisfy enough of the sex features that tend to cluster together in order to count as being of a particular sex. But, one need not satisfy all of those features or some arbitrarily chosen supposedly necessary sex feature, like chromosomes (Stone 2007, 44). This makes sex a matter of degree and sex classifications should take place on a spectrum: one can be more or less female/male but there is no sharp distinction between the two. Further, intersex people (along with trans people) are located at the centre of the sex spectrum and in many cases their sex will be indeterminate (Stone 2007).

More recently, Ayala and Vasilyeva (2015) have argued for an inclusive and extended conception of sex: just as certain tools can be seen to extend our minds beyond the limits of our brains (e.g. white canes), other tools (like dildos) can extend our sex beyond our bodily boundaries. This view aims to motivate the idea that what counts as sex should not be determined by looking inwards at genitalia or other anatomical features. In a different vein, Ásta (2018) argues that sex is a conferred social property. This follows her more general conferralist framework to analyse all social properties: properties that are conferred by others thereby generating a social status that consists in contextually specific constraints and enablements on individual behaviour. The general schema for conferred properties is as follows (Ásta 2018, 8):

Conferred property: what property is conferred. Who: who the subjects are. What: what attitude, state, or action of the subjects matter. When: under what conditions the conferral takes place. Base property: what the subjects are attempting to track (consciously or not), if anything.

With being of a certain sex (e.g. male, female) in mind, Ásta holds that it is a conferred property that merely aims to track physical features. Hence sex is a social – or in fact, an institutional – property rather than a natural one. The schema for sex goes as follows (72):

Conferred property: being female, male. Who: legal authorities, drawing on the expert opinion of doctors, other medical personnel. What: “the recording of a sex in official documents ... The judgment of the doctors (and others) as to what sex role might be the most fitting, given the biological characteristics present.” When: at birth or after surgery/ hormonal treatment. Base property: “the aim is to track as many sex-stereotypical characteristics as possible, and doctors perform surgery in cases where that might help bring the physical characteristics more in line with the stereotype of male and female.”

This (among other things) offers a debunking analysis of sex: it may appear to be a natural property, but on the conferralist analysis is better understood as a conferred legal status. Ásta holds that gender too is a conferred property, but contra the discussion in the following section, she does not think that this collapses the distinction between sex and gender: sex and gender are differently conferred albeit both satisfying the general schema noted above. Nonetheless, on the conferralist framework what underlies both sex and gender is the idea of social construction as social significance: sex-stereotypical characteristics are taken to be socially significant context specifically, whereby they become the basis for conferring sex onto individuals and this brings with it various constraints and enablements on individuals and their behaviour. This fits object- and idea-constructions introduced above, although offers a different general framework to analyse the matter at hand.

In addition to arguing against identity politics and for gender performativity, Butler holds that distinguishing biological sex from social gender is unintelligible. For them, both are socially constructed:

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all. (Butler 1999, 10–11)

(Butler is not alone in claiming that there are no tenable distinctions between nature/culture, biology/construction and sex/gender. See also: Antony 1998; Gatens 1996; Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999.) Butler makes two different claims in the passage cited: that sex is a social construction, and that sex is gender. To unpack their view, consider the two claims in turn. First, the idea that sex is a social construct, for Butler, boils down to the view that our sexed bodies are also performative and, so, they have “no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute [their] reality” (1999, 173). Prima facie , this implausibly implies that female and male bodies do not have independent existence and that if gendering activities ceased, so would physical bodies. This is not Butler’s claim; rather, their position is that bodies viewed as the material foundations on which gender is constructed, are themselves constructed as if they provide such material foundations (Butler 1993). Cultural conceptions about gender figure in “the very apparatus of production whereby sexes themselves are established” (Butler 1999, 11).

For Butler, sexed bodies never exist outside social meanings and how we understand gender shapes how we understand sex (1999, 139). Sexed bodies are not empty matter on which gender is constructed and sex categories are not picked out on the basis of objective features of the world. Instead, our sexed bodies are themselves discursively constructed : they are the way they are, at least to a substantial extent, because of what is attributed to sexed bodies and how they are classified (for discursive construction, see Haslanger 1995, 99). Sex assignment (calling someone female or male) is normative (Butler 1993, 1). [ 6 ] When the doctor calls a newly born infant a girl or a boy, s/he is not making a descriptive claim, but a normative one. In fact, the doctor is performing an illocutionary speech act (see the entry on Speech Acts ). In effect, the doctor’s utterance makes infants into girls or boys. We, then, engage in activities that make it seem as if sexes naturally come in two and that being female or male is an objective feature of the world, rather than being a consequence of certain constitutive acts (that is, rather than being performative). And this is what Butler means in saying that physical bodies never exist outside cultural and social meanings, and that sex is as socially constructed as gender. They do not deny that physical bodies exist. But, they take our understanding of this existence to be a product of social conditioning: social conditioning makes the existence of physical bodies intelligible to us by discursively constructing sexed bodies through certain constitutive acts. (For a helpful introduction to Butler’s views, see Salih 2002.)

For Butler, sex assignment is always in some sense oppressive. Again, this appears to be because of Butler’s general suspicion of classification: sex classification can never be merely descriptive but always has a normative element reflecting evaluative claims of those who are powerful. Conducting a feminist genealogy of the body (or examining why sexed bodies are thought to come naturally as female and male), then, should ground feminist practice (Butler 1993, 28–9). Feminists should examine and uncover ways in which social construction and certain acts that constitute sex shape our understandings of sexed bodies, what kinds of meanings bodies acquire and which practices and illocutionary speech acts ‘make’ our bodies into sexes. Doing so enables feminists to identity how sexed bodies are socially constructed in order to resist such construction.

However, given what was said above, it is far from obvious what we should make of Butler’s claim that sex “was always already gender” (1999, 11). Stone (2007) takes this to mean that sex is gender but goes on to question it arguing that the social construction of both sex and gender does not make sex identical to gender. According to Stone, it would be more accurate for Butler to say that claims about sex imply gender norms. That is, many claims about sex traits (like ‘females are physically weaker than males’) actually carry implications about how women and men are expected to behave. To some extent the claim describes certain facts. But, it also implies that females are not expected to do much heavy lifting and that they would probably not be good at it. So, claims about sex are not identical to claims about gender; rather, they imply claims about gender norms (Stone 2007, 70).

Some feminists hold that the sex/gender distinction is not useful. For a start, it is thought to reflect politically problematic dualistic thinking that undercuts feminist aims: the distinction is taken to reflect and replicate androcentric oppositions between (for instance) mind/body, culture/nature and reason/emotion that have been used to justify women’s oppression (e.g. Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999). The thought is that in oppositions like these, one term is always superior to the other and that the devalued term is usually associated with women (Lloyd 1993). For instance, human subjectivity and agency are identified with the mind but since women are usually identified with their bodies, they are devalued as human subjects and agents. The opposition between mind and body is said to further map on to other distinctions, like reason/emotion, culture/nature, rational/irrational, where one side of each distinction is devalued (one’s bodily features are usually valued less that one’s mind, rationality is usually valued more than irrationality) and women are associated with the devalued terms: they are thought to be closer to bodily features and nature than men, to be irrational, emotional and so on. This is said to be evident (for instance) in job interviews. Men are treated as gender-neutral persons and not asked whether they are planning to take time off to have a family. By contrast, that women face such queries illustrates that they are associated more closely than men with bodily features to do with procreation (Prokhovnik 1999, 126). The opposition between mind and body, then, is thought to map onto the opposition between men and women.

Now, the mind/body dualism is also said to map onto the sex/gender distinction (Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999). The idea is that gender maps onto mind, sex onto body. Although not used by those endorsing this view, the basic idea can be summed by the slogan ‘Gender is between the ears, sex is between the legs’: the implication is that, while sex is immutable, gender is something individuals have control over – it is something we can alter and change through individual choices. However, since women are said to be more closely associated with biological features (and so, to map onto the body side of the mind/body distinction) and men are treated as gender-neutral persons (mapping onto the mind side), the implication is that “man equals gender, which is associated with mind and choice, freedom from body, autonomy, and with the public real; while woman equals sex, associated with the body, reproduction, ‘natural’ rhythms and the private realm” (Prokhovnik 1999, 103). This is said to render the sex/gender distinction inherently repressive and to drain it of any potential for emancipation: rather than facilitating gender role choice for women, it “actually functions to reinforce their association with body, sex, and involuntary ‘natural’ rhythms” (Prokhovnik 1999, 103). Contrary to what feminists like Rubin argued, the sex/gender distinction cannot be used as a theoretical tool that dissociates conceptions of womanhood from biological and reproductive features.

Moi has further argued that the sex/gender distinction is useless given certain theoretical goals (1999, chapter 1). This is not to say that it is utterly worthless; according to Moi, the sex/gender distinction worked well to show that the historically prevalent biological determinism was false. However, for her, the distinction does no useful work “when it comes to producing a good theory of subjectivity” (1999, 6) and “a concrete, historical understanding of what it means to be a woman (or a man) in a given society” (1999, 4–5). That is, the 1960s distinction understood sex as fixed by biology without any cultural or historical dimensions. This understanding, however, ignores lived experiences and embodiment as aspects of womanhood (and manhood) by separating sex from gender and insisting that womanhood is to do with the latter. Rather, embodiment must be included in one’s theory that tries to figure out what it is to be a woman (or a man).

Mikkola (2011) argues that the sex/gender distinction, which underlies views like Rubin’s and MacKinnon’s, has certain unintuitive and undesirable ontological commitments that render the distinction politically unhelpful. First, claiming that gender is socially constructed implies that the existence of women and men is a mind-dependent matter. This suggests that we can do away with women and men simply by altering some social practices, conventions or conditions on which gender depends (whatever those are). However, ordinary social agents find this unintuitive given that (ordinarily) sex and gender are not distinguished. Second, claiming that gender is a product of oppressive social forces suggests that doing away with women and men should be feminism’s political goal. But this harbours ontologically undesirable commitments since many ordinary social agents view their gender to be a source of positive value. So, feminism seems to want to do away with something that should not be done away with, which is unlikely to motivate social agents to act in ways that aim at gender justice. Given these problems, Mikkola argues that feminists should give up the distinction on practical political grounds.

Tomas Bogardus (2020) has argued in an even more radical sense against the sex/gender distinction: as things stand, he holds, feminist philosophers have merely assumed and asserted that the distinction exists, instead of having offered good arguments for the distinction. In other words, feminist philosophers allegedly have yet to offer good reasons to think that ‘woman’ does not simply pick out adult human females. Alex Byrne (2020) argues in a similar vein: the term ‘woman’ does not pick out a social kind as feminist philosophers have “assumed”. Instead, “women are adult human females–nothing more, and nothing less” (2020, 3801). Byrne offers six considerations to ground this AHF (adult, human, female) conception.

• It reproduces the dictionary definition of ‘woman’.
• One would expect English to have a word that picks out the category adult human female, and ‘woman’ is the only candidate.
• AHF explains how we sometimes know that an individual is a woman, despite knowing nothing else relevant about her other than the fact that she is an adult human female.
• AHF stands or falls with the analogous thesis for girls, which can be supported independently.
• AHF predicts the correct verdict in cases of gender role reversal.
• AHF is supported by the fact that ‘woman’ and ‘female’ are often appropriately used as stylistic variants of each other, even in hyperintensional contexts.

