masculinity femininity essay

Masculinity and Femininity Essay

Introduction.

Masculinity and femininity is always influenced by geographical, cultural, and historical location. Currently, the combined influence of gay movements and feminism has blown up the conception of a standardized definition of masculinity and femininity.

Therefore, it is becoming increasingly fashionable to adopt the term masculinity or femininity not only to reflect the modern times, but also to depict the cultural construction and manifestation of masculinity and femininity to closer and more accurate scrutiny (Beynon, 2002, p. 1). In this regard, social, behavioral, and cultural scientists are specifically concerned with various ways in which gender acquires different meanings and contexts.

pecifically, gender is more associated with definitions attached to notions within the cultural and historical framework. According to Andersen and Taylor (2010), gender roles are closely associated with masculinity and femininity in different cultures. In western industrialized societies, people intend to believe that these masculinity and femininity should be absolutely juxtaposed as two opposite sexes due to the social functions they perform. This is why the era of capitalism is highly distinguished among other historical periods.

Cultural Variations of Masculinity and Femininity in the Era of Industrialization

Given that maleness has a biological orientation, then masculinity must have a cultural one. According to Beynon (2002), masculinity “can never float free of culture” (p. 2). Culture shapes and expresses masculinity differently at different points in time in different situations and different areas by groups and individual.

For instance, Hispanic professional males depict a somewhat higher robustness rating than other categories (Long and Martinez, 1997). In Hispanic cultural societies, traditional masculinity is associated with power status. Hispanic professional men (and women) fight the challenges of attempting to balance the popular cultural values in the United States with their ethnic identity and ethnic values.

Traditional masculinity has an appreciable influence on Hispanic men’s perception of self. Thus, social counselors must consider the cultural values and ethnic identity when handling a social issue involving the Hispanics. In addition, Beynon (2002, p. 2), argues that, masculinity in the first place exists merely as fantasy about what men ought to be, a blurry construction to assist individuals structure and make sense of their lives.

Much research has been done on discussing gender differences from a cross-cultural perspective. To enlarge on this point, Costa et al. (2001) have found out that there are significant gender variations that were observed across cultures. Specifically, the researchers have defined that gender difference were the most communicated ones in American and European cultures where traditional gender roles are diminished.

Such a behavior is explained by the fact that gender aspects are more perceived as roles people perform, but not as cultural traits. Regarding the identified period, the industrialized society is more on presenting direct associations with their social roles where males and females distinction come to the forth and are recognized as norms for behavior.

Full opposition for two-gender dimension has also been supported by Gaudreau (1977) whose research proves that the terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are perceived as independent traits, but not as bipolar dimension.

In general, cross-cultural research on masculinity and femininity indicates that all cultures assign different roles to men and women. However, characteristics that are associated with each indicate some cultural diversity. Due to the fact that gender variations have been perceived as cultural determinants influencing the formation of societies, it has significant social meaning.

Historical Patterns of Masculinity and Femininity during Capitalist Period

Historical variations of gender distinctions are also heavily discussed by researchers in terms of social and dimensions. Furthermore, the studies have also underscored such aspects as domesticity and public movements related to masculinity-femininity aspects. Therefore, these differences and variations play a significant role in forming various social dimensions and evaluating social situation.

The observations made by Sethi (1984) has shown that industrialization have displayed tangible chances to the concepts of gender influencing such aspects as residence patterns, house composition, and sleeping accommodations. With regard to historical perspectives, gender and social reproduction are introduced by feminist theory.

In particular, Laslett (1989) argues that societies Europe and North America in the twentieth century were oriented on such social differences as consumerism, procreation, sexuality, and family strategies. In this respect, the researcher supports the idea that re-organization of gender relations have given rise to the development of macro-historical processes. In whole, femininity and masculinity in the industrialized society is presented as two opposite conceptions that have a potent impact on social reproduction.

The acceptable way for expressing masculinity in the modern American cultural society was for a young American man to enroll for war. Indeed a traditional way to lure young American men to enroll to war was to remind them of opportunities it offers to act heroically (Boyle, 2011, p. 149).

This approach exploits the mentality of young American men of equating heroics with masculinity. This reveals how cultural perception of masculinity-femininity can be use to motivate people towards a specific social course. These young American adults go to war with hope of getting an opportunity to perform heroic acts thereby expressing his masculinity. Nevertheless, most of the American war narratives depict the outright converse.

These narratives depict vain attempts by men to exhibit traditional paradigm of masculinity, because they manifest a state of being out of control and in need of rescue (Boyle, 2011, p 149); a traditional view of femininity. This misconception of masculinity is accountable for increase captivity and rescue associated with the intention to pull a heroic masculinity stunt.

In whole, the are of industrialization witnessed constantly changing patterns of masculinity and femininity that were based on chances in social perception of gender roles. Ranging from traditional norms on assessing gender relations to more radical, historical variations are also connected with social movements dedicated to the protection of human rights, such gender equality. In addition, racial disparities also significantly influenced the situation within the identified period.

Studies exploring cultural and historical variations of masculinity and femininity in the era of industrialization have revealed a number of important assumptions. First, cultural variations in gender functions exist due to the shifts in stereotypes and outlooks on social roles of males and females in society. Second, different industrialized societies propagandized various functions and influences in terms of domesticity, consumerism, and bipolar dimension.

Finally, industrialized society is more inclined to present direct, traditional traits attached to the terms under analysis. With regard to historical perspectives, most of past events are also connected with shaping different stereotypes connected to femininity and masculinity, ranging from traditional patterns to the emergence of sub-cultural forms. Both aspects are significant in defining the social significant of these shifts for the formation new patterns and variations.

Reference List

Andersen, M. L., and Taylor, H. F. (2010). Society: The Essentials . US: Cengage Learning.

Beynon, J. (2002). Masculinities and culture. Philadelphia : Open University Press.

Costa, P. Jr., Terracciano, A., and McCrae, R. R. (2001). Gender differences in personality traits across cultures: Robust and surprising findings. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology . 81(2), 322-331.

Gaudreau, P. (1977). Factor analysis of the Bem Sex-Role Inventory. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. 45(2), 299-302.

Laslett, B., and Brenner, J. (1989). Gender and Social Reproduction: Historical Perspectives. Annual Review of Sociology. 15, 381-404.

Long, V., & Martinez, E. (1997). Masculinity, Femininity, and Hispanic

professionals Men’s self-esteem and self acceptance . The journal of psychology,131 (5), 481-488.

Sethi, R. R. and Allen, M. J. (1984). Sex-role Stereotype in Northern India and the United States. Sex Roles. 11(7-8), 615-626.

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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

Acknowledgments

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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How Toxic Is Masculinity?

By Zoë Heller

Ten years ago, Hanna Rosin’s book, “ The End of Men ,” argued that feminism had largely achieved its aims, and that it was time to start worrying about the coming obsolescence of men. American women were getting more undergraduate and graduate degrees than American men, and were better placed to flourish in a “feminized” job market that prized communication and flexibility. For the first time in American history, they were outnumbering men in the workplace. “The modern economy is becoming a place where women hold the cards,” Rosin wrote.

The events of the past decade—the rise of Trump, the emergence of the #MeToo movement, the overturning of Roe v. Wade—have had a sobering effect on this sort of triumphalism. The general tone of feminist rhetoric has grown distinctly tougher and more cynical. Cheerful slogans about the femaleness of the future have receded; the word “patriarchy,” formerly the preserve of women’s-studies professors, has entered the common culture. Last year, in an article about women’s exodus from their jobs during the pandemic, Rosin recanted her previous thesis and apologized for its “tragic naïveté.” “It’s now painfully obvious that the mass entry of women into the workforce was rigged from the beginning,” she wrote. “American work culture has always conspired to keep professional women out and working-class women shackled.”

Men, especially conservative men, continue to wring their hands over the male condition, of course. (Tucker Carlson appropriated the title of Rosin’s book for a documentary, advertised this past spring, about plummeting sperm counts.) But feminist patience for “twilight of the penis” stories has run out. “All that time they spend snivelling about how hard it is to be a poor persecuted man nowadays is just a way of adroitly shirking their responsibility to make themselves a little less the pure products of patriarchy,” Pauline Harmange wrote in her 2020 screed, “I Hate Men.” More recently, the British journalist Laurie Penny, in her “ Sexual Revolution ” (Bloomsbury), notes the systemic underpinnings of such snivels: “The assumption that oozes from every open pore of straight patriarchal culture is that women are expected to tolerate pain, fear and frustration—but male pain, by contrast, is intolerable.” Penny is careful to distinguish hatred of masculinity from hatred of men, but she nonetheless defines the fundamental political struggle of our time as a contest between feminism and white heterosexual male supremacy. In “ Daddy Issues ” (Verso), Katherine Angel calls for #MeToo-era feminists to turn their attention to long-overlooked paternal delinquencies. If the patriarchy is to be defeated, she argues, women’s reluctance to criticize their male parents must be interrogated and overcome. Even the “modern, civilized father” must be “kept on the hook,” she recommends, and daughters must reckon with their “desire for retribution, revenge and punishment.”