Robin Dembroff (2021) responds to Byrne and highlights various problems with Byrne’s argument. First, framing: Byrne assumes from the start that gender terms like ‘woman’ have a single invariant meaning thereby failing to discuss the possibility of terms like ‘woman’ having multiple meanings – something that is a familiar claim made by feminist theorists from various disciplines. Moreover, Byrne (according to Dembroff) assumes without argument that there is a single, universal category of woman – again, something that has been extensively discussed and critiqued by feminist philosophers and theorists. Second, Byrne’s conception of the ‘dominant’ meaning of woman is said to be cherry-picked and it ignores a wealth of contexts outside of philosophy (like the media and the law) where ‘woman’ has a meaning other than AHF . Third, Byrne’s own distinction between biological and social categories fails to establish what he intended to establish: namely, that ‘woman’ picks out a biological rather than a social kind. Hence, Dembroff holds, Byrne’s case fails by its own lights. Byrne (2021) responds to Dembroff’s critique.

Others such as ‘gender critical feminists’ also hold views about the sex/gender distinction in a spirit similar to Bogardus and Byrne. For example, Holly Lawford-Smith (2021) takes the prevalent sex/gender distinction, where ‘female’/‘male’ are used as sex terms and ‘woman’/’man’ as gender terms, not to be helpful. Instead, she takes all of these to be sex terms and holds that (the norms of) femininity/masculinity refer to gender normativity. Because much of the gender critical feminists’ discussion that philosophers have engaged in has taken place in social media, public fora, and other sources outside academic philosophy, this entry will not focus on these discussions.

4. Women as a group

The various critiques of the sex/gender distinction have called into question the viability of the category women . Feminism is the movement to end the oppression women as a group face. But, how should the category of women be understood if feminists accept the above arguments that gender construction is not uniform, that a sharp distinction between biological sex and social gender is false or (at least) not useful, and that various features associated with women play a role in what it is to be a woman, none of which are individually necessary and jointly sufficient (like a variety of social roles, positions, behaviours, traits, bodily features and experiences)? Feminists must be able to address cultural and social differences in gender construction if feminism is to be a genuinely inclusive movement and be careful not to posit commonalities that mask important ways in which women qua women differ. These concerns (among others) have generated a situation where (as Linda Alcoff puts it) feminists aim to speak and make political demands in the name of women, at the same time rejecting the idea that there is a unified category of women (2006, 152). If feminist critiques of the category women are successful, then what (if anything) binds women together, what is it to be a woman, and what kinds of demands can feminists make on behalf of women?

Many have found the fragmentation of the category of women problematic for political reasons (e.g. Alcoff 2006; Bach 2012; Benhabib 1992; Frye 1996; Haslanger 2000b; Heyes 2000; Martin 1994; Mikkola 2007; Stoljar 1995; Stone 2004; Tanesini 1996; Young 1997; Zack 2005). For instance, Young holds that accounts like Spelman’s reduce the category of women to a gerrymandered collection of individuals with nothing to bind them together (1997, 20). Black women differ from white women but members of both groups also differ from one another with respect to nationality, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation and economic position; that is, wealthy white women differ from working-class white women due to their economic and class positions. These sub-groups are themselves diverse: for instance, some working-class white women in Northern Ireland are starkly divided along religious lines. So if we accept Spelman’s position, we risk ending up with individual women and nothing to bind them together. And this is problematic: in order to respond to oppression of women in general, feminists must understand them as a category in some sense. Young writes that without doing so “it is not possible to conceptualize oppression as a systematic, structured, institutional process” (1997, 17). Some, then, take the articulation of an inclusive category of women to be the prerequisite for effective feminist politics and a rich literature has emerged that aims to conceptualise women as a group or a collective (e.g. Alcoff 2006; Ásta 2011; Frye 1996; 2011; Haslanger 2000b; Heyes 2000; Stoljar 1995, 2011; Young 1997; Zack 2005). Articulations of this category can be divided into those that are: (a) gender nominalist — positions that deny there is something women qua women share and that seek to unify women’s social kind by appealing to something external to women; and (b) gender realist — positions that take there to be something women qua women share (although these realist positions differ significantly from those outlined in Section 2). Below we will review some influential gender nominalist and gender realist positions. Before doing so, it is worth noting that not everyone is convinced that attempts to articulate an inclusive category of women can succeed or that worries about what it is to be a woman are in need of being resolved. Mikkola (2016) argues that feminist politics need not rely on overcoming (what she calls) the ‘gender controversy’: that feminists must settle the meaning of gender concepts and articulate a way to ground women’s social kind membership. As she sees it, disputes about ‘what it is to be a woman’ have become theoretically bankrupt and intractable, which has generated an analytical impasse that looks unsurpassable. Instead, Mikkola argues for giving up the quest, which in any case in her view poses no serious political obstacles.

Elizabeth Barnes (2020) responds to the need to offer an inclusive conception of gender somewhat differently, although she endorses the need for feminism to be inclusive particularly of trans people. Barnes holds that typically philosophical theories of gender aim to offer an account of what it is to be a woman (or man, genderqueer, etc.), where such an account is presumed to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for being a woman or an account of our gender terms’ extensions. But, she holds, it is a mistake to expect our theories of gender to do so. For Barnes, a project that offers a metaphysics of gender “should be understood as the project of theorizing what it is —if anything— about the social world that ultimately explains gender” (2020, 706). This project is not equivalent to one that aims to define gender terms or elucidate the application conditions for natural language gender terms though.

4.1 Gender nominalism

Iris Young argues that unless there is “some sense in which ‘woman’ is the name of a social collective [that feminism represents], there is nothing specific to feminist politics” (1997, 13). In order to make the category women intelligible, she argues that women make up a series: a particular kind of social collective “whose members are unified passively by the objects their actions are oriented around and/or by the objectified results of the material effects of the actions of the other” (Young 1997, 23). A series is distinct from a group in that, whereas members of groups are thought to self-consciously share certain goals, projects, traits and/ or self-conceptions, members of series pursue their own individual ends without necessarily having anything at all in common. Young holds that women are not bound together by a shared feature or experience (or set of features and experiences) since she takes Spelman’s particularity argument to have established definitely that no such feature exists (1997, 13; see also: Frye 1996; Heyes 2000). Instead, women’s category is unified by certain practico-inert realities or the ways in which women’s lives and their actions are oriented around certain objects and everyday realities (Young 1997, 23–4). For example, bus commuters make up a series unified through their individual actions being organised around the same practico-inert objects of the bus and the practice of public transport. Women make up a series unified through women’s lives and actions being organised around certain practico-inert objects and realities that position them as women .

Young identifies two broad groups of such practico-inert objects and realities. First, phenomena associated with female bodies (physical facts), biological processes that take place in female bodies (menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth) and social rules associated with these biological processes (social rules of menstruation, for instance). Second, gender-coded objects and practices: pronouns, verbal and visual representations of gender, gender-coded artefacts and social spaces, clothes, cosmetics, tools and furniture. So, women make up a series since their lives and actions are organised around female bodies and certain gender-coded objects. Their series is bound together passively and the unity is “not one that arises from the individuals called women” (Young 1997, 32).

Although Young’s proposal purports to be a response to Spelman’s worries, Stone has questioned whether it is, after all, susceptible to the particularity argument: ultimately, on Young’s view, something women as women share (their practico-inert realities) binds them together (Stone 2004).

Natalie Stoljar holds that unless the category of women is unified, feminist action on behalf of women cannot be justified (1995, 282). Stoljar too is persuaded by the thought that women qua women do not share anything unitary. This prompts her to argue for resemblance nominalism. This is the view that a certain kind of resemblance relation holds between entities of a particular type (for more on resemblance nominalism, see Armstrong 1989, 39–58). Stoljar is not alone in arguing for resemblance relations to make sense of women as a category; others have also done so, usually appealing to Wittgenstein’s ‘family resemblance’ relations (Alcoff 1988; Green & Radford Curry 1991; Heyes 2000; Munro 2006). Stoljar relies more on Price’s resemblance nominalism whereby x is a member of some type F only if x resembles some paradigm or exemplar of F sufficiently closely (Price 1953, 20). For instance, the type of red entities is unified by some chosen red paradigms so that only those entities that sufficiently resemble the paradigms count as red. The type (or category) of women, then, is unified by some chosen woman paradigms so that those who sufficiently resemble the woman paradigms count as women (Stoljar 1995, 284).

Semantic considerations about the concept woman suggest to Stoljar that resemblance nominalism should be endorsed (Stoljar 2000, 28). It seems unlikely that the concept is applied on the basis of some single social feature all and only women possess. By contrast, woman is a cluster concept and our attributions of womanhood pick out “different arrangements of features in different individuals” (Stoljar 2000, 27). More specifically, they pick out the following clusters of features: (a) Female sex; (b) Phenomenological features: menstruation, female sexual experience, child-birth, breast-feeding, fear of walking on the streets at night or fear of rape; (c) Certain roles: wearing typically female clothing, being oppressed on the basis of one’s sex or undertaking care-work; (d) Gender attribution: “calling oneself a woman, being called a woman” (Stoljar 1995, 283–4). For Stoljar, attributions of womanhood are to do with a variety of traits and experiences: those that feminists have historically termed ‘gender traits’ (like social, behavioural, psychological traits) and those termed ‘sex traits’. Nonetheless, she holds that since the concept woman applies to (at least some) trans persons, one can be a woman without being female (Stoljar 1995, 282).

The cluster concept woman does not, however, straightforwardly provide the criterion for picking out the category of women. Rather, the four clusters of features that the concept picks out help single out woman paradigms that in turn help single out the category of women. First, any individual who possesses a feature from at least three of the four clusters mentioned will count as an exemplar of the category. For instance, an African-American with primary and secondary female sex characteristics, who describes herself as a woman and is oppressed on the basis of her sex, along with a white European hermaphrodite brought up ‘as a girl’, who engages in female roles and has female phenomenological features despite lacking female sex characteristics, will count as woman paradigms (Stoljar 1995, 284). [ 7 ] Second, any individual who resembles “any of the paradigms sufficiently closely (on Price’s account, as closely as [the paradigms] resemble each other) will be a member of the resemblance class ‘woman’” (Stoljar 1995, 284). That is, what delimits membership in the category of women is that one resembles sufficiently a woman paradigm.

4.2 Neo-gender realism

In a series of articles collected in her 2012 book, Sally Haslanger argues for a way to define the concept woman that is politically useful, serving as a tool in feminist fights against sexism, and that shows woman to be a social (not a biological) notion. More specifically, Haslanger argues that gender is a matter of occupying either a subordinate or a privileged social position. In some articles, Haslanger is arguing for a revisionary analysis of the concept woman (2000b; 2003a; 2003b). Elsewhere she suggests that her analysis may not be that revisionary after all (2005; 2006). Consider the former argument first. Haslanger’s analysis is, in her terms, ameliorative: it aims to elucidate which gender concepts best help feminists achieve their legitimate purposes thereby elucidating those concepts feminists should be using (Haslanger 2000b, 33). [ 8 ] Now, feminists need gender terminology in order to fight sexist injustices (Haslanger 2000b, 36). In particular, they need gender terms to identify, explain and talk about persistent social inequalities between males and females. Haslanger’s analysis of gender begins with the recognition that females and males differ in two respects: physically and in their social positions. Societies in general tend to “privilege individuals with male bodies” (Haslanger 2000b, 38) so that the social positions they subsequently occupy are better than the social positions of those with female bodies. And this generates persistent sexist injustices. With this in mind, Haslanger specifies how she understands genders:

S is a woman iff [by definition] S is systematically subordinated along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and S is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction.

S is a man iff [by definition] S is systematically privileged along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and S is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a male’s biological role in reproduction. (2003a, 6–7)

These are constitutive of being a woman and a man: what makes calling S a woman apt, is that S is oppressed on sex-marked grounds; what makes calling S a man apt, is that S is privileged on sex-marked grounds.