The combative tone taken by these writers is hardly a surprise. One might argue that a movement currently scrambling to defend some vestige of women’s reproductive rights can be forgiven for not being especially solicitous of men’s sperm counts. One might argue that it isn’t feminism’s job to worry about how men are doing—any more than it’s the job of hens to fret about the condition of foxes. But two recent books claim otherwise. “ A History of Masculinity: From Patriarchy to Gender Justice ” (Allen Lane), by the French historian Ivan Jablonka, and “ What Do Men Want?: Masculinity and Its Discontents ” (Allen Lane), by Nina Power, a British columnist with a background in philosophy, both contend that the drift toward zero-sum war-of-the-sexes language is a bad thing for feminism. Although their diagnoses of the problem are almost diametrically opposed, both authors make the case for a more generous and humane feminist discourse, capable of recognizing the suffering of men as well as of women. Hens, they acknowledge, have legitimate cause for resentment, but foxes have feelings, too.

Jablonka’s dense, copiously researched book, which became a surprise best-seller in France when it was published there, in 2019, takes an ambitious, key-to-all-mythologies approach to its subject. Jablonka, who is a professor at the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, begins in the Upper Paleolithic, examining its mysterious, corpulent “Venus” figurines, and moves suavely across the millennia all the way to the successive waves of modern feminism. He has an eye for striking, often grim, details—under the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, a daughter might be killed as punishment for a murder committed by her father—and relishes drawing parallels across eras. From ancient times to the present day, it seems, the central totems of masculinity—weapons, locomotive vehicles, and meat (particularly rare meat)—have remained remarkably consistent. Likewise, from the fall of Rome to the Weimar Republic, men have consistently attributed political disaster and cultural decline to the corrupting influence of feminine values.

Jablonka’s thesis about how patriarchy arose is a fairly standard one. Paleolithic societies already had a sexual division of labor—Spanish cave paintings from as early as 10,000 B.C. show male archers hunting and women gathering honey—but it was relatively benign. In the Neolithic era, with the advent of agriculture and the move away from nomadic existence, birth rates increased and women became confined to the domestic sphere, while men started to own land. From then on, each new development, be it metal weapons, the rise of the state, or even the birth of writing, further entrenched the power of men and the subjugation of women.

Until now, that is. “Patriarchy has declined,” according to Jablonka, but men remain caught in “pathologies of the masculine,” trying to live up to a symbolic role that doesn’t reflect their reduced dominance. The result is an “almost tragic” level of alienation, he writes, and feminists, instead of mocking or dismissing male anguish—thereby leaving men vulnerable to the revanchist fantasies of Tucker Carlson and his ilk—should recognize this moment as a crucial recruitment opportunity. Now is the time to convince men that their “obligatory model of virility” has immiserated them far more than it has empowered them. “The masculinity of domination pays, but it comes at a high cost: an insecure ego, puerile vanity, disinterest in reading and the life of the mind, atrophied inner life, the narrowing of social opportunities . . . and to top it all, a diminished life expectancy.”

Feminism has been slow to empathize and collaborate with men, Jablonka claims, because too many in the movement remain wedded to a “Manichean world view” of male oppressors and female victims. Some feminists are unreconstructed leftist types, who reject any evidence of women’s progress as “mystification designed to hide the persistence of male domination.” Others are duped by a “pro-women romanticism” into believing that women are innately nicer and more progressive than men. Jablonka rejects this sort of essentialist thinking, which he says provides a spurious biological rationale for traditional gender roles. If women are naturally kinder and more nurturing than men, and if men are “intrinsically imbued with a culture of rape,” why bother trying to change the status quo? Testosterone and other androgens may “have something to do with” a male propensity for aggression, he concedes, but “human beings are hostage neither to their biology nor their gender.” Men’s history of brutish behavior is the product of patriarchal culture, and only by insisting on “the fundamental identity” between men and women can feminism realize its proper aim—a “redistribution of gender,” in which “new masculinities” abound and the selection of any given way of being a man becomes “a lifestyle choice.”

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To claim that masculinity is a patriarchal “construct,” however, is not so much an explanation as the postponement of an explanation. Who or what created the patriarchy? Evolutionary biologists maintain that our earliest male ancestors had an evolutionary incentive to maximize the spread of their genes by violently competing for, and monopolizing access to, women. Jablonka is eager to avoid such biological imperatives, but in doing so he reaches for a kind of just-so story that renders much of the history he has laid out beside the point. Patriarchy, he speculates, was motivated by simple resentment of women’s wombs. “Deprived of the power that women have, men reserved all the others for themselves,” he writes. “This was the revenge of the males: their biological inferiority led to their social hegemony.”

Thus it is that successive patriarchal élites have spent the past several millennia shoring up their illegitimate rule, by defining manliness as a set of superior qualities denied to women. Not that Jablonka thinks there is only one, eternal masculine style; rather, all models of masculinity since antiquity have been mechanisms for asserting and imposing patriarchal power. The extroversion and swagger of the toreador look very different from the gallantry of the Victorian gentleman, which is, in turn, quite distinct from the laconic glamour of the cowboy, but they are all equally culpable expressions of the masculine-superiority complex.

Jablonka’s desire to trace all the world’s hierarchies, injustices, and conflicts back to one prehistoric fit of reproductive jealousy leads to a good deal of muddle as things proceed. One of his more bizarre—and ahistorical—claims is that the masculine hegemony has deemed four masculine types inferior: “the Jew,” “the loser,” “the Black,” and “the homosexual.” It is, of course, impossible to explain the historical oppression of poor people, Black people, gays, and Jews entirely in terms of gender politics, and, in trying to do so, Jablonka has to make any number of ludicrous assertions, including that white men enslaved Black men in part because they considered them “feminine” and “non-virile.” The book’s cocky bid for comprehensiveness proves to be its undoing.

In keeping with his anti-essentialist view of the sexes, Jablonka maintains that women are, deep down, no less capable of greed and racism and warlike behavior than men, but this view is somewhat at odds with his central contention—that a world without patriarchal masculinity would be an infinitely more just and peaceable place. In an apparent attempt to square this contradiction, he expresses the vague hope that powerful women of the future will avoid some of the worst practices of powerful men of the past, and that gender justice might be “translated into the principle of an equality of positions, reducing inequalities between the various socio-economic statuses.”

According to Nina Power’s “What Do Men Want?,” such inattention to questions of class inequality is a typical weakness of modern gender politics. Her short but slightly meandering work of cultural criticism takes aim at several strands of contemporary feminist doctrine and lays out, with varying degrees of coherence, how she thinks a “graceful playfulness” between men and women might be restored. Power finds terms like “the patriarchy” and “male privilege” nebulous, and believes they obscure more than they reveal when applied to poor and working-class men. Liberal feminism, she argues, has proved all too compatible with the interests of corporate capitalism, precisely because it is more interested in how people “identify” than in who owns the means of production.

Power’s main interest, however, is not in persuading feminism to be more intersectional in its critique of men. “I increasingly think that we need to think less in terms of structures,” she writes, “and much more in terms of mutual respect.” She believes that exaggerated complaints about the toxicity of men—their mansplaining and manspreading and so forth—have become a kind of tribal habit among women. In addition to eliminating much of the pleasure and charm of everyday male-female interactions, the constant demonizing of men has led us to lose sight of what is valuable and generative in male and female difference. Where Jablonka wants to help men escape the “obligatory model of virility” that has given them a bad name, Power asks us to consider what might be worth retaining from that model. In our haste to declare masculinity a redundant artifact, she says, we have lost sight of some of its “positive dimensions”—“the protective father, the responsible man.” Although we’re often told that modern societies have outgrown the need for male muscle and aggression, we still rely on men to do the lion’s share of physically arduous and dangerous jobs, including the fighting of wars. (Even in Jablonka’s gender-fluid future, he acknowledges, men will do the heavy, dirty, “thankless” work. To insist on a literal-minded gender parity would be “absurd,” he says.) If we still expect men to do the dirty work, Power asks, shouldn’t some value be attached to male strength? Women in heterosexual relationships, she claims, respect a degree of responsibly channelled aggression in their partners. “However tough you feel, however independent you might be, when it comes down to it, you would like a man to be able to stand up for you, physically at least,” she writes. “Violence is not as far away from care as we might like to imagine.”