Haslanger’s ameliorative analysis is counterintuitive in that females who are not sex-marked for oppression, do not count as women. At least arguably, the Queen of England is not oppressed on sex-marked grounds and so, would not count as a woman on Haslanger’s definition. And, similarly, all males who are not privileged would not count as men. This might suggest that Haslanger’s analysis should be rejected in that it does not capture what language users have in mind when applying gender terms. However, Haslanger argues that this is not a reason to reject the definitions, which she takes to be revisionary: they are not meant to capture our intuitive gender terms. In response, Mikkola (2009) has argued that revisionary analyses of gender concepts, like Haslanger’s, are both politically unhelpful and philosophically unnecessary.

Note also that Haslanger’s proposal is eliminativist: gender justice would eradicate gender, since it would abolish those sexist social structures responsible for sex-marked oppression and privilege. If sexist oppression were to cease, women and men would no longer exist (although there would still be males and females). Not all feminists endorse such an eliminativist view though. Stone holds that Haslanger does not leave any room for positively revaluing what it is to be a woman: since Haslanger defines woman in terms of subordination,

any woman who challenges her subordinate status must by definition be challenging her status as a woman, even if she does not intend to … positive change to our gender norms would involve getting rid of the (necessarily subordinate) feminine gender. (Stone 2007, 160)

But according to Stone this is not only undesirable – one should be able to challenge subordination without having to challenge one’s status as a woman. It is also false: “because norms of femininity can be and constantly are being revised, women can be women without thereby being subordinate” (Stone 2007, 162; Mikkola [2016] too argues that Haslanger’s eliminativism is troublesome).

Theodore Bach holds that Haslanger’s eliminativism is undesirable on other grounds, and that Haslanger’s position faces another more serious problem. Feminism faces the following worries (among others):

Representation problem : “if there is no real group of ‘women’, then it is incoherent to make moral claims and advance political policies on behalf of women” (Bach 2012, 234). Commonality problems : (1) There is no feature that all women cross-culturally and transhistorically share. (2) Delimiting women’s social kind with the help of some essential property privileges those who possess it, and marginalizes those who do not (Bach 2012, 235).

According to Bach, Haslanger’s strategy to resolve these problems appeals to ‘social objectivism’. First, we define women “according to a suitably abstract relational property” (Bach 2012, 236), which avoids the commonality problems. Second, Haslanger employs “an ontologically thin notion of ‘objectivity’” (Bach 2012, 236) that answers the representation problem. Haslanger’s solution (Bach holds) is specifically to argue that women make up an objective type because women are objectively similar to one another, and not simply classified together given our background conceptual schemes. Bach claims though that Haslanger’s account is not objective enough, and we should on political grounds “provide a stronger ontological characterization of the genders men and women according to which they are natural kinds with explanatory essences” (Bach 2012, 238). He thus proposes that women make up a natural kind with a historical essence:

The essential property of women, in virtue of which an individual is a member of the kind ‘women,’ is participation in a lineage of women. In order to exemplify this relational property, an individual must be a reproduction of ancestral women, in which case she must have undergone the ontogenetic processes through which a historical gender system replicates women. (Bach 2012, 271)

In short, one is not a woman due to shared surface properties with other women (like occupying a subordinate social position). Rather, one is a woman because one has the right history: one has undergone the ubiquitous ontogenetic process of gender socialization. Thinking about gender in this way supposedly provides a stronger kind unity than Haslanger’s that simply appeals to shared surface properties.

Not everyone agrees; Mikkola (2020) argues that Bach’s metaphysical picture has internal tensions that render it puzzling and that Bach’s metaphysics does not provide good responses to the commonality and presentation problems. The historically essentialist view also has anti-trans implications. After all, trans women who have not undergone female gender socialization won’t count as women on his view (Mikkola [2016, 2020] develops this line of critique in more detail). More worryingly, trans women will count as men contrary to their self-identification. Both Bettcher (2013) and Jenkins (2016) consider the importance of gender self-identification. Bettcher argues that there is more than one ‘correct’ way to understand womanhood: at the very least, the dominant (mainstream), and the resistant (trans) conceptions. Dominant views like that of Bach’s tend to erase trans people’s experiences and to marginalize trans women within feminist movements. Rather than trans women having to defend their self-identifying claims, these claims should be taken at face value right from the start. And so, Bettcher holds, “in analyzing the meaning of terms such as ‘woman,’ it is inappropriate to dismiss alternative ways in which those terms are actually used in trans subcultures; such usage needs to be taken into consideration as part of the analysis” (2013, 235).

Specifically with Haslanger in mind and in a similar vein, Jenkins (2016) discusses how Haslanger’s revisionary approach unduly excludes some trans women from women’s social kind. On Jenkins’s view, Haslanger’s ameliorative methodology in fact yields more than one satisfying target concept: one that “corresponds to Haslanger’s proposed concept and captures the sense of gender as an imposed social class”; another that “captures the sense of gender as a lived identity” (Jenkins 2016, 397). The latter of these allows us to include trans women into women’s social kind, who on Haslanger’s social class approach to gender would inappropriately have been excluded. (See Andler 2017 for the view that Jenkins’s purportedly inclusive conception of gender is still not fully inclusive. Jenkins 2018 responds to this charge and develops the notion of gender identity still further.)

In addition to her revisionary argument, Haslanger has suggested that her ameliorative analysis of woman may not be as revisionary as it first seems (2005, 2006). Although successful in their reference fixing, ordinary language users do not always know precisely what they are talking about. Our language use may be skewed by oppressive ideologies that can “mislead us about the content of our own thoughts” (Haslanger 2005, 12). Although her gender terminology is not intuitive, this could simply be because oppressive ideologies mislead us about the meanings of our gender terms. Our everyday gender terminology might mean something utterly different from what we think it means; and we could be entirely ignorant of this. Perhaps Haslanger’s analysis, then, has captured our everyday gender vocabulary revealing to us the terms that we actually employ: we may be applying ‘woman’ in our everyday language on the basis of sex-marked subordination whether we take ourselves to be doing so or not. If this is so, Haslanger’s gender terminology is not radically revisionist.

Saul (2006) argues that, despite it being possible that we unknowingly apply ‘woman’ on the basis of social subordination, it is extremely difficult to show that this is the case. This would require showing that the gender terminology we in fact employ is Haslanger’s proposed gender terminology. But discovering the grounds on which we apply everyday gender terms is extremely difficult precisely because they are applied in various and idiosyncratic ways (Saul 2006, 129). Haslanger, then, needs to do more in order to show that her analysis is non-revisionary.

Charlotte Witt (2011a; 2011b) argues for a particular sort of gender essentialism, which Witt terms ‘uniessentialism’. Her motivation and starting point is the following: many ordinary social agents report gender being essential to them and claim that they would be a different person were they of a different sex/gender. Uniessentialism attempts to understand and articulate this. However, Witt’s work departs in important respects from the earlier (so-called) essentialist or gender realist positions discussed in Section 2: Witt does not posit some essential property of womanhood of the kind discussed above, which failed to take women’s differences into account. Further, uniessentialism differs significantly from those position developed in response to the problem of how we should conceive of women’s social kind. It is not about solving the standard dispute between gender nominalists and gender realists, or about articulating some supposedly shared property that binds women together and provides a theoretical ground for feminist political solidarity. Rather, uniessentialism aims to make good the widely held belief that gender is constitutive of who we are. [ 9 ]

Uniessentialism is a sort of individual essentialism. Traditionally philosophers distinguish between kind and individual essentialisms: the former examines what binds members of a kind together and what do all members of some kind have in common qua members of that kind. The latter asks: what makes an individual the individual it is. We can further distinguish two sorts of individual essentialisms: Kripkean identity essentialism and Aristotelian uniessentialism. The former asks: what makes an individual that individual? The latter, however, asks a slightly different question: what explains the unity of individuals? What explains that an individual entity exists over and above the sum total of its constituent parts? (The standard feminist debate over gender nominalism and gender realism has largely been about kind essentialism. Being about individual essentialism, Witt’s uniessentialism departs in an important way from the standard debate.) From the two individual essentialisms, Witt endorses the Aristotelian one. On this view, certain functional essences have a unifying role: these essences are responsible for the fact that material parts constitute a new individual, rather than just a lump of stuff or a collection of particles. Witt’s example is of a house: the essential house-functional property (what the entity is for, what its purpose is) unifies the different material parts of a house so that there is a house, and not just a collection of house-constituting particles (2011a, 6). Gender (being a woman/a man) functions in a similar fashion and provides “the principle of normative unity” that organizes, unifies and determines the roles of social individuals (Witt 2011a, 73). Due to this, gender is a uniessential property of social individuals.

It is important to clarify the notions of gender and social individuality that Witt employs. First, gender is a social position that “cluster[s] around the engendering function … women conceive and bear … men beget” (Witt 2011a, 40). These are women and men’s socially mediated reproductive functions (Witt 2011a, 29) and they differ from the biological function of reproduction, which roughly corresponds to sex on the standard sex/gender distinction. Witt writes: “to be a woman is to be recognized to have a particular function in engendering, to be a man is to be recognized to have a different function in engendering” (2011a, 39). Second, Witt distinguishes persons (those who possess self-consciousness), human beings (those who are biologically human) and social individuals (those who occupy social positions synchronically and diachronically). These ontological categories are not equivalent in that they possess different persistence and identity conditions. Social individuals are bound by social normativity, human beings by biological normativity. These normativities differ in two respects: first, social norms differ from one culture to the next whereas biological norms do not; second, unlike biological normativity, social normativity requires “the recognition by others that an agent is both responsive to and evaluable under a social norm” (Witt 2011a, 19). Thus, being a social individual is not equivalent to being a human being. Further, Witt takes personhood to be defined in terms of intrinsic psychological states of self-awareness and self-consciousness. However, social individuality is defined in terms of the extrinsic feature of occupying a social position, which depends for its existence on a social world. So, the two are not equivalent: personhood is essentially about intrinsic features and could exist without a social world, whereas social individuality is essentially about extrinsic features that could not exist without a social world.

Witt’s gender essentialist argument crucially pertains to social individuals , not to persons or human beings: saying that persons or human beings are gendered would be a category mistake. But why is gender essential to social individuals? For Witt, social individuals are those who occupy positions in social reality. Further, “social positions have norms or social roles associated with them; a social role is what an individual who occupies a given social position is responsive to and evaluable under” (Witt 2011a, 59). However, qua social individuals, we occupy multiple social positions at once and over time: we can be women, mothers, immigrants, sisters, academics, wives, community organisers and team-sport coaches synchronically and diachronically. Now, the issue for Witt is what unifies these positions so that a social individual is constituted. After all, a bundle of social position occupancies does not make for an individual (just as a bundle of properties like being white , cube-shaped and sweet do not make for a sugar cube). For Witt, this unifying role is undertaken by gender (being a woman or a man): it is

a pervasive and fundamental social position that unifies and determines all other social positions both synchronically and diachronically. It unifies them not physically, but by providing a principle of normative unity. (2011a, 19–20)

By ‘normative unity’, Witt means the following: given our social roles and social position occupancies, we are responsive to various sets of social norms. These norms are “complex patterns of behaviour and practices that constitute what one ought to do in a situation given one’s social position(s) and one’s social context” (Witt 2011a, 82). The sets of norms can conflict: the norms of motherhood can (and do) conflict with the norms of being an academic philosopher. However, in order for this conflict to exist, the norms must be binding on a single social individual. Witt, then, asks: what explains the existence and unity of the social individual who is subject to conflicting social norms? The answer is gender.

Gender is not just a social role that unifies social individuals. Witt takes it to be the social role — as she puts it, it is the mega social role that unifies social agents. First, gender is a mega social role if it satisfies two conditions (and Witt claims that it does): (1) if it provides the principle of synchronic and diachronic unity of social individuals, and (2) if it inflects and defines a broad range of other social roles. Gender satisfies the first in usually being a life-long social position: a social individual persists just as long as their gendered social position persists. Further, Witt maintains, trans people are not counterexamples to this claim: transitioning entails that the old social individual has ceased to exist and a new one has come into being. And this is consistent with the same person persisting and undergoing social individual change via transitioning. Gender satisfies the second condition too. It inflects other social roles, like being a parent or a professional. The expectations attached to these social roles differ depending on the agent’s gender, since gender imposes different social norms to govern the execution of the further social roles. Now, gender — as opposed to some other social category, like race — is not just a mega social role; it is the unifying mega social role. Cross-cultural and trans-historical considerations support this view. Witt claims that patriarchy is a social universal (2011a, 98). By contrast, racial categorisation varies historically and cross-culturally, and racial oppression is not a universal feature of human cultures. Thus, gender has a better claim to being the social role that is uniessential to social individuals. This account of gender essentialism not only explains social agents’ connectedness to their gender, but it also provides a helpful way to conceive of women’s agency — something that is central to feminist politics.

Linda Alcoff holds that feminism faces an identity crisis: the category of women is feminism’s starting point, but various critiques about gender have fragmented the category and it is not clear how feminists should understand what it is to be a woman (2006, chapter 5). In response, Alcoff develops an account of gender as positionality whereby “gender is, among other things, a position one occupies and from which one can act politically” (2006, 148). In particular, she takes one’s social position to foster the development of specifically gendered identities (or self-conceptions): “The very subjectivity (or subjective experience of being a woman) and the very identity of women are constituted by women’s position” (Alcoff 2006, 148). Alcoff holds that there is an objective basis for distinguishing individuals on the grounds of (actual or expected) reproductive roles:

Women and men are differentiated by virtue of their different relationship of possibility to biological reproduction, with biological reproduction referring to conceiving, giving birth, and breast-feeding, involving one’s body . (Alcoff 2006, 172, italics in original)

The thought is that those standardly classified as biologically female, although they may not actually be able to reproduce, will encounter “a different set of practices, expectations, and feelings in regard to reproduction” than those standardly classified as male (Alcoff 2006, 172). Further, this differential relation to the possibility of reproduction is used as the basis for many cultural and social phenomena that position women and men: it can be

the basis of a variety of social segregations, it can engender the development of differential forms of embodiment experienced throughout life, and it can generate a wide variety of affective responses, from pride, delight, shame, guilt, regret, or great relief from having successfully avoided reproduction. (Alcoff 2006, 172)

Reproduction, then, is an objective basis for distinguishing individuals that takes on a cultural dimension in that it positions women and men differently: depending on the kind of body one has, one’s lived experience will differ. And this fosters the construction of gendered social identities: one’s role in reproduction helps configure how one is socially positioned and this conditions the development of specifically gendered social identities.

Since women are socially positioned in various different contexts, “there is no gender essence all women share” (Alcoff 2006, 147–8). Nonetheless, Alcoff acknowledges that her account is akin to the original 1960s sex/gender distinction insofar as sex difference (understood in terms of the objective division of reproductive labour) provides the foundation for certain cultural arrangements (the development of a gendered social identity). But, with the benefit of hindsight

we can see that maintaining a distinction between the objective category of sexed identity and the varied and culturally contingent practices of gender does not presume an absolute distinction of the old-fashioned sort between culture and a reified nature. (Alcoff 2006, 175)

That is, her view avoids the implausible claim that sex is exclusively to do with nature and gender with culture. Rather, the distinction on the basis of reproductive possibilities shapes and is shaped by the sorts of cultural and social phenomena (like varieties of social segregation) these possibilities gives rise to. For instance, technological interventions can alter sex differences illustrating that this is the case (Alcoff 2006, 175). Women’s specifically gendered social identities that are constituted by their context dependent positions, then, provide the starting point for feminist politics.

Recently Robin Dembroff (2020) has argued that existing metaphysical accounts of gender fail to address non-binary gender identities. This generates two concerns. First, metaphysical accounts of gender (like the ones outlined in previous sections) are insufficient for capturing those who reject binary gender categorisation where people are either men or women. In so doing, these accounts are not satisfying as explanations of gender understood in a more expansive sense that goes beyond the binary. Second, the failure to understand non-binary gender identities contributes to a form of epistemic injustice called ‘hermeneutical injustice’: it feeds into a collective failure to comprehend and analyse concepts and practices that undergird non-binary classification schemes, thereby impeding on one’s ability to fully understand themselves. To overcome these problems, Dembroff suggests an account of genderqueer that they call ‘critical gender kind’:

a kind whose members collectively destabilize one or more elements of dominant gender ideology. Genderqueer, on my proposed model, is a category whose members collectively destabilize the binary axis, or the idea that the only possible genders are the exclusive and exhaustive kinds men and women. (2020, 2)

Note that Dembroff’s position is not to be confused with ‘gender critical feminist’ positions like those noted above, which are critical of the prevalent feminist focus on gender, as opposed to sex, kinds. Dembroff understands genderqueer as a gender kind, but one that is critical of dominant binary understandings of gender.

Dembroff identifies two modes of destabilising the gender binary: principled and existential. Principled destabilising “stems from or otherwise expresses individuals’ social or political commitments regarding gender norms, practices, and structures”, while existential destabilising “stems from or otherwise expresses individuals’ felt or desired gender roles, embodiment, and/or categorization” (2020, 13). These modes are not mutually exclusive, and they can help us understand the difference between allies and members of genderqueer kinds: “While both resist dominant gender ideology, members of [genderqueer] kinds resist (at least in part) due to felt or desired gender categorization that deviates from dominant expectations, norms, and assumptions” (2020, 14). These modes of destabilisation also enable us to formulate an understanding of non-critical gender kinds that binary understandings of women and men’s kinds exemplify. Dembroff defines these kinds as follows:

For a given kind X , X is a non-critical gender kind relative to a given society iff X ’s members collectively restabilize one or more elements of the dominant gender ideology in that society. (2020, 14)

Dembroff’s understanding of critical and non-critical gender kinds importantly makes gender kind membership something more and other than a mere psychological phenomenon. To engage in collectively destabilising or restabilising dominant gender normativity and ideology, we need more than mere attitudes or mental states – resisting or maintaining such normativity requires action as well. In so doing, Dembroff puts their position forward as an alternative to two existing internalist positions about gender. First, to Jennifer McKitrick’s (2015) view whereby gender is dispositional: in a context where someone is disposed to behave in ways that would be taken by others to be indicative of (e.g.) womanhood, the person has a woman’s gender identity. Second, to Jenkin’s (2016, 2018) position that takes an individual’s gender identity to be dependent on which gender-specific norms the person experiences as being relevant to them. On this view, someone is a woman if the person experiences norms associated with women to be relevant to the person in the particular social context that they are in. Neither of these positions well-captures non-binary identities, Dembroff argues, which motivates the account of genderqueer identities as critical gender kinds.

As Dembroff acknowledges, substantive philosophical work on non-binary gender identities is still developing. However, it is important to note that analytic philosophers are beginning to engage in gender metaphysics that goes beyond the binary.

This entry first looked at feminist objections to biological determinism and the claim that gender is socially constructed. Next, it examined feminist critiques of prevalent understandings of gender and sex, and the distinction itself. In response to these concerns, the entry looked at how a unified women’s category could be articulated for feminist political purposes. This illustrated that gender metaphysics — or what it is to be a woman or a man or a genderqueer person — is still very much a live issue. And although contemporary feminist philosophical debates have questioned some of the tenets and details of the original 1960s sex/gender distinction, most still hold onto the view that gender is about social factors and that it is (in some sense) distinct from biological sex. The jury is still out on what the best, the most useful, or (even) the correct definition of gender is.

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Beauvoir, Simone de | feminist philosophy, approaches: intersections between analytic and continental philosophy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on reproduction and the family | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on the self | homosexuality | identity politics | speech acts

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I am very grateful to Tuukka Asplund, Jenny Saul, Alison Stone and Nancy Tuana for their extremely helpful and detailed comments when writing this entry.

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Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Essay

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Cultural factors play an important role in a person’s sexual orientation and gender identity, yet such influences may have a negative effect. For instance, many people tend to classify others as either female or male depending on their birth gender and treat them accordingly throughout their lives (Spielman et al., 2020). However, the cases such as that of David Reimer demonstrate that an individual’s gender identity and sexual orientation are more complicated than traditional binary views. David Reimer was an intersex person who was born as a boy, but his testicles were removed soon after he was born due to health problems (Spielman et al., 2020). The parents tried to raise the baby as a girl, yet it was difficult for the child to identify as a female (Spielman et al., 2020). Eventually, David realized that he was a male and wished to continue living as one (Spielman et al., 2020). Consequently, David Reimer’s story suggests that such cultural factors as how gender is perceived and treated in a community cannot define an individual’s identity but can rather force them to hide who they are.

Furthermore, a person who is intersexed has to deal with several cultural and emotional issues. First, despite many people being intersexed, they are quite frequently neglected by society or discriminated against when noticed (TEDx Talks, 2019). For example, intersex babies are likely to be operated on without consent and with no medical need because of cultures that recognize individuals only as male or female (TEDx Talks, 2019). Second, intersex individuals are typically told to keep their identity secret, which may cause them to feel ashamed of who they are (TEDx Talks, 2019). Moreover, society often reinforces a certain gender on intersex people to accept a personality that does not correspond with theirs (TEDx Talks, 2019). Accordingly, a person who is intersexed is usually put in a box of cultural prejudices, which cause negative emotions.

Spielman, R. M., Jenkins, W. J., & Lovett, M. D. (2020). Psychology . OpenStax.

TEDx Talks. (2019). A different kind of superpower: what it means to be intersex [Video]. YouTube. Web.

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A Clockwork Lavender: Sexology, Psychology and the LGBTQ+ Community Investigates scientific understandings about sexual orientation and gender identity over the course of the 20th century, spotlighting the researchers and activists whose work had a profound impact on the lives of countless LGBTQ+ individuals. Smithsonian Learning Lab Cummings Center for the History of Psychology

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Identifying the Intersection of Trauma and Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity: Part I: Key Considerations Addresses why providers should ask about sexual orientation and gender identity, identifies the intersection of trauma, sexual orientation and gender identity, and provides goals for the screener. The National Child Traumatic Stress Network

Identifying the Intersection of Trauma and Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity: Part II: The Screener Is intended for use with children and youth ages 7-18 and their caregiver(s). The National Child Traumatic Stress Network

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Sexuality vs. Gender: What's the Difference?

While often conflated, they're not the same thing—let's clear up the confusion

Cynthia Vinney, PhD is an expert in media psychology and a published scholar whose work has been published in peer-reviewed psychology journals.

Dr. Monica Johnson is a clinical psychologist and owner of Kind Mind Psychology, a private practice in NYC specializing in evidence-based approaches to treating a wide range of mental health issues (e.g., depression, anxiety, trauma, and personality disorders). Additionally, she works with marginalized groups of people, including BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and alternative lifestyles, to manage minority stress.

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• Differences
• Effects of Discrimination

Sexuality and gender are often assumed to be related concepts, but they are actually separate and distinct. Understanding the difference between sexuality vs. gender is important because, while both are important parts of an individual's sense of self, if you don't know what each one is, you may make incorrect assumptions.

For example, some people may assume that someone who is transgender is gay. But a transgender person's gender identity and sexual orientation aren't connected.