Power’s book, being of the “pendulum’s swung too far” variety, is rather too quick to declare all the meaningful equalities already won, all the necessary reforms of male manners accomplished. “Male behavior has shifted radically,” she writes. “What man would today flirt with a female co-worker?”—which is the kind of facetious remark that only a person who has mistaken her bien-pensant bubble for the world could make. Nevertheless, the “graceful playfulness” that she hopes can be preserved between the sexes, and even some of the more benign aspects of old-school masculinity, are probably more widely shared than is generally acknowledged. Jablonka argues rather unconvincingly that women read romantic fiction because it sweetens the pill of their subordination and helps them accept the “inevitability of masculine power.” But romantic fiction isn’t produced by the Commission for the Continuation of the Patriarchy. It sells because it speaks to a persistent female attraction to the benignly dominant male. Whether that attraction has its roots in nature or in culture, one has only to read Joan Didion describing her girlhood dreams of John Wayne, or listen to Amy Winehouse singing “You should be stronger than me,” or overhear contemporary teens mocking “soft bois” on social media to know that it is there.

Some years ago, the conservative Harvard philosopher Harvey Mansfield, in his book “Manliness,” defined protection as a defining task of masculinity. “A man protects those whom he has taken in his care against dangers they cannot face or handle without him,” he wrote. For Jablonka, such a role is inextricable from patriarchy: “Polite gestures of protection partake of a benevolent sexism that complements hostile sexism.” Power suggests that the charming, sexy aspects of masculinity—violent, sure, but still “compatible with the flourishing of others”—can be brought out only as needed, allowing men and women to live on terms of scrupulous equality the rest of the time. Is this plausible? Can women enjoy the warm embrace of he-men without having to endure bossiness and swagger? Harvey Mansfield didn’t think so. “Honor is an asserted claim to protect someone, and the claim to protect is a claim to rule,” he wrote. “How can I protect you properly if I can’t tell you what to do?” ♦

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Masculinity and Femininity

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Femaleness ; Gender ; Maleness

Masculinity and femininity refer to an individual’s gender in terms of maleness and femaleness, respectively. Gender roles are those socially ascribed normative behaviors with respect to a given gender. Biological sex refers to an individual’s reproductive organs as being male or female.

Introduction

Issues surrounding sex and gender roles as they relate to sexuality are among the most divisive across scholarly disciplines. If one adheres strictly to the definitions, sex is biological and defines individuals based on their reproductive anatomy into male and female, while gender refers to one’s maleness (masculinity) and femaleness (femininity). Gender roles are those societally constructed normative behaviors ascribed to a given gender that, in turn, are attached to a particular biological sex. For those with backgrounds in social theory, biology may have little to do with how cultural norms color the blank canvas that becomes adult...

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Dixson, B.J.W. (2021). Masculinity and Femininity. In: Shackelford, T.K., Weekes-Shackelford, V.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19650-3_3389

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Femininity and masculinity.

Femininity and masculinity are acquired social identities: as individuals become socialized they develop a gender identity, an understanding of what it means to be a ‘‘man’’ or a ‘‘woman’’ (Laurie et al. 1999). How individuals develop an understanding of their gender identity, including whether or not they fit into these prescribed gender roles, depends upon the context within which they are socialized and how they view themselves in relation to societal gender norms. Class, racial, ethnic, and national factors play heavily into how individuals construct their gender identities and how they are perceived externally (hooks 2004). Gender identities are often naturalized; that is, they rely on a notion of biological difference, ‘‘so that ‘natural’ femininity [in a white, European, middle class context] encompasses, for example, motherhood, being nurturing, a desire for pretty clothes and the exhibition of emotions’’ (Laurie et al. 1999: 3). ‘‘Natural’’ masculinity, in contrast, may encompass fatherhood, acting ‘‘tough,’’ a desire for sports and competition, and hiding emotions (Connell 1997; Thompson 2000). In both cases, these constructions of gender identity are based on stereotypes that fall within the range of normative femininities and masculinities. Yet, as many sociologists have pointed out, not all individuals fit within these prescribed norms and as such, masculinities and femininities must be recognized as socially constituted, fluid, wide ranging, and historically and geographically differentiated (Connell 1997; Halberstam 1998; Laurie et al. 1999).

Feminist scholars have long addressed the social construction of femininities, particularly in the context of gender inequality and power (Lorber 1994). Early second wave feminist scholars such as Simone de Beauvoir (1980) argued that women’s subordinated status in western societies was due to socialization rather than to any essential biological gender difference, as evidenced in her often cited phrase, ‘‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’’ Many feminist scholars in Anglo Saxon and European countries have emphasized social construction over biological difference as an explanation for women’s ways of being, acting, and knowing in the world and for their related gender subordination (Gilligan 1993). Some feminist scholars have addressed the social construction of femininities as a way to explain wage inequality, the global ‘‘feminization of poverty,’’ and women’s relegation to ‘‘feminine’’ labor markets (e.g., secretarial labor, garment industry, caring labor) and to the so called private realm of the household and family (Folbre 2001). Because feminists were primarily concerned with the question of women’s subordination, masculinities themselves were rarely analyzed except in cases where scholars sought an explanation for male aggression or power. Likewise, hegemonic femininity was emphasized over alternative femininities such that the experiences of women who did not fit into socially prescribed gender roles were either left unexamined or viewed through the normative lens of gender dualisms (Halberstam 1998).

Particularly since the 1980s, at least three areas of research on gender identity have helped shift the debate on femininities and masculinities: (1) masculinity studies, which emerged primarily in the 1980s and 1990s; (2) queer studies and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) studies, including the pivotal research of Butler (1990); and (3) gender, race, ethnic, and postcolonial studies, a trajectory of scholarship in which researchers have long critiqued hegemonic forms of masculinity and femininity on the basis that these racialized constructions helped reinforce the criminalization and subordination of racial/ethnic minorities in industrialized societies and the colonization of both men and women in poor and/or nonwestern regions.

In contrast to feminist scholarship that focused primarily on women’s experiences with femininity, Connell’s (1987) research on ‘‘hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity’’ was among the first to systematically analyze both sets of constructions as they contribute to global gender inequality. Connell argues ‘‘hegemonic masculinity,’’ a type of masculinity oriented toward accommodating the interests and desires of men, forms the basis of patriarchal social orders. Similarly, ‘‘emphasized femininity,’’ a hegemonic form of femininity, is ‘‘defined around compliance with [female] sub ordination and is oriented to accommodating the interests and desires of men’’ (p. 23). Borrowing from Gramsci’s analysis of class hegemony and struggle, Connell develops a framework for understanding multiple competing masculinities and femininities. He argues that hegemonic masculinity is always constructed in relation to various subordinated masculinities as well as in relation to women. Thus, for example, non-European, poor, non-white, and/or gay men tend to experience subordinated masculinities, whereas men of middle class European, white, and/or heterosexual backgrounds tend to benefit from the privileges of hegemonic masculinity.

Especially since the 1980s, scholars of masculinity studies have produced innovative research on various aspects of men’s lives and experiences. Messner (1992), for example, examines men’s identifications with sports as an example of how masculinities are constructed and maintained. Messner analyzes the ‘‘male viewer’’ of today’s most popular spectator sports in terms of the mythology and symbolism of masculine identification: common themes he encounters in his research include patriotism, militarism, violence, and meritocracy. Scholars of gay masculinities have addressed how gay men of various ethnic, racial, class, and national backgrounds have negotiated hegemonic masculinity, sometimes in contradictory ways, and constructed alternative masculinities through their everyday lives (Messner 1997).

Importantly, research on hegemonic masculinities sheds light on how and why masculinity has been largely ‘‘invisible’’ in the lives of men who benefit from hegemonic masculinity and in the field of women’s/gender studies, which tends to focus on the experiences of women. Although there are obvious reasons why the field of women’s/gender studies has focused primarily on women, since women experience gender inequalities more than men, scholars increasingly have pointed out that male socialization processes and identities, as well as masculinist institutions and theories, should be examined as a way to rethink gender inequality. As Kimmel (2002) notes: ‘‘The ‘invisibility’ of masculinity in discussions of [gender] has political dimensions. The processes that confer privilege on one group and not another group are often invisible to those upon whom that privilege is conferred. Thus, not having to think about race is one of the luxuries of being white, just as not having to think about gender is one of the ‘patriarchal dividends’ of gender inequality.’’