At a Glance

To better understand the differences between sexuality vs. gender, it's important to start by defining gender identity. Becoming more informed about these differences and the way that different identities can intersect can help you understand the impact of discrimination against gender-diverse and sexual minority individuals and the factors that can help mediate the negative effects of stigma and prejudice.

Understanding Sexuality vs. Gender

To understand the difference between sexuality vs. gender, it's helpful to know what each term means.

• Gender is socially constructed and one's innermost concept of themselves as a man, woman, and/or nonbinary person. People define their gender identity in a variety of deeply personal ways that can include man or woman but can also extend to identities such as agender, genderfluid , gender nonconforming , and a variety of others .
• Sexuality  refers to who a person is attracted to and can include a plethora of orientations. While being gay, heterosexual, and bisexual are perhaps the most well-known sexual orientations, there are  many others , such as  asexual and pansexual .

While the terms are often conflated, recognizing the differences between sexuality and gender is important. Sexuality and gender are essential aspects of a person's identity and play a part in shaping a person's experiences throughout life.  

What Is Gender and Gender Identity?

The American Psychological Association (APA) defines gender identity as "a person’s deeply felt, inherent sense of being a boy, a man, or male; a girl, a woman, or female; or an alternative gender, which may or may not correspond to a person’s sex assigned at birth."

Gender identity is personal and an inherent part of an individual's sense of self. While gender is often presented as a binary that only includes men and women, in reality, gender is a spectrum. People can define their gender in a variety of waysinc! This includes a combination of woman and man, a completely separate gender, or no gender at all.

The four types of gender applied to living and nonliving things are masculine, feminine, neuter, and common.

Gender Identity vs. Gender Expression

Gender identity is internal and may not always be obvious to the outside world. That's because gender expression —the way one presents themselves through their external appearance and behavior with things like clothes, hairstyles, voice, and body language—may or may not conform to their gender identity.

Gender Identity vs. Sex

The terms sex and gender are often used interchangeably, and people often assume that the sex one is assigned at birth dictates the gender one is. In reality, though, gender identity and sex refer to different things.

While gender identity refers to how one defines themselves, sex is biological and dictated by one's anatomy, hormones, and chromosomes.

Just like gender identity, sex is a continuum that isn't limited to male or female, as people can also be born intersex , meaning their bodies aren't biologically male or female.

What Is Sexuality?

Sexuality is another word for sexual orientation. The APA defines sexual orientation as "a component of identity that includes a person's sexual or emotional attraction to another person and the behavior that may result from this attraction.

Sexual vs. Romantic Attraction

It's important to recognize that sexual and emotional attraction may not always match for asexual and aromantic people. Someone may be sexually attracted to one gender but experience no romantic attraction, whereas they may be romantically attracted to another gender but not want to engage in sexual acts.

Sexual Fluidity

Sexual orientation can change at any point during one's lifetime, which is known as sexual fluidity . In particular, as people age and get to know themselves and their preferences better. This often gives them the opportunity to learn more about themselves and who they are attracted to, leading to the evolution of their sexuality. In fact, for some people, sexuality is fluid throughout their lives.

Effects of Sexuality and Gender Discrimination

Unfortunately, transgender people or those whose sexual orientation is something other than heterosexual often encounter discrimination and prejudice . In the past few decades, both gender identity and sexual orientation have become political flashpoints.

Social and Political Effects

A case revolving around whether people who were not heterosexual had the right to marry went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the judges' ruling led to marriage equality. Many states have passed or are debating laws about issues involving transgender people, such as whether to prevent transgender men and women from using the bathroom that matches their gender identity.

The fact that issues surrounding the rights of gender-diverse and sexual minority people are up for debate contributes to a climate where discrimination is still common against anyone who isn't straight and cisgender . Research shows gender diverse and sexual minority individuals suffer from physical and psychological abuse, bullying, and persecution in a variety of contexts, including school, the workplace, and health care.

People can become preoccupied with an individual's gender expression or sexual orientation if it doesn't conform to social norms, and they may make their lack of support clear by doing things like using incorrect pronouns to refer to the individual.

In fact, a 2019 report of the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer ( LGBTQ ) youth in American schools, found that over half of LGBTQ+ students were verbally harassed and that over one-fifth were physically harassed due to their sexual orientation or gender expression.

Mental Health Effects

This kind of prejudice and discrimination puts gender-diverse and sexual minority individuals at an increased risk of mental health issues, including depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and suicide. On the other hand, an individual's journey to determining their sexuality or gender identity is personal. Suppressing one's true gender or sexual identity can lead to mental health issues as well.

Discrimination continues to be a serious problem for people with diverse identities, but there are things that can help. Studies have shown that the mental distress triggered by discrimination can be mediated by:

• Social and familial support
• Contact with other sexual minorities or others who are gender diverse
• Expectations of acceptance

Taking steps to combat discrimination based on sexuality and gender can be beneficial. LGBTQ students in schools with gay-straight alliances, LGBTQ-inclusive curriculums, and supportive educators felt safer and experienced a greater sense of belonging at school.

Both gender identity and sexual orientation are important to parts of a person's overall identity. But it's important to recognize they are not the same thing and knowing the differences between sexuality vs. gender is critical.

In each case, social constructs surrounding sexuality and gender continue to result in prejudices that negatively impact gender-diverse and sexual minority individuals. This may be one reason why many people continue to conflate these constructs.

People must recognize that for individuals, sexuality and gender are not inherently linked. Never make assumptions about a person's sexual orientation based on gender or vice versa. Instead, people need to feel free to explore and define their gender identity and sexual orientation in the way that feels best to them. In doing so, they can be the truest version of themselves.

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By Cynthia Vinney, PhD Cynthia Vinney, PhD is an expert in media psychology and a published scholar whose work has been published in peer-reviewed psychology journals.

Sexual Orientation and Gender: Stereotypes and Beyond

• Invited Essay
• Published: December 2005
• Volume 34 , pages 595–611, ( 2005 )

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• Theo G. M. Sandfort Ph.D 1  

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In this essay, I explore empirical research about the relationship between sexual orientation and gender. Both concepts have multiple meanings, which hinder an unequivocal understanding of the relationship between the two concepts. One of the first studies assumed to establish a relationship between male homosexuality and femininity was conducted by L. M. Terman and C. C. Miles (1936). The study actually gives a much more complicated picture of the relationship. Terman and Miles actually found two groups of homosexual men with, respectively, extremely high masculinity and extremely high femininity scores. Subsequently, various other studies examined the relationship between sexual orientation and gender, introducing the concept of androgyNY. While these studies were executed, major changes took place in the homosexual world, which have been characterized as the masculinization of culture. It is unclear how these changes relate to the masculine and feminine properties of the men involved. Various suggestions are made for further research on the relation between gender and sexual orientation.

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MINI REVIEW article

Sexual orientation and gender identity: review of concepts, controversies and their relation to psychopathology classification systems.

• Instituto Universitário de Lisboa ISCTE-IUL, CIS, Lisboa, Portugal

Numerous controversies and debates have taken place throughout the history of psychopathology (and its main classification systems) with regards to sexual orientation and gender identity. These are still reflected on present reformulations of gender dysphoria in both the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and the International Classification of Diseases, and in more or less subtle micro-aggressions experienced by lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans patients in mental health care. The present paper critically reviews this history and current controversies. It reveals that this deeply complex field contributes (i) to the reflection on the very concept of mental illness; (ii) to the focus on subjective distress and person-centered experience of psychopathology; and (iii) to the recognition of stigma and discrimination as significant intervening variables. Finally, it argues that sexual orientation and gender identity have been viewed, in the history of the field of psychopathology, between two poles: gender transgression and gender variance/fluidity.

Numerous controversies and debates have taken place throughout the history of psychopathology and mental health care with regards to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people. The present paper aims to review relevant concepts in this literature, its historical and current controversies, and their relation to the main psychopathology classification systems.

Concepts and Definitions

Concepts and definitions that refer to sexual orientation and gender identity are an evolving field. Many of the terms used in the past to describe LGBT people, namely in the mental health field, are now considered to be outdated and even offensive.

Sexual orientation refers to the sex of those to whom one is sexually and romantically attracted ( American Psychological Association, 2012 ). Nowadays, the terms ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ are used to refer to people who experience attraction to members of the same sex, and the term ‘bisexual’ describe people who experience attraction to members of both sexes. It should be noted that, although these categories continue to be widely used, sexual orientation does not always appear in such definable categories and, instead, occurs on a continuum ( American Psychological Association, 2012 ), and people perceived or described by others as LGB may identify in various ways ( D’Augelli, 1994 ).

The expression gender identity was coined in the middle 1960s, describing one’s persistent inner sense of belonging to either the male and female gender category ( Money, 1994 ). The concept of gender identity evolved over time to include those people who do not identify either as female or male: a “person’s self concept of their gender (regardless of their biological sex) is called their gender identity” ( Lev, 2004 , p. 397). The American Psychological Association (2009a , p. 28) described it as: “the person’s basic sense of being male, female, or of indeterminate sex.” For decades, the term ‘transsexual’ was restricted for individuals who had undergone medical procedures, including genital reassignment surgeries. However, nowadays, ‘transsexual’ refers to anyone who has a gender identity that is incongruent with the sex assigned at birth and therefore is currently, or is working toward, living as a member of the sex other than the one they were assigned at birth, regardless of what medical procedures they may have undergone or may desire in the future (e.g., Serano, 2007 ; American Psychological Association, 2009a ; Coleman et al., 2012 ). In this paper we use the prefix trans when referring to transsexual people.

Since the 1990’s the word transgender has been used primarily as an umbrella term to describe those people who defy societal expectations and assumptions regarding gender (e.g., Lev, 2004 ; American Psychological Association, 2009a ). It includes people who are transsexual and intersex, but also those who identify outside the female/male binary and those whose gender expression and behavior differs from social expectations. As in the case of sexual orientation, people perceived or described by others as transgender – including transsexual men and women – may identify in various ways (e.g., Pinto and Moleiro, 2015 ).

Discrimination and Impact on Mental Health

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people often suffer from various forms of discrimination, stigma and social exclusion – including physical and psychological abuse, bullying, persecution, or economic alienation ( United Nations, 2011 ; Bostwick et al., 2014 ; European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2014 ). Moreover, experiences of discrimination may occur in various areas, such as employment, education and health care, but also in the context of meaningful interpersonal relationships, including family (e.g., Milburn et al., 2006 ; Feinstein et al., 2014 ; António and Moleiro, 2015 ). Accordingly, several studies strongly suggest that experiences of discrimination and stigmatization place LGBT people at higher risk for mental distress ( Cochran and Mays, 2000 ; Dean et al., 2000 ; Cochran et al., 2003 ; Meyer, 2003 ; Shilo, 2014 ).

For example, LGB populations may be at increased risk for suicide ( Hershberger and D’Augelli, 1995 ; Mustanski and Liu, 2013 ), traumatic stress reactions ( D’Augelli et al., 2002 ), major depression disorders ( Cochran and Mays, 2000 ), generalized anxiety disorders ( Bostwick et al., 2010 ), or substance abuse ( King et al., 2008 ). In addition, transgender people have been identified as being at a greater risk for developing: anxiety disorders ( Hepp et al., 2005 ; Mustanski et al., 2010 ); depression ( Nuttbrock et al., 2010 ; Nemoto et al., 2011 ); social phobia and adjustment disorders ( Gómez-Gil et al., 2009 ); substance abuse ( Lawrence, 2008 ); or eating disorders ( Vocks et al., 2009 ). At the same time, data on suicide ideation and attempts among this population are alarming: Maguen and Shipherd (2010) found the percentage of attempted suicides to be as high as 40% in transsexual men and 20% in transsexual women. Nuttbrock et al. (2010) , using a sample of 500 transgender women, found that around 30% had already attempted suicide, around 35% had planned to do so, and close to half of the participants expressed suicide ideation. In particular, adolescence has been identified as a period of increased risk with regard to the mental health of transgender and transsexual people ( Dean et al., 2000 ).