Judith Butler’s research on gender performativity has opened space for discussion about the naturalized linking of gender identity, the body, and sexual desire. Butler (1990) argues feminism has made a mistake by trying to assert that ‘‘women’’ are a group with common characteristics and interests. Like socio biologists, feminists who rely exclusively on a sociocultural explanation of gender identity construction also fall prey to essentialism. Many individuals, especially those who define as ‘‘queer’’ or as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or trans gendered, do not experience gender identity, embodiment, and sexual desire through the dominant norms of gender and heterosexuality. Influenced by Foucault, Butler suggests, like Connell, that certain cultural configurations of gender have seized a hegemonic hold. She calls for subversive action in the present: ‘‘gender trouble,’’ the mobilization, subversive confusion, and proliferation of genders, and therefore identity. This idea of identity as free floating and not connected to an ‘‘essence’’ is one of the key ideas expressed in queer theory (EGS 2005).

Butler and other queer theorists have addressed how normative femininities and masculinities play a role in disciplining the lives of LGBT individuals. Halberstam’s (1998) research addresses constructions of ‘‘female masculinity’’ and argues that scholars must separate discussions of gender identity (e.g., masculinities, femininities) from discussions of the body. Women can ‘‘act masculine’’ just as men can ‘‘act feminine’’; how individuals identify in terms of their gender is not and should not be linked to their biological anatomies, however defined. Halberstam’s own research addresses how masculine identified women experience gender, the stratification of masculinities (e.g., ‘‘heroic’’ vs. alternative masculinities), and the public emergence of other genders. Other scholars have examined how medical and scientific institutions have managed normative gender (and sexual) identities through psychological protocols and surgical intervention (Fausto Sterling 2000). This type of research points toward a broader understanding of gender that places dualistic conceptions of ‘‘masculine’’ vs. ‘‘feminine’’ and ‘‘male’’ vs. ‘‘female’’ into question.

Scholars of race, ethnic, and postcolonial studies have addressed how normative femininities and masculinities, which tend to benefit those with racial/ethnic privilege, help rein force a racialized social order in which subordinated groups are demasculinized or feminized in ways that maintain their racial/ethnic sub ordination in society. One example involves the stereotyping of African American men as unruly and hypersexual. The ‘‘myth of the male rapist,’’ as Davis (2001) has discussed, has played a highly destructive role in black men’s lives and has influenced legal, political, and social actions toward them, including their disproportionate criminalization for rape, often based on fraudulent charges. Another example concerns immigrant men racialized as minorities in the US. Thai (2002) illustrates how working class Vietnamese American men have developed innovative strategies to achieve higher status in their communities by marrying middle to upper class Vietnamese women and bringing them to the US. Faced with few marriage options and low paying jobs in the US, working class Vietnamese American men who experience a form of subordinated masculinity seek upward mobility through these transnational marriage networks.

Women of color in the US and working class women in developing countries also face unequal access to hegemonic femininity, as defined in western terms. Hill Collins (2004) addresses how African American women have been hypersexualized in US popular culture, thereby placing them outside the realm of normative femininity according to hegemonic white, western standards. Postcolonial studies scholars have demonstrated how poor women in developing regions (particularly non-white women) have been sexualized by male tourists from industrialized countries and sometimes also by local men (Freeman 2001). More broadly, scholars of masculinities and/or femininities have pointed out how constructions of masculinities and femininities are embedded in social institutions (e.g., the state, economy, nation, educational system) and processes (e.g., social welfare policy, globalization, colonization, political campaigns, popular culture, everyday life) and shape individuals’ everyday experiences and gendered self-perceptions (Connell 1987, 1997; Laurie et al. 1999; Free man 2001; Hill Collins 2004).

Critics have defended normative femininity and masculinity on religious, moral, and/or biological grounds. Some, for example, have argued that these social norms (what Connell would call hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity) are ‘‘naturally’’ aligned with men’s and women’s assumed biological roles in reproduction and/or with their assumed heterosexual desire (see Lorber 1994; Messner 1997). On all sides of the ideological spectrum, individuals have participated in interesting political responses and social movements that either embrace or challenge dominant societal constructions of masculinity and femininity. Some women have joined feminist movements and challenged traditional notions of femininity; whereas other women have joined right wing women’s movements that embrace

traditional gender roles and identities (e.g., Concerned Women for America). Men have formed feminist men’s movements, based largely on the principles of women’s feminist movements, as well as movements to embrace traditional notions of fatherhood, as in the divergent examples of the Christian based (and largely white, middle class) Promise Keepers and the Million Man Marches, first organized in 1995 by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and attended by over 800,000 African American men as part of a movement to reclaim black masculinity (Messner 1997).

Future research on femininities and masculinities will likely be influenced by the recent scholarship in the fields of masculinity studies, queer theory and LGBT studies, and race, ethnic, and postcolonial studies. Although scholars vary in their disciplinary backgrounds and methodological approaches to the study of femininities and masculinities, most would agree that femininities and masculinities can be seen as sets of rules or norms that govern female and male behavior, appearance, and self-image

References:

• Butler, (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, New York.
• Connell, W. (1987) Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto.
• Connell, W. (1997) Hegemonic Masculinity and Emphasized Femininity. In: Richardson, L., Taylor, V., & Whittier, N. (Eds.), Feminist Frontiers IV. McGraw-Hill, New York, pp. 22-5.
• Davis, (2001) Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black Rapist. In: Bhavnani, K.-K. (Ed.), Feminism and ‘‘Race.’’ Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 50-64.
• de Beauvoir, (1980 [1952]) The Second Sex. Random House/Alfred Knopf, New York.
• European Graduate School (EGS) (2005) Judith Online. http://egs.edu/faculty/judith-butler.
• Fausto-Sterling, (2000) Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. Basic Books, New York.
• Folbre, (2001) The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values. New Press, New York.
• Freeman, (2001) Is Local : Global as Feminine : Masculine? Rethinking the Gender of Globalization. Signs 26(4): 1007-38.
• Gilligan, (1993) In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
• Halberstam, (1998) Female Masculinity. Duke University Press, Durham, NC.
• Hill Collins, P. (2004) Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. Routledge, New
• hooks, b. (2004) We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. Routledge, New
• Kimmel, (2002) Foreword. In: Cleaver, F. (Ed.), Masculinities Matter! Men, Gender and Development. Zed Books, London, pp. xi xiv.
• Laurie, , Dwyer, C., Holloway, S., & Smith, F. (1999) Geographies of New Femininities. Longman, London.
• Lorber, (1994) Paradoxes of Gender. Yale University Press, New Haven.
• Messner, A. (1992) Power at Play. Beacon Press, Boston.
• Messner, A. (1997) Politics in Masculinities: Men in Movements. Sage, Walnut Creek, CA.
• Thai, C. (2002) Clashing Dreams: Highly Educated Overseas Brides and Low-Wage US Husbands. In: Ehrenreich, B. & Hochschild, A. R. (Eds.), Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. Metropolitan Books, New York, pp. 230-53.
• Thompson, C. (2000) The Male Role Stereotype. In: Cyrus, V. (Ed.), Experiencing Race, Class, and Gender in the United States. Mayfield Publishing, Mountain View, CA, pp. 85-7.

Back to Sociology of Gender

Masculinity vs Femininity: Similarities and Differences

The distinction between masculinity and femininity primarily concerns societal expectations, behaviors, and social roles typically associated with males and females.

The differences relate to social and cultural understandings about the social behaviors and roles of these two genders, whereas the categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’ relate to biological understandings of biological sexes .

For a brief introduction, these are the two binary gender identities:

• Femininity typically embodies traits related to nurturing, emotional expression, and collaboration (Basow, 1992). Women, for example, are often expected to show more emotion, communicate effectively and non-aggressively, and prioritize nurturing relationships over assertive behavior . Think about a typical film character who is nurturing her children (e.g., Mrs. Doubtfire’s character), or a woman leading a team through conflict resolution rather than dominance.
• Masculinity tends to align with traits such as assertiveness, independence, and dominance (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2015). Men are often encouraged to suppress emotion, strive for independence and display assertiveness or even aggressiveness. A real-world example might be a Hollywood action hero, physically strong and emotionally guarded (e.g., James Bond).

As these descriptors are cultural descriptions of expected behaviors, they are not strictly connected to the genders. For example, many women can, and do, exhibit masculine traits to a greater or lesser extent. As such, these traits are seen as socially constructed , and extensive research underscores the spectrum of masculine and feminine behaviors rather than rigidly dichotomous categories.

Masculinity vs Femininity

Masculinity.