In sum, research clearly recognizes the role of stigma and discrimination as significant intervening variables in psychopathology among LGBT populations. Nevertheless, the relation between sexual orientation or gender identity and stress may be mediated by several variables, including social and family support, low internalized homophobia, expectations of acceptance vs. rejection, contact with other LGBT people, or religiosity ( Meyer, 2003 ; Shilo and Savaya, 2012 ; António and Moleiro, 2015 ; Snapp et al., 2015 ). Thus, it seems important to focus on subjective distress and in a person-centered experience of psychopathology.

On the History of Homosexuality and Psychiatric Diagnoses

While nowadays we understand that higher rates of psychological distress among LGB people are related to their minority status and to discrimination, by the early 20th century, psychiatrists mostly regarded homosexuality as pathological per se ; and in the mid-20th century psychiatrics, physicians, and psychologists were trying to “cure” and change homosexuality ( Drescher, 2009 ). In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association published its first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-I), in which homosexuality was considered a “sociopathic personality disturbance.” In DSM-II, published in 1968, homosexuality was reclassified as a “sexual deviation.” However, in December 1973, the American Psychiatric Association’s Board of Trustees voted to remove homosexuality from the DSM.

The most significant catalyst to homosexuality’s declassification as a mental illness was lesbian and gay activism, and its advocacy efforts within the American Psychiatric Association ( Drescher, 2009 ). Nevertheless, during the discussion that led to the diagnostic change, APA’s Nomenclature Committee also wrestled with the question of what constitutes a mental disorder. Concluding that “they [mental disorders] all regularly caused subjective distress or were associated with generalized impairment in social effectiveness of functioning” ( Spitzer, 1981 , p. 211), the Committee agreed that homosexuality by itself was not one.

However, the diagnostic change did not immediately end the formal pathologization of some presentations of homosexuality. After the removal of the “homosexuality” diagnosis, the DSM-II contained the diagnosis of “sexual orientation disturbance,” which was replaced by “ego dystonic homosexuality” in the DSM-III, by 1980. These diagnoses served the purpose of legitimizing the practice of sexual “conversion” therapies among those individuals with same-sex attractions who were distressed and reported they wished to change their sexual orientation ( Spitzer, 1981 ; Drescher, 2009 ). Nonetheless, “ego-dystonic homosexuality” was removed from the DSM-III-R in 1987 after several criticisms: as formulated by Drescher (2009 , p. 435): “should people of color unhappy about their race be considered mentally ill?”

The removal from the DSM of psychiatric diagnoses related to sexual orientation led to changes in the broader cultural beliefs about homosexuality and culminated in the contemporary civil rights quest for equality ( Drescher, 2012 ). In contrast, it was only in 1992 that the World Health Organization ( World Health Organization, 1992 ) removed “homosexuality” from the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), which still contains a diagnosis similar to “ego-dystonic homosexuality.” However, this is expected to change in the next revision, planned for publication in 2017 ( Cochran et al., 2014 ).

Controversies on Gender Dysphoria and (Trans)Gender Diagnoses

Mental health diagnoses that are specific to transgender and transsexual people have been highly controversial. In this domain, the work of Harry Benjamin was fundamental for trans issues internationally, through the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (presently, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, WPATH). In the past few years, there has been a vehement discussion among interested professionals, trans and LGBT activists, and human rights groups concerning the reform or removal of (trans)gender diagnoses from the main health diagnostic tools. However, discourses on this topic have been inconclusive, filled with mixed messages and polarized opinions ( Kamens, 2011 ). Overall, mental health diagnoses which are specific to transgender people have been criticized in large part because they enhance the stigma in a population which is already particularly stigmatized ( Drescher, 2013 ). In fact, it has been suggested that the label “mental disorder” is the main factor underlying prejudice toward trans people ( Winter et al., 2009 ).

The discussion reached a high point during the recent revision process of the DSM-5 ( American Psychiatric Association, 2013 ), in which the diagnosis of “gender identity disorder” was revised into one of “gender dysphoria.” Psychiatric diagnosis was thus limited to those who are, in a certain moment of their lives, distressed about living with a gender assignment they experience as incongruent with their gender identity ( Drescher, 2013 ). The change of criteria and nomenclature “is less pathologizing as it no longer implies that one’s identity is disordered” ( DeCuypere et al., 2010 , p. 119). In fact, gender dysphoria is not a synonym for transsexuality, nor should it be used to describe transgender people in general ( Lev, 2004 ); rather, “[it] is a clinical term used to describe the symptoms of excessive pain, agitation, restless, and malaise that gender-variant people seeking therapy often express” ( Lev, 2004 , p. 910). Although the changes were welcomed (e.g., DeCuypere et al., 2010 ; Lev, 2013 ), there are still voices arguing for the “ultimate removal” ( Lev, 2013 , p. 295) of gender dysphoria from the DSM. Nevertheless, attention is presently turned to the ongoing revision of the ICD. Various proposals concerning the revision of (trans)gender diagnoses within ICD have been made, both originating from transgender and human rights groups (e.g., Global Action for Trans ∗ Equality, 2011 ; TGEU, 2013 ) and the health profession community (e.g., Drescher et al., 2012 ; World Professional Association for Transgender Health, 2013 ). These include two main changes: the reform of the diagnosis of transsexualism into one of “gender incongruence”; and the change of the diagnosis into a separate chapter from the one on “mental and behavioral disorders.”

Mental Health Care Reflecting Controversies

There is evidence that LGBT persons resort to psychotherapy at higher rates than the non-LGBT population ( Bieschke et al., 2000 ; King et al., 2007 ); hence, they may be exposed to higher risk for harmful or ineffective therapies, not only as a vulnerable group, but also as frequent users.

Recently, there has been a greater concern in the mental health field oriented to the promotion of the well-being among non-heterosexual and transgender people, which has paralleled the diagnostic changes. This is established, for instance, by the amount of literature on gay and lesbian affirmative psychotherapy which has been developed in recent decades (e.g., Davis, 1997 ) and, also, by the fact that major international accrediting bodies in counseling and psychotherapy have identified the need for clinicians to be able to work effectively with minority clients, namely LGBT people. The APA’s guidelines for psychotherapy with lesbian, gay, and bisexual client ( American Psychological Association, 2000 , 2012 ) are a main reference. These ethical guidelines highlight, among several issues, the need for clinicians to recognize that their own attitudes and knowledge about the experiences of sexual minorities are relevant to the therapeutic process with these clients and that, therefore, mental health care providers must look for appropriate literature, training, and supervision.

However, empirical research also reveals that some therapists still pursue less appropriate clinical practices with LGBT clients. In a review of empirical research on the provision of counseling and psychotherapy to LGB clients, Bieschke et al. (2006) encountered an unexpected recent explosion of literature focused on “conversion therapy.” There are, in fact, some mental health professionals that still attempt to help lesbian, gay, and bisexual clients to become heterosexual ( Bartlett et al., 2009 ), despite the fact that a recent systematic review of the peer-reviewed journal literature on sexual orientation change efforts concluded that “efforts to change sexual orientation are unlikely to be successful and involve some risk of harm” ( American Psychological Association, 2009b , p. 1).

Moreover, there is evidence of other forms of inappropriate (while less blatant) clinical practices with LGBT clients (e.g., Garnets et al., 1991 ; Jordan and Deluty, 1995 ; Liddle, 1996 ; Hayes and Erkis, 2000 ). Even those clinicians who intend to be affirmative and supportive of LGBT individuals can reveal subtle heterosexist bias in the work with these clients ( Pachankis and Goldfried, 2004 ). Examples of such micro-aggressions ( Sue, 2010 ) might be automatically assuming that a client is heterosexual, trying to explain the etiology of the client’s homosexuality, or focusing on the sexual orientation of a LGB client despite the fact that this is not an issue at hand (e.g., Shelton and Delgado-Romero, 2011 ). Heterosexual bias in counseling and psychotherapy may manifest itself also in what Brown (2006 , p. 350) calls “sexual orientation blindness,” i.e., struggling for a supposed neutrality and dismissing the specificities related to the minority condition of non-heterosexual clients. This conceptualization of the human experience mostly in heterosexual terms, found in the therapeutic setting, does not seem to be independent of psychotherapist’s basic training and the historical heterosexist in the teaching of medicine and psychology ( Simoni, 1996 ; Alderson, 2004 ).

With regards to the intervention with trans people, for decades the mental health professionals’ job was to sort out the “true” transsexuals from all other transgender people. The former would have access to physical transition, and the later would be denied any medical intervention other than psychotherapy. By doing this, whether deliberately or not, professionals – acting as gatekeepers – pursued to ‘ensure that most people who did transition would not be “gender-ambiguous” in any way’ ( Serano, 2007 , p. 120). Research shows that currently trans people still face serious challenges in accessing health care, including those related to inappropriate gatekeeping ( Bockting et al., 2004 ; Bauer et al., 2009 ). Some mental health professionals still focus on the assessment of attributes related to identity and gender expressions, rather than on the distress with which trans people may struggle with ( Lev, 2004 ; Serano, 2007 ). Hence, trans people may feel the need to express a personal narrative consistent with what they believe the clinicians’ expectations to be, for accessing hormonal or surgical treatments ( Pinto and Moleiro, 2015 ). Thus, despite the revisions of (trans)gender diagnoses within the DSM, more recent diagnoses seem to still be used as if they were identical with the diagnosis of transsexualism – in a search for the “true transsexual” ( Cohen-Kettenis and Pfäfflin, 2010 ). It seems clear that social and cultural biases have significantly influenced – and still do – diagnostic criteria and the access to hormonal and surgical treatments for trans people.

Controversies and debates with regards to medical classification of sexual orientation and gender identity contribute to the reflection on the very concept of mental illness. The agreement that mental disorders cause subjective distress or are associated with impairment in social functioning was essential for the removal of “homosexuality” from the DSM in the 1970s ( Spitzer, 1981 ). Moreover, (trans)gender diagnoses constitute a significant dividing line both within trans related activism (e.g., Vance et al., 2010 ) and the health professionals’ communities (e.g., Ehrbar, 2010 ). The discussion has taken place between two apposite positions: (1) trans(gender) diagnoses should be removed from health classifying systems, because they promote the pathologization and stigmatization of gender diversity and enhance the medical control of trans people’s identities and lives; and (2) trans(gender) diagnoses should be retained in order to ensure access to care, since health care systems rely on diagnoses to justify medical treatment – which many trans people need. In fact, trans people often describe experiences of severe distress and argue for the need for treatments and access to medical care ( Pinto and Moleiro, 2015 ), but at the same time reject the label of mental illness for themselves ( Global Action for Trans ∗ Equality, 2011 ; TGEU, 2013 ). Thus, it may be important to understand how the debate around (trans)diagnoses may be driven also by a history of undue gatekeeping and by stigma involving mental illness.

The present paper argues that sexual orientation and gender identity have been viewed, in the history of the field of psychopathology, between two poles: gender transgression and gender variance/fluidity.

On the one hand, aligned with a position of “transgression” and/or “deviation from a norm,” people who today are described as LGBT were labeled as mentally ill. Inevitably, classification systems reflect(ed) the existing social attitudes and prejudices, as well as the historical and cultural contexts in which they were developed ( Drescher, 2012 ; Kirschner, 2013 ). In that, they often failed to differentiate between mental illness and socially non-conforming behavior or fluidity of gender expressions. This position and the historical roots of this discourse are still reflected in the practices of some clinicians, ranging from “conversion” therapies to micro-aggressions in the daily lives of LGBT people, including those experienced in the care by mental health professionals.