Masculinity refers to the qualities, characteristics or roles conventionally associated with men (Kimmel & Aronson, 2011).

Traditionally, many societies value traits such as strength, aggression, and independence in men. These are often internalized by children through media and parental expectations in a process called gender socialization .

Masculinity is not limited to men, as women can, and often do, exhibit masculine traits.

Gender theorists have also explored the concept of “ hegemonic masculinity ” (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2015), which refers to a particular configuration of practice that legitimizes men’s dominant position in society and justifies the subordination of women, and other marginalized ways of being male.

An instance demonstrating this can be seen in most superhero movies like “Superman” where the male lead character is depicted as physically dominant, emotionally detached and rescues those in trouble.

See also: Toxic Masculinity Definition and Examples

However, it is vital not to oversimplify or stereotype these traits.

Modern perspectives of masculinity emphasize plurality, intersectionality and fluid dynamics (Bridges & Pascoe, 2014). Plurality suggests that there are many ways to express masculinity, not just a rigid stereotype.

For example, consider the trend of stay-at-home dads, which reflects a valid expression of masculinity contrary to the societal norm. Intersectionality discusses how different factors such as race, class, age or sexual orientation interact with masculinity, which results in varied experiences of it.

The fluid nature of masculinity underscores that it can change within an individual over time due to numerous factors including personal growth or cultural shifts.

Masculinity Examples

The following are traits traditionally associated with hegemonic masculinity. Please note that these are generalized, traditional, and often outdated stereotypes, and do not necessarily apply to every individual.

• Physical Strength: Men are often judged by their physical capabilities, such as their strength, endurance, and athletic prowess (Bridges & Pascoe, 2014). An example would be professional athletes like Usain Bolt who are renowned for their physical abilities.
• Emotional Control: Men are typically encouraged to suppress their emotions as a sign of strength (Kimmel & Aronson, 2011). Consider the phrase “real men don’t cry,” which discourages emotional vulnerability .
• Sexual Prowess: Successfully attracting sexual partners can be seen as a measure of masculinity (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2015). For example, fictional characters like James Bond are portrayed as overwhelmingly attractive to women.
• Competitiveness: Often, masculinity is associated with the need to compete and win (Bridges & Pascoe, 2014). Corporate leaders like Elon Musk and his competition with other billionaires in the space industry exemplify this.
• Dominance: Exerting control in social situations is often seen as a masculine trait (Kimmel & Aronson, 2011). This can be seen in team leaders, such as football captains, who direct and guide their team.
• Stoicism: Preserving composure in the face of adversity is considered a masculine virtue (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2015). For example, firefighters remaining calm in dangerous situations.
• Financial Independence: Masculinity is often associated with earning power and economic independence (Bridges & Pascoe, 2014). Successful businessmen like Warren Buffett exemplify this trait.
• Authority: Men who wield authority, either at home or at work, are often seen as embodying masculinity (Kimmel & Aronson, 2011). Historic world leaders, such as Winston Churchill, can serve as examples.
• Autonomy : Emphasizing self-reliance and independence is a commonly upheld masculine trait (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2015). Backpackers traveling alone through challenging terrains embody this characteristic.
• Risk-Taking: Men are often expected to be adventurous and willing to confront danger (Bridges & Pascoe, 2014). This trait can be seen in adrenaline pursuits such as skydiving or bungee jumping.

See More Masculinity Examples Here

Femininity, fundamentally, characterizes traits, roles, and behaviors typically associated with women in a given society (Brown & Gilligan, 2013).

Traits associated with femininity often include nurturing, empathy, sensitivity, and non-aggressive communication.

As with masculinity, the construct of femininity extends beyond women, as men can, and often do, embody these traits.

Examining femininity critically, it is often linked to the private sphere and associated with the nurturing and caring roles (Lemon, 2016).

These expectations are often structured around homemaking, child-rearing, and other forms of emotional labor.

An example of this expectation might be a character like Marmee March in “Little Women,” who embodies the loving, nurturing, and domestic qualities associated with traditional ideas of femininity.

Contrary to past stereotypical portrayals, modern understandings of femininity acknowledge its complex and diverse nature (Brown & Gilligan, 2013). Femininity is not monolithic; instead, it intersects with other identity aspects such as race, socioeconomic status, and sexual orientation, leading to varying expressions and experiences.

A contemporary portrayal of femininity may include a Fortune 500 CEO who leads with compassion and empathy, effectively blending traits typically associated with both femininity and masculinity.

This underscores the emergence of a more fluid understanding of femininity that resists binary categorizations.

Femininity Examples

The following are traits traditionally associated with femininity. Please note that these are generalized, traditional, and often outdated stereotypes, and do not necessarily apply to every individual:

• Emotional Openness: Women are typically expected to be more open with their emotions (Brown & Gilligan, 2013). A well-known movie character who embodies this would be Julia Roberts’ character in ‘Steel Magnolias’, who readily shares her feelings with those around her.
• Nurturing Behavior: Femininity is often associated with nurturing and caring for others (Lemon, 2016). An example can be seen in the role of Florence Nightingale, historically known for her caring nature and dedication to nursing.
• Empathy: Empathy, or the understanding and sharing of others’ feelings, is traditionally seen as a feminine trait. A famous example could be Mother Teresa and her profound empathy for the less fortunate.
• Verbal Communication: Women are often associated with verbal skills and are often expected to be conversationally engaging (Brown & Gilligan, 2013). Oprah Winfrey, a noted television host and interviewer, is an example who uses these skills masterfully.
• Cooperation: Societal expectations often associate femininity with cooperative and collaborative work . An example could be seen in team projects in any professional setting where female team members work constructively to reach a common goal.
• Modesty: Cultural norms often link modesty, or humility, with femininity. For instance, Aung San Suu Kyi is often praised for her modest approach in leading her political movement.
• Concern for Appearance: Attention to personal grooming and appearance is often associated with femininity. One real-world example is the flourishing beauty and fashion industry largely catering to women.
• Flexibility: Adaptability and flexibility, especially emotional, are commonly viewed as feminine traits (Lemon, 2016). An example is evident in many working mothers who juggle multiplicity of roles and adapt to changing circumstances.
• Patience: Historically, patience has often been hailed as a feminine virtue. An example could be a teacher like Maria Montessori, who demonstrated patience in her innovative approach to education.
• Gracefulness: Gracefulness, such as in movement, manners, or style, is often ascribed to femininity. Many female dancers, like Misty Copeland, embody this trait through their performances.

See More Femininity Examples Here

Table of Differences Between Femininity and Masculinity

This table reflects traditional views on masculinity and femininity. It is important to understand that individuals may identify with traits from both columns or none at all, and that’s perfectly okay.

It’s also crucial to recognize that societal views on gender are changing, with many societies moving towards more fluid understandings of gender roles and characteristics.

Cultural Variations in Masculine and Feminine Stereotypes

Cultural differences in gender norms play a significant role in shaping perceptions of masculinity and femininity (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2015). In fact, some cultures even have multiple different types of genders .

Essentially, what is considered masculine or feminine can vary greatly from one culture to another. Such cultural ideals are deeply embedded and shape individual behavior, identities, and societal norms at large.

In some societies, the concept of masculinity is strictly tied to physical strength, stoicism, and economic prowess (Maass et al., 2016). For instance, in many traditional societies, manual labor and physical strength define a man’s masculinity.

On the contrary, in other societies, mental strength, emotional intelligence, and the ability to provide for the family define masculinity. An example might be the difference in expression of masculinity between the Maasai warriors of Kenya, whose rites of passage include lion hunting, and men in Scandinavian cultures, where gender equality and shared household work is emphasized.

Femininity, as well, can exhibit significant cultural variation.

In some cultures, femininity is tied to domesticity, gentleness, and passivity (Maass et al., 2016). For instance, in many fundamentalist and deeply conservative societies, women’s roles are traditionally restricted to the private sphere: homemaking, child-rearing, etc.

However, in other cultures, femininity can also be associated with strength, leadership, and independence. The Mosuo culture in China, for instance, is a matrilineal society where women are heads of households, and their economic and social status are more prominent, challenging traditional notions of femininity.

See Also: 10 Types of Masculinity

Masculinity and femininity are fluid constructs, molded by cultural norms, values, and historical contexts . Therefore, they are subject to continuous change and redefinition.

Basow, S. A. (1992). Gender: Stereotypes and roles . Thomson Brooks/Cole Publishing Co.

Bridges, T., & Pascoe, C. J. (2014). Exploring masculinities: Identity, inequality, continuity, and change . Oxford University Press.

Brown, L. M., & Gilligan, C. (2013). Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development . Harvard University Press. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.151.2.281

Connell, R., & Messerschmidt, J. (2015). Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept. Gender & Society, 19 (6), 829-859. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243205278639

Kimmel, M., & Aronson, A. (2011). The gendered society . Oxford University Press.

Lemon, R. (2016). “Femininity” as a Barrier to Positive Sexual Health for Adolescent Girls. Journal of Adolescent Health, 59 (2), 154-159.

Maass, V. S., Cadinu, M., Guarnieri, G., & Grasselli, A. (2016). Sexual harassment under social identity threat: The computer harassment paradigm. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 75 (5), 1245–1261. Doi: https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0022-3514.85.5.853

O’Neil, M. (2013). Men’s and Women’s Gender Role Journeys: Metaphor for Healing, Transition, and Transformation. Springer Publishing Company.

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Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

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• Subtle Gender Bias
• Solutions and Best Practices

"Femininities" and "masculinities" describe gender identities (see Gender ). They describe socio-cultural categories in everyday language; these terms are used differently in biology (see below). Because femininities and masculinities are gender identities, they are shaped by socio-cultural processes, not biology (and should not be essentialized). Femininities and masculinities are plural and dynamic; they change with culture and with individuals.

Points to keep in mind:

• ● In everyday language, femininities and masculinities do not map onto biological sex. In any one culture, certain behaviors or practices may be widely recognized as “feminine” or “masculine,” irrespective of whether they are adopted by women or by men. Femininities and masculinities are not descriptors of sexual orientation.
• ● Femininities and masculinities are plural—there are many forms of femininity and many forms of masculinity. What gets defined as feminine or masculine differs by region, religion, class, national culture, and other social factors. How femininities and masculinities are valued differs culturally.
• ● Any one person—woman or man—engages in many forms of femininity and masculinity, which she or he adopts (consciously or unconsciously) depending on context, the expectations of others, the life stage, and so forth. A man can engage in what are often stereotyped as “feminine” activities, such as caring for a sick parent.
• ● Cultural notions of “feminine” and “masculine” behavior are shaped in part by observations about what women and men do. This kind of “gender marking” tends to discourage women or men from entering “gender-inauthentic” occupations (Faulkner, 2009).
• ● Femininities and masculinities are learned. Messages about “feminine” and “masculine” behaviors are embedded in advertising, media, news, educational materials, and so forth. These messages are present in a range of environments, from the home to the workplace to public spaces.  

Note on biology: Although the terms “feminine” and “masculine” are gender terms (socio-cultural categories) in everyday usage, they carry different meanings in biology. Masculinization refers to the development of male-specific morphology, such as the Wolffian ducts and male reproductive structures. Feminization refers to the development of female-specific morphology, such as the Müllerian ducts and female reproductive structures. In order to become a reproductively functioning female, for example, both feminization and demasculinization are required, and vice versa for males (Uhlenhaut et al., 2009).

Works Cited 

Faulkner, W. (2009). Doing Gender in Engineering Workplace Cultures: Part II—Gender In/Authenticity and the In/Visibility Paradox. Engineering Studies, 1 (3), 169-189.

Uhlenhaut, N., Jakob, S., Anlag, K., Eisenberger, T., Sekido, R., Kress, J., Treier, A., Klugmann, C., Klasen, C., Holter, N., Riethmacher, D., Schütz, G., Cooney, A., Lovell-Badge, R., & Treier, M. (2009). Somatic Sex Reprogramming of Adult Ovaries to Testes by FOXL2 Ablation. Cell, 139 (6), 1130-1142.

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Traditional masculinity and femininity: validation of a new scale assessing gender roles.

• Department of Social and Economic Psychology, University of Koblenz and Landau, Landau, Germany

Gender stereotype theory suggests that men are generally perceived as more masculine than women, whereas women are generally perceived as more feminine than men. Several scales have been developed to measure fundamental aspects of gender stereotypes (e.g., agency and communion, competence and warmth, or instrumentality and expressivity). Although omitted in later version, Bem's original Sex Role Inventory included the items “masculine” and “feminine” in addition to more specific gender-stereotypical attributes. We argue that it is useful to be able to measure these two core concepts in a reliable, valid, and parsimonious way. We introduce a new and brief scale, the Traditional Masculinity-Femininity (TMF) scale, designed to assess central facets of self-ascribed masculinity-femininity. Studies 1–2 used known-groups approaches (participants differing in gender and sexual orientation) to validate the scale and provide evidence of its convergent validity. As expected the TMF reliably measured a one-dimensional masculinity-femininity construct. Moreover, the TMF correlated moderately with other gender-related measures. Demonstrating incremental validity, the TMF predicted gender and sexual orientation in a superior way than established adjective-based measures. Furthermore, the TMF was connected to criterion characteristics, such as judgments as straight by laypersons for the whole sample, voice pitch characteristics for the female subsample, and contact to gay men for the male subsample, and outperformed other gender-related scales. Taken together, as long as gender differences continue to exist, we suggest that the TMF provides a valuable methodological addition for research into gender stereotypes.

Introduction

Every time a group of people is addressed as “Ladies and Gentlemen!” the pervasiveness of gender over all other social categories is demonstrated. Gender is also one of the first social categories that children learn in today's societies, and thus knowledge of gender stereotypes is evident from early childhood on (for a recent review, see Steffens and Viladot, 2015 ) and into adulthood, with both adolescents and college students construing their self-concepts in line with the gender stereotypes they have internalized (e.g., Nosek et al., 2002 ; Steffens et al., 2010 ). Since the 1970s, following Bem's (1974) pioneering work, many scales have been designed, developed, and widely used for measuring traits traditionally considered as typically male vs. typically female ( Constantinople, 1973 ). In recent years, such measures have often failed to find between-gender differences in self-ascriptions of gender stereotypical traits (e.g., Sczesny et al., 2004 ), which is presumably due to changes in gender roles across the decades (e.g., Diekman and Eagly, 2000 ; Wilde and Diekman, 2005 ; Ebert et al., 2014 ). Still, gender differences in self-ascriptions do continue to exist, and there are attempts to measure different aspects of masculinity and femininity, including, for example, everyday behavior such as housework ( Athenstaedt, 2003 ). In the present paper, we argue that a scale that reliably and validly measures differences in an individual's underlying conceptualization of his or her own masculinity-femininity would be valuable for gender research. To date, these constructs can only be measured using two items, “masculine” and “feminine,” which is somewhat limited given that established standards of psychological assessment typically recommend using a larger number of items (e.g., Bühner, 2010 ). In the present article, we introduce a new, extended, but still parsimonious scale, the Traditional Masculinity-Femininity Scale, TMF, to fill this gap. Using a known-groups approach, we present two studies testing this measure's reliability as well as its incremental and criterion validity, and we provide evidence for its convergent validity.

We define “traditional masculinity” and “traditional femininity” as relatively enduring characteristics encompassing traits, appearances, interests, and behaviors that have traditionally been considered relatively more typical of women and men, respectively (adapting the definitions provided by Constantinople, 1973 ). It is important to note that the focus of the present paper is on gender-related self-assessment. Complementary research has investigated many different aspects of gender, for example, gender-role norms (e.g., Athenstaedt, 2000 ; Thompson and Bennet, 2015 ; Klocke and Lamberty, unpublished manuscript).

In a seminal study on masculinity and femininity, Deaux and Lewis (1984) investigated the perceived relationship between gender and gender-related components, such as role behaviors (e.g., head of household vs. takes care of children), traits, occupations, and physical characteristics (e.g., tall, broad-shouldered vs. soft voice, graceful). The researchers showed that these components were interdependent, impacting on one another, as well as on perceived gender and sexual orientation. In other words, participants readily generalized from one component to the others. In addition, physical appearance played a particularly large role. Such findings indicate that gender stereotypes may be based on some sort of “core” masculinity and femininity. Similarly, individuals may use such “core” masculinity and femininity in their self-construal.