On the other hand, lined up with a position of gender variance and fluidity, changes in the diagnostic systems in the last few decades reflect a broader respect and value of the diversity of human sexuality and of gender expressions. This position recognizes that the discourse and practices coming from the (mental) health field may lead to changes in the broader cultural beliefs ( Drescher, 2012 ). As such, it also recognizes the power of medical classifications, health discourses and clinical practices in translating the responsibility of fighting discrimination and promoting LGBT people’s well-being.

In conclusion, it seems crucial to emphasize the role of specific training and supervision in the development of clinical competence in the work with sexual minorities. Several authors (e.g., Pachankis and Goldfried, 2004 ) have argued for the importance of continuous education and training of practitioners in individual and cultural diversity competences, across professional development. This is in line with APA’s ethical guidelines ( American Psychological Association, 2000 , 2012 ), and it is even more relevant when we acknowledge the significant and recent changes in this field. Furthermore, it is founded on the very notion that LGBT competence assumes clinicians ought to be aware of their own personal values, attitudes and beliefs regarding human sexuality and gender diversity in order to provide appropriate care. These ethical concerns, however, have not been translated into training programs in medicine and psychology in a systematic manner in most European countries, and to the mainstreaming of LGBT issues ( Goldfried, 2001 ) in psychopathology.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords : sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender, discrimination, psychopathology, mental health care

Citation: Moleiro C and Pinto N (2015) Sexual orientation and gender identity: review of concepts, controversies and their relation to psychopathology classification systems. Front. Psychol. 6:1511. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01511

Received: 29 July 2015; Accepted: 18 September 2015; Published: 01 October 2015.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2015 Moleiro and Pinto. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Carla Moleiro, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa ISCTE-IUL, CIS, Avenida das Forças Armadas, 1649-026 Lisbon, Portugal, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Sexual orientation and gender: stereotypes and beyond

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• 1 HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies, New York State Psychiatric Institute, Unit 15, 1051 Riverside Drive, NY 10032, USA. [email protected]
• PMID: 16362245
• DOI: 10.1007/s10508-005-7907-8

In this essay, I explore empirical research about the relationship between sexual orientation and gender. Both concepts have multiple meanings, which hinder an unequivocal understanding of the relationship between the two concepts. One of the first studies assumed to establish a relationship between male homosexuality and femininity was conducted by L. M. Terman and C. C. Miles (1936). The study actually gives a much more complicated picture of the relationship. Terman and Miles actually found two groups of homosexual men with, respectively, extremely high masculinity and extremely high femininity scores. Subsequently, various other studies examined the relationship between sexual orientation and gender, introducing the concept of androgyNY. While these studies were executed, major changes took place in the homosexual world, which have been characterized as the masculinization of culture. It is unclear how these changes relate to the masculine and feminine properties of the men involved. Various suggestions are made for further research on the relation between gender and sexual orientation.

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Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Sexual Orientation — A Person’s Gender Orientation: the Impact of Norms and Stereotypes

A Person's Gender Orientation: The Impact of Norms and Stereotypes

• Categories: Gender Identity Gender Stereotypes Sexual Orientation

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Published: Aug 14, 2023

Words: 1199 | Pages: 3 | 6 min read

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Complexities of gender and sexual orientation .

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• University of Denver
• Inclusive Teaching Practices

Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity*

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Introduction

This Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity module offers a glossary, models, and campus resources on Title IX to increase our awareness on this topic and best support our students. Gender identity and expression are complex concepts that have come to the forefront of national conversations around diversity and inclusion in Higher Education. 

Students from all over the country have voiced their concern and fear of being misgendered, outed without consent and subsequently invalidated, marginalized, and psychologically damaged by a lack of awareness surrounding their identity. With this in mind, we invite you to explore the resources on this page  as a primer to the many layers that surround these concepts and incorporate many of the suggested approaches into your teaching practices.

This article covers:

What is Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity?

Definitions, name and pronoun etiquette.

• Establishing Ground Rules
• DU Resources

Gender identity and expression are complex concepts that have come to the forefront of  recent national conversations around diversity and inclusion in Higher Education . Students from all over the country have voiced their concern and fear of being misgendered, outed without consent and subsequently invalidated, marginalized, and psychologically damaged by a lack of awareness surrounding their identity. This module is an introductory primer to the many layers that surround these concepts, and the ways we can increase our awareness and best support our students in a complex and often divisive sociopolitical context.

According to the  National Education Association  (NEA), sexual orientation is an identity based on whether someone is attracted to people of a sex different than their own, the same sex, or both sexes (i.e., heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual). Gender identity is a person's internal sense of being male, female, or somewhere else along the gender spectrum. Transgender is an umbrella term for people whose gender identity is different from their biological sex or the sex they were assigned at birth. The acronym LGBTQI stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, intersex.

LGBTQI-related issues often arise in various types of educational settings. These include bullying or harassment against students (and sometimes school personnel) who are or are perceived as LGBTQI; the high rates of truancy, dropout, substance abuse, homelessness and suicide among LGBTQI youth; controversy surrounding LGBTQI school events and student clubs; the right of school personnel to “come out” or identify as LGBTQI in school; and other issues.

* “Queer and trans organizers have been making the distinction between gender identity, gender presentation/expression, sex, and attraction for decades. No one person or organization has created the concept” ( Trans Student Educational Resources  , 2020).

Since terms evolve over time and contexts, the following definitions will be updated as frequently as possible to reflect LGBTQI language (adapted from Trans Student Educational Resources )

Sexual Orientation

A person's sexual identity or self-identification as bisexual, heterosexual, homosexual, pansexual, etc.

A person who is sexually attracted to people of any sex.

(adapted from Trans Student Educational Resources )

Heterosexual

A person who is sexually attracted to people of the opposite sex.

(adapted from GLAAD Media Reference Guide )

Heteronormative

The belief and assumption that heterosexuality is the normative or default sexual orientation for all people. It is important to review course materials to gauge the predominance of heteronormative language in readings, supplementary materials and examples.

(adapted from Warner, 1991 )

A person who is sexually attracted to people of their own sex.

A person who is not limited by biological sex, gender or gender identity in sexual choice.

(adapted from Human Rights Campaign ) 

Gender Identity

* “Queer and trans organizers have been making the distinction between gender identity, gender presentation/expression, sex, and attraction for decades. No one person or organization has created the concept” ( Trans Student Educational Resources , 2020).

The behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex.

Agender literally means “without gender” and is a term used to refer to individuals who consider themselves gender neutral or who don’t express a gender identity.

Androgynous

A gender expression that ambiguously incorporates masculine and feminine characteristics.

Cisgender/Cis

Derived from the Latin word meaning "on the same side". People whose gender identity or expression aligns with the sex assigned to them at birth. "Cis" is not a slur nor a fake word.

The birth name of a person who has since changed their name (especially a transgender person).

(adapted from Inside Higher Ed )

When someone refers to a person who is transgender by their non-affirmed name. Deadnaming is damaging to the individual, and conveys disrespect for the person's identity, a lack of societal support, invalidation and can potentially "out" the person and signal to others that they are transgender without their consent.

Gender Binary

The idea that male/female are the only two genders, and that individuals should be gendered either as man or woman.

Gender Expression

The external appearance of one's gender identity, usually expressed through behavior, clothing, haircut or voice. Gender expression may or may not conform to socially defined behaviors and characteristics typically associated with being masculine or feminine.

(adapted from Trans Student Educational Resources Gender Unicorn ) 

Gender Fluid

Refers to individuals whose gender identity fluctuates between all genders or a specific subset of genders.

A person's innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both or neither. It is how individuals perceive themselves and what they call themselves or ask to be called. It's important to remember that one's gender identity can be the same or different from the sex assigned at birth.

Gender Nonconforming

An umbrella term often used to describe people who do not follow stereotypical societal expectations about how they should look, or act based on the sex they were assigned at birth.

(adapted from A Queer Endeavor )

Genderqueer

An umbrella term used to refer to a broad spectrum of non-binary gender identities.

Gender Transition

The process by which some people strive to more closely align their internal knowledge of gender with its outward appearance. Some people socially transition, whereby they might begin dressing, using names and pronouns and/or be socially recognized as another gender. Others undergo physical transitions in which they modify their bodies.

Gender Variant

A term used to refer to individuals who don’t conform to socially-constructed, dominant gender norms.

(adapted from PFLAG )

Individuals born with any several variations in sex characteristics that can include chromosomes, gonads, sex hormones, or genitals.

Misgendering

The act of not acknowledging and/or using a person’s preferred and/or requested gender pronouns. It also occurs when referring to someone through gendered language with which they do not identify, i.e., “guys,” “ma’am,” “miss,” “sir,” etc. Misgendering is disrespectful, psychologically damaging and causes a great deal of anxiety for people who are subsequently put at an increased risk of discrimination.

An umbrella term for all genders other than female/male or woman/man; used as an adjective (e.g. Alex is a nonbinary person). Not all non-binary people identify as trans and not all trans people identify as nonbinary.

Transgender/Trans

An umbrella term often used to describe people whose gender identity and/or expression is different from cultural expectations based on the sex they were assigned at birth. Being transgender does now imply any specific sexual orientation.

Trans Woman

Generally describes someone assigned male at birth who identifies as a woman. Sometimes trans women identify as male-to-female (also MTF, M2F, or trans feminine).

Generally describes someone assigned female at birth who identifies as a man. Sometimes trans men identify as female-to-male (also FTM, F2M, or trans masculine).

A term traditionally used by Native American people to refer to individuals who exhibit the identity and roles commonly associated with the opposite sex.

(adapted from We R Native ) 

The Gender Unicorn

The Genderbread Person

Key Considerations

• “Transgender” encompasses many different gender presentations and identities.
• Gender is socially constructed.
• Certain body parts do not determine gender identity.
• Gender identity is about how we see ourselves. Trans people can identify as gay, straight, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, etc.
• Gender expression is the external representation of one’s gender identity. 1
• Sex, gender identities, and gender expressions are all malleable. 2
• The best way to be an ally is to listen to trans people themselves.
• Because language shapes reality, be careful with pronouns. 2
• Positive interaction between faculty and trans and gender-nonconforming students is beneficial. 3

Teaching Tools

A critical part of building a learning environment that is inclusive of sexual orientation and gender identity is asking and correctly using someone's name and  pronouns. Not only is this best practice, it prevents someone from being microaggressed and feeling disrespected, invalidated, dismissed, alienated, dysphoric or all of the above.

• State your pronouns when introducing yourself.
• Include your gender pronouns in your email signature and syllabus. This signals to students that you are aware of and value their gender pronouns.
• Call roll using students' last names.
• Do not call roll or otherwise read the roster aloud until you have given students a chance to state what they prefer to be called, in case the roster represents a prior name.
• Ask for students pronouns through pre-class Qualtrics surveys. This should be created as an optional question.  It is a great opportunity to learn more about students and what will best support them in your class. Consider asking a set of questions that will help you get to know them better.  
• Allow students to self-identify the name they go by and what pronouns they use, if they would like to share them.  You can accomplish this with a sign-in sheet, asking them to indicate these terms in writing, not orally, in class.
• If you are aware of a student’s former name that they do not use, do not use it or reveal it to others.
• If you meet a student outside the classroom in a setting where they did not already get to self-identify via your seating chart, and you are not sure of the proper pronoun for them, ask. One way to do this is by sharing your own. For example: “I use masculine pronouns. I want to make sure to address you correctly, how do you like to be addressed?”
• Never ask personal questions of trans people that you would not ask of others.