The first attempts to gauge masculinity and femininity placed these constructs on a bipolar spectrum and involved measuring simple collections of personality traits on which women and men differed on average (for a review, see Constantinople, 1973 ). By contrast, Bem's pioneering Sex Role Inventory (BSRI; Bem, 1974 ) used gender-stereotypical traits to independently measure masculinity and femininity (e.g., masculine items such as competitive and dominant, and feminine items such as affectionate and gentle). She pointed out that women/men who score high on both scales were called androgynous. Importantly, “masculine” and “feminine” were included as items in these original scales, but were excluded from the revised version ( Bem, 1979 ) because of problematic loadings on the factors on which the masculine and feminine traits loaded, respectively. Exploratory factor analyses showed an instable factor structure but often converged on three-factor solutions: Masculine traits on one factor, feminine traits on a second factor, and masculine-feminine along with participant gender on a third factor (e.g., Niedlich et al., 2015 , see review by Choi and Fuqua, 2003 ). It has thus been suggested that the two independent masculinity and femininity trait dimensions are complemented by one bipolar masculinity-femininity dimension (see Constantinople, 1973 ; Spence et al., 1975 ; Bem, 1979 ) that reflects gender identity instead of gender-role related aspects (e.g., Bem, 1979 ; Spence and Buckner, 2000 ). As Choi and Fuqua (2003) suggest, inventories such as the BSRI “may not capture the complex and multidimensional nature of masculinity/femininity.” Instead, “masculinity and femininity could be two higher order constructs, with each having its own subconstructs” (p. 873). Similar to other scales (e.g., Personal Attributes Questionnaire, PAQ, by Spence et al., 1975 ), the BSRI appears to tap more specific constructs, often referred to as instrumentality/agency and expressivity/communion (e.g., Fiske et al., 2002 ; Abele and Wojciszke, 2007 ), rather than masculinity and femininity in general. For the present purposes it is important to note that if masculinity and femininity are directly measured they should load on one bipolar masculinity-femininity dimension.

Another limit to the practical use of these established scales pertains to the generally small magnitude of gender differences found on these two dimensions (e.g., Deaux, 1984 ). In other words, women and men appear rather similar on “masculinity” and “femininity.” More recently, gender differences have not emerged at all between graduates with the same major (see Abele, 2000 ). In short, scales that have been developed to assess aspects of masculinity and femininity have recently failed to find gender differences (see also Sczesny et al., 2004 ; Evers and Sieverding, 2014 ). This could indicate that gender differences in masculinity and femininity are a thing of the past ( Alvesson, 1998 ). However, it could also mean that the scales do not tap the most relevant aspects of the constructs on which gender differences continue to exist. For example, gender roles have changed over the last decades, particularly women's roles, so that today's women possess more of the traits traditionally considered as masculine (e.g., Diekman and Eagly, 2000 ; Spence and Buckner, 2000 ; Wilde and Diekman, 2005 ; Ebert et al., 2014 ). According to these findings, instrumental traits have become more socially desirable for women and expressive traits have become more socially desirable for men ( Swazina et al., 2004 ).

In order to overcome limitations of the discussed scales, there have been attempts to measure other aspects of masculinity and femininity to account for the multiple dimensions they are reflected in, such as physical appearance, behaviors, attitudes, and interests (e.g., Spence and Buckner, 2000 ; Blashill and Powlishta, 2009 ). For example, Athenstaedt (2003) observed considerable gender differences in everyday behavior such as “putting flowers on the desk” (feminine) and “putting the meat on the barbeque” (masculine), strongly suggesting the continued importance of gender differences. Complementing these existing approaches, we suggest directly assessing the presumed higher-order constructs, namely masculinity and femininity. However, instead of using only these two items, we constructed a scale that can be tested empirically with regard to its reliability and validity.

Scale Construction

We introduce the TMF scale, an instrument for measuring gender-role self-concept. Appendix A1 in Supplementary Material shows all items, both English translations and original German wordings. Each item initially included in scale construction was selected based on theoretical considerations, as outlined in the following. We argue that we can measure the “core” of masculinity/femininity by referring to three central aspects, identified by Constantinople (1973) , that we summarize using the term gender-role self-concept: Namely, gender-role adoption, gender-role preference, and gender-role identity. Constantinople (1973) defines gender-role adoption as the actual manifestation (i.e., how masculine-feminine a person considers her- or himself) and gender-role preference as the desired degree of masculinity-femininity (i.e., how masculine-feminine a person ideally would like to be). According to Kagan (1964) , gender-role identity refers to a comparison of gender-related social norms and the gender-related characteristics of the individual (e.g., how a person actually looks compared to expected gender-typical appearances according to societal norms). Hence, for gender-role identity social comparisons as well as references to different gender-related aspects are emphasized (e.g., looks, behaviors etc.), whereas gender-role adoption and preference are based on non-relative, absolute statements. Following the former approach, we use TMF as a reference point. Based on dimensions identified as important in previous research, the TMF encompasses gender-role identity with regard to physical appearance, behavior, interests, and attitudes and beliefs (e.g., Deaux and Lewis, 1984 ; Athenstaedt, 2003 ). As mentioned, physical appearance was shown to play a particularly large role in implicating other components of gender stereotypes ( Deaux and Lewis, 1984 ). Athenstaedt (2003) advocated the inclusion of gender-stereotypical behaviors in addition to traits, so this domain was included in the TMF as well. Lippa (2008) found that gender-related interests were highly relevant in discriminating women and men as well as lesbians/gay men from straight people. Additionally, his study showed that instrumental and expressive traits were outperformed by these gender-related interests in predicting participants' gender. Consequently, we included gender-related interests in the TMF (instead of gender-related traits). Finally, regarding attitudes and beliefs , gender differences have often been found, for example, with regard to attitudes toward minority groups (e.g., Sidanius et al., 1994 ; Kite and Whitley, 1996 ). We therefore also included self-assessment of attitudes and beliefs in the TMF.

One advantage of the TMF is that each of the mentioned scale dimensions is measured on a global level and not by various specific indicator items. Different from the instruments described above, which infer masculinity-femininity from the degree of affirmation of specific traits and behaviors, the TMF aims to directly assess masculinity-femininity. For example, “Traditionally, my behavior would be considered as…” 1 ( not at all masculine ) to 7 ( very masculine ). We consider it an asset of the scale that it is thus independent of specific stereotype content regarding masculinity and femininity that depend on culture and time (e.g., intelligent and ambitious as masculine, childlike and shy as feminine, see BSRI; in the General Discussion we discuss how far this global conception can also be considered a limitation). The TMF consists of six items only: One for gender-role adoption (“I consider myself as…”), one for gender-role preference (“Ideally, I would like to be…”), and four for gender-role identity (“Traditionally, my 1. interests, 2. attitudes and beliefs, 3. behavior, and 4. outer appearance would be considered as…”) in order to measure an individual's gender-role self-concept in a parsimonious way. All of them have high face validity. Each item is to be independently rated in terms of femininity and masculinity. A 7-point-scale is used to gauge the extent to which the participant feels feminine or masculine, how feminine or masculine she or he ideally would like to be, and how feminine and masculine her or his appearance, interests, attitudes, and behavior would traditionally be seen. Construct validity is tested in the studies described below. The TMF was used with masculinity and femininity as two unipolar dimensions (Study 1: 1, not at all masculine , to 7, very masculine , and 1, not at all feminine , to 7, very feminine ) vs. one bipolar dimension (pilot study, Study 2; 1, very masculine , to 7, very feminine ) in order to check for dimensionality.

Overview of the Present Research

We validated the TMF in various ways. First, we conducted an item analysis and a factor analysis. As suggested by findings reported by Bem (1979) , Constantinople (1973) , and Spence et al. (1975 ; see Introductory Section), the TMF's items should load on one factor and tap a one-dimensional masculinity-femininity construct. Hence, we expected the TMF to measure a one-dimensional gender-role self-concept (Hypothesis 1).

Validation by Using the Known-Groups Approach

Based on the idea that gender differences are not a thing of the past, as indicated in the introduction, a valid masculinity and femininity scale should show these gender differences. Therefore, we expected men and women to differ considerably on self-ascriptions on the TMF, with men being more masculine and less feminine than women (Hypothesis 2).

Moreover, a valid masculinity and femininity scale should show differences between people differing in sexual orientation. The essence of gender stereotypes of straight women and men is that they conform to traditional gender roles (e.g., Kite and Deaux, 1987 ; Kite and Whitley, 1996 ; Madon, 1997 ; Blashill and Powlishta, 2009) . Lay people expect straight women to be more feminine and less masculine than lesbians, and straight men to be more masculine and less feminine than gay men. Similarly, straight women's and men's self-ascriptions are, on average, more gender-typed than those of lesbians and gay men (see meta-analysis by Lippa, 2005 ). Bisexual women were found to score on masculinity-femininity in between lesbians and straight women ( Lippa, 2005 ). Therefore, we used the known-groups approach as an established method for testing a scale's validity (e.g., Howitt and Cramer, 2008 ). We expected lesbians' self-ascriptions on the TMF to be less feminine and more masculine compared to straight women (Hypothesis 3a). Bisexual women should score in between (Hypothesis 3b). Additionally, we expected straight men's self-ascriptions to be more masculine and less feminine compared to gay men (Hypothesis 3c).