Establish Ground Rules

• Use gender neutral language in your syllabus and other general written communication.
• Set a tone of respect when establishing classroom guidelines.

A critical part of building a learning environment that is inclusive of sexual orientation and gender identity is asking and correctly using someone's name and pronouns. You can add your pronouns in Canvas at the beginning of the term so that we can refer to you using the correct pronouns. If your pronoun set is not available in Canvas, please let me know or fill out this survey to have your pronouns added. Preferred names and pronouns may change during the term, so feel free at any point to let me know that you would like to be addressed differently. As a community, we will strive to address each other with the names and pronouns identified in Canvas. If we make mistakes or are corrected, we will briefly apologize and correct ourselves. To learn more about personal pronouns and why they are important, please visit the “Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity” module on the Office of Teaching and Learning website. For student resources, please visit the "Gender and Sexuality" section on the DU Cultural Center’s website.

• Don't assume that students know what a pronoun is. Instead, model usage by saying something like, "For example, I use the pronouns she/her/hers."  

Making Mistakes

Personal Responsibility

If you make a mistake about someone’s pronoun, correct yourself.

"[...] going on as if it did not happen is actually less respectful than making the correction. This also saves the person who was misidentified from having to correct an incorrect pronouns assumption that has now been planted in the minds of any other participants in the conversation who heard the mistake"

– Spade, 2010  

Community Responsibility

When someone else makes a pronoun mistake, correct them.

" [...] It is polite to provide correction, whether or not the person whose pronoun was misused is present, in order to avoid future mistakes and in order to correct the mistaken assumption that might now have been planted in the minds of any other participants in the conversation who heard the mistake"

– Spade, 2010

Title IX Considerations

Title IX and Equal Opportunity (EO)

The University of Denver’s Equal Opportunity policy and procedures expressly prohibit harassment, discrimination or violence against any person on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. DU will continue to follow this policy adopted in 2007. This will not change .

Additionally, DU is governed by the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act’s prohibition against harassment and discrimination on the basis of sex, which includes sexual orientation and gender identity. The University will continue to stand firm in its commitment to honoring the identities of all people and will adhere to its established Equal Opportunity policy and procedures.

Title IX Protected Class

In United States federal anti-discrimination law, a protected class is a group of people with a common characteristic who are legally protected from discrimination on the basis of that characteristic. Protected classes include race, color, religion, national origin, age (40 and over), sex, pregnancy, citizenship, familial status, disability, veteran status and genetic information. 

Supportive Resources

Resources at DU

• DU Pride Portal
• DU Preferred Name Usage
• Center for Multicultural Excellence LGBTIQ&Ally Services
• Social Justice Living and Learning Community
• Office of Equal Opportunity & Title IX
• Campus Life and Inclusive Excellence
• Office of Graduate Education
• Human Resources and Inclusive Community
• Trans Terminology Resource
• Human Rights Watch: LGBT Rights
• Human Rights Campaign: State Maps of Laws and Policies

Name and Pronoun Articles

Pronoun Etiquette Sheet

Tips on how to be polite when it comes to problems of misidentifying another person’s pronoun. 

Suggested Format for Requesting Student Self-Identification

These practices are what institutions should strive for in addressing the needs of transgender students.

FAQs about Pronouns

Here are answers to questions about common pronouns, what to do when you make a mistake, and more.

Pronoun Introductions

Designed for the School of Social Work at Smith College, this resource is broadly useful for many disciplines. 

Supporting Trans Students

The Experiences of Incoming Transgender College Students

Exploring the Ways Trans* Collegians Navigate Academic, Romantic, and Social Relationships

Trans Inclusion Quick Guide

Transphobia & Racism, and Other Intersections

Trans Student Educational Resources’ Model Policy for Four Year Colleges

Teaching Beyond the Gender Binary in the University Classroom

Inclusive learning environments for lgbtqi students.

Applying the Seven Learning Principles to Creating LGBT-Inclusive Classrooms

Teaching LBGTQI Issues in Higher Education

An Examination of the (In)visibility of Sexual Orientation, Heterosexism, Homophobia, and Other LGBTQ Concerns in the U.S. Multicultural Teacher Education Coursework

Case, K. A., Stewart, B., & Tittsworth, J. (2009). Transgender Across the Curriculum: A Psychology for Inclusion. Teaching of Psychology, 36 (2), 117-121.

Clark, J. E., Rand, E., & Vogt, L. (2003). Climate Control; Teaching About Gender and Sexuality in 2003. Radical Teacher, (66), 2.

1Teich, N. M. (2012). Transgender 101: A Simple Guide to a Complex issue. Columbia University Press.

2Nicolazzo, Z. (2010). Trans* in College: Transgender Students’ Strategies for Navigating Campus Life and the Institutional Politics of Inclusion. Stylus Publishing, LLC.

4Linley, J. L., Nguyen, D., Brazelton, G. B., Becker, B., Renn, K., & Woodford, M. (2016). Faculty as Sources of Support for LGBTQ College Students. College Teaching, 64 (2), 55-63.

Schmalz, J. (2015). Ask me: What LGBTQ Students Want Their Professors to Know. The Chronicle of Higher Education : http://chronicle.com/article/Ask-Me-What-LGBTQ-Students/232797

Spade, D. (2011). Some Very Basic Tips for Making Higher Education More Accessible to Trans Students and Rethinking How We Talk about Gendered Bodies.  Radical Teacher 92 (1), 57–62.

A Queer Endeavor, Staley, S. & Leonardi, B. (2018). For educators: Making silence unworkable . Retrieved from http://aqueerendeavor.org/for-educators/ . Boulder, CO: University of Colorado Boulder. 

GLAAD. (2016). GLAAD Media Reference Guide . Retrieved from https://www.glaad.org/sites/default/files/GLAAD-Media-Reference-Guide-Tenth-Edition.pdf

Human Rights Campaign. (2020). Glossary of terms. Retrieved from https://www.hrc.org/resources/glossary-of-terms

Paige, K. (2016, November 4). A call for flexible name-change policies. Inside Higher Ed . Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2016/11/04/trans-students-need-be-able-legally-change-their-names-official-college-records

PFLAG. (2019). PFLAG national glossary of terms. Retrieved from https://pflag.org/glossary

Warner, M. (1991). Fear of a queer planet. Social Text, 29, 3-17.  We R Native. (2020). LGBT – Two Spirit . Retrieved from https://www.wernative.org/my-relationships/sexual-health/lgbt-two-spirit

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Gender identity and sexual orientation - Essay Example

• Subject: Gender & Sexual Studies
• Type: Essay
• Level: Undergraduate
• Pages: 2 (500 words)
• Downloads: 5
• Author: rashadabernathy

Extract of sample "Gender identity and sexual orientation"

Gender identity and sexual orientationGender identity and sexual orientation are mere labels that should identify a person but not form a basis for victimization. Even though differences may exist in opinion over sexual and gender orientation, positive psychology requires management of the opinions for positive lives of all members of the society. Measures for dealing with the differences should therefore not focus on the differences but on satisfaction that people can derive from their lives.

A member of the LGBTQ community should therefore not have a negative attitude towards straight people and straight people should be positive towards sexual orientation of members of the LGBTQ community. In addition, positivity towards people’s orientation improves their self-confidence and self-actualization and therefore contributes to quality of life. The same positive attitude should also exist over gender identity differences in which marginalized groups such as transgender and people with gender non-conformance should receive psychological support that can help them understand and be confident of their orientations (Riggle and Rostosky, 2014).

My sexual and gender identities are straight and I have never experienced any alternative orientation. This could be because of my social background in which the alternative orientations were condemned and I believed them to be immoral. I seemingly conformed to the social values that condemned the alternative orientations, though I do not discriminate against them. My developed social knowledge does not however support the strict social environments that condemn other social orientations because psychological support is necessary for emotional stability (Riggle and Rostosky, 2014).

Effects of racial micro-aggression depend on the form. Many forms exists, based on examples that Yearwood (2013) offers. Such racial micro-aggressions such as underrepresentation of a race do not have negative effects on an individual, as long as no direct discrimination is directed against the individual or the involved minority race. Other racial micro-aggressions such as being ignored or being dismissed are however likely to cause psychological harm to a target. I have however not experienced any form of racial micro-aggression and long-term existence of members of my race in the locality could explain this.

Certain micro-aggressions, such as disproportionate representation of race are easier to deal with because they are too passive and not direct to an individual and does not identify intention of the source. Some forms that are direct and associate with discrimination, such as dismissal because of race, are however difficult to deal with (Yearwood, 2013). Formed opinion about a sub-population and avoidance of a population are the micro-aggressions that I witness the most and I am likely to have a formed opinion over people, though not likely to express the opinions.

A "good" man does work to provide for the family. A "good" woman does work to raise the family. A "good" woman thinks about relationships and quality of life. A "good" Man thinks work and power. A "good" Man feels power. A "good" woman feels relationships and quality of life.Family members, peers, media, church and work institutions are the sources of the messages, as they preserve and communicate social norms that define gender (Riggle and Rostosky, 2014). ReferencesYearwood, E. (2013). Microaggression.

Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing 26(1), 98-99. Riggle, E. and Rostosky, S. (2014). A positive view of LGBTQ: Embracing identity and cultivating well-being. Washington, DC: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

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What’s the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity?

June 21, 2024 3 min read

By Julia @ Planned Parenthood

We get a lot of questions from parents about LGBTQ+ issues, ranging from how to know if your kid is LGBTQ+ to how to answer their questions about LGBTQ+ topics. And the truth is, it’s a good idea to proactively start conversations with your kid about sexual orientation and gender identity even if your kid doesn’t ask you questions, so you send the message that it’s OK and safe for them to talk with you about their feelings and identity.

It can be helpful to ground these conversations with our kids in the basics, so let’s break down these two concepts:

Gender identity :

This is about who someone is – how they feel inside about their gender and how they express that feeling outwardly. Your gender identity and the biological sex you were assigned at birth are not always the same. Words like woman, man, nonbinary , intersex , genderqueer, cisgender , or transgender are some of the words we use to describe gender identity. 

Research shows   that our gender identities are formed in the preschool years, around 3-4 years old. So when your kid is quite young they can tell you if they identify as a boy or a girl (or both or neither), regardless of what body parts they have or what’s on their birth certificate. This doesn’t mean it will stay that way for the rest of their life, so you can support your kid by checking in with them once in a while about whether they see themselves as a boy, girl, both, or neither. You can also support them by encouraging them to express themselves openly — for example letting  them wear clothes styles and colors they like and feel good in, instead of trying to fit them into a gender stereotype.

Another important element of gender identity is how it relates to biological sex. If your kid was born intersex, the most supportive thing you can do is be honest with them about their body, and let them figure out their gender on their own. Unless it’s necessary to treat a specific health problem, avoid any medical interventions. If someday they want gender-affirming health care, it can be their choice.

Sexual orientation :

This is about who you’re attracted to or want to have romantic relationships with. We use words like straight , gay , lesbian , bisexual , or asexual to describe who we’re attracted to. 

Generally we start to get a sense of our sexual orientation when we begin to experience sexual attraction to people, which is often linked with puberty (though some start figuring it out earlier). It’s a good idea to expose your kids to different kinds of sexual orientations and couples, and not just assume that they’ll be straight. This can help them build stronger self-esteem and self-awareness as they grow up, regardless of their sexual orientation.

And finally, keep in mind that everyone has a sexual orientation, and everyone has a gender identity. So no matter your values, identities, or experiences, talking about these topics with your kids benefits everybody.

Tags: sexual orientation , parents , gender identity

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