Because straight women and men conform to gender roles more than lesbians and gay men, comparing lesbians and gay men constituted a stricter test of the TMF. Consistent with Hypothesis 2 and gender self-stereotyping but contradictory to implicit gender inversion theory ( Kite and Deaux, 1987 ; which we turn to in General Discussion), we hypothesized lesbians to be more feminine and less masculine than gay men (Hypothesis 4).

The idea that differences in “core” masculinity and femininity underlie differences in lesbians' and gay men's vs. straight women and men's self-ascriptions in gender typicality can formally be conceived as masculinity-femininity mediating the relationship between sexual orientation and responses on scales such as the BSRI (Hypothesis 5).

Validation by Implicit and Explicit Gender-Related Measures

A common critique of self-report measures is that they could reflect differences in social desirability more than “true” underlying differences in traits. Using implicit measures relying on response-time differences, such as an Implicit Association Test (IAT), may minimize this problem ( Greenwald et al., 1998 ). Implicit measures are assumed to assess the impulsive system: Habitual, repeated, long-term associations between concepts ( Strack and Deutsch, 2004 ), including self-related concepts (e.g., Steffens and Schulze-Koenig, 2006 ). We expected lesbians to describe themselves more masculine and less feminine than straight women (Hypothesis 6).

Adults' masculinity-femininity is related to (recalled) gender conformity during adolescence (e.g., Safir et al., 2003 ) and childhood (e.g., Lippa, 2008 ). Thus, gender-role instruments for assessing current traits and behaviors as well as recalled gender-typical behaviors, preferences, and interests during childhood were also suitable for testing convergent validity. We assumed all these characteristics to show moderate correlations with the TMF (Hypothesis 7).

Additionally, we expected the TMF to predict sexual orientation within one gender group better than other gender-related scales. We assumed the TMF to outperform other gender-related scales when predicting sexual orientation of women and men (Hypothesis 8).

Hypotheses Based on Criterion Validity

As indicated above, lay people use gender-typicality as an indicator for judging someone's sexual orientation ( Rieger et al., 2010 ; Valentova et al., 2011 ). People self-reporting gender-typical characteristics are likely to be perceived as straight, whereas people who do not display such characteristics are more likely to be perceived as lesbian or gay on pictures, videos, and speech recordings. Hence, targets who are perceived as straight could be those who self-describe as gender-typical in masculinity-femininity ratings (Hypothesis 9).

Additionally, there is some evidence that voice pitch characteristics, also called fundamental frequency features, of lesbians and gay men are shifted toward what is typical for straight women and men. Generally, compared to straight women, straight men show voice pitches that are lower on average, in variability, and in range (e.g., Pierrehumbert et al., 2004 ; Munson and Babel, 2007 ). Average voice pitch has been found to be lower in straight compared to gay men ( Baeck et al., 2011 ) and higher in straight women compared lesbians ( Camp, 2009 ). Hence, we assumed gender-typical masculinity-femininity self-ratings to be reflected in gender-typical patterns of voice pitch characteristics (Hypothesis 10).

Furthermore, contact frequency of straight women and men with lesbians and gay men is linked to attitudes toward them (e.g., Swank and Raiz, 2010 ): A lower contact frequency is connected to more negative beliefs about lesbians and gay men. One belief about lesbians and gay men is that they transgress gender roles, on average (e.g., Kite and Whitley, 1996 ). It thus seems plausible that people who are more gender-typical themselves are those who have less contact to lesbians and gay men and hold more negative beliefs. Hence, we assumed gender-typical masculinity-femininity self-ratings to be connected to more current contact with straight women and men and less current contact with lesbians and gay men (Hypothesis 11).

Hypotheses Concerning Test-Retest Reliability and Predictive Validity

Finally, the TMF was expected to show at least moderate test-retest reliabilities given that people were re-invited after a 1-years period (Hypothesis 12). From a scale validation perspective, it is desirable to present analyses in which the predictor is truly assessed before the criterion. Therefore, we expected at least moderate predictive validity for other gender-related features at second measurement (Hypothesis 13).

Pilot Study

The pilot study had two aims. First, we tested the factor structure of the scale's version that contained six bipolar items. We assumed the TMF items to load on one factor (Hypothesis 1). Additionally, we wanted to determine the appropriateness of every single item by using an item analysis. Second, we assessed the scale's validity using a known-groups approach (Hypothesis 2).

At the end of an online survey that had a different purpose, participants filled in the 6-item version of the TMF (see Appendix in Supplementary Material) and indicated their gender (response options: male, female, both, none, no response). Overall 319 participants finished the study. Thirteen of them were excluded from further analysis because they described themselves as both male and female or neither or they did not disclose their gender. Data from 188 women and 118 men were used for analysis. Their age ranged from 18 to 41 ( M = 23.6, SD = 3.1). They were students of different majors from different German universities (specifically, in Thuringia). Participants received no compensation for participation. Approval for all studies reported in this paper was obtained by the board of ethics (= human subjects committee) of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena. All studies were carried out in accordance with its recommendations, with written informed consent obtained from all participants in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

In order to check for one-dimensionality of the TMF, an exploratory principal axis factoring (PAF) was conducted. Sample adequacy was confirmed by a Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) criterion of 0.87. All items were suitable for factor analysis as indicated by item-specific KMO values >0.79 and moderate to high commonalities (0.57–0.88). According to a graphical scree-plot analysis, a one-factor solution was confirmed. There was a steep decline of explained variance from factor one (77%) to factor two (10%). Each of the six items was represented well by the factor (factor loadings ranged from 0.75 to 0.94).

Reliability of the TMF was high (Cronbach's α = 0.94). As indicated by the coefficients in Table 1 , no items needed to be deleted to improve reliability. Item-specific homogeneity was high and ranged from 0.66 to 0.72 (see Table 1 ). Corrected item-total correlations ranged from 0.72 to 0.91, suggesting that each item represented the scale well. Moreover, item means ranged from 0.51 to 0.59. Accordingly, every item received almost equal masculinity and femininity ratings, indicating that averaged across the sample containing women and men, items received “androgynous” responses, as one would expect. When computing item “difficulties” separately for each gender group, findings pointed in the expected directions: “Difficulties” ranged from 0.18 to 0.35 for the male sample, indicating “masculine” responses, and from 0.60 to 0.85 for the female sample, indicating “feminine” responses.

Table 1. Item Characteristics of the TMF in the Pilot Study for the Whole Sample (left-hand values, n = 306) and Separately for Men (middle values, n = 118) and Women (right-hand values, n = 188) .

We found the expected bimodal distribution of the TMF scores. Men and women differed significantly in terms of the scale mean, M male = 2.56 ( SD = 0.80), M female = 5.28 ( SD = 0.76), t (304) = −29.83, p < 0.001, and on every item, all t s (287) > −10.41, all p s < 0.001. With the exception of two outlier individuals, the overlap between men's and women's scores was very small (see Figure 1 ). According to Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistics, the TMF scores were normally distributed for men ( Z = 0.99, p = 0.28) and women ( Z = 0.78, p = 0.58). Predicting gender by the TMF scores in a logistic regression analysis was 97% accurate [ B = 4.43, SE = 0.69, χ ( 1 ) 2 = 41 . 38 , p < 0.001; Nagelkerke's R 2 = 0.92; Model χ ( 1 ) 2 = 347.87, p < 0.001].

Figure 1. Distribution of the TMF scores separately for men ( n = 118) and women ( n = 188) in the pilot study . The lines in the bars represent medians and bars indicate the range between 75th and 25th percentile. Error bars show the range of masculinity-femininity scores for non-outliers. Dots represent outlying values (1.5 SD above/below median).

Taken together, confirming Hypothesis 1, we found that the TMF tapped a one-dimensional construct which is in line with lay ascriptions and previous findings regarding the items masculine and feminine. All factor loadings were similar (Δ < 0.1), so that an unweighted additive overall score was justified ( Bortz and Döring, 2006 ). Its single items represented the overall scale very well and were strongly connected to each other. Hence, no item had to be excluded due to low item-specific homogeneity ( Bortz and Döring, 2006 ). Moreover, confirming Hypothesis 2, the TMF was shown to discriminate between women and men at the scale and at the item level. Therefore, we kept all items in the TMF.

The aim of Study 1 was to test the one-dimensionality, reliability, and validity of the TMF. We used a known-groups approach, with lesbians, bisexual, and straight women, to assess which of several gender-related scales is best in differentiating between these groups. In addition to the TMF, we used the BSRI as the gold standard in gender-related assessment. However, we also used the Gender Role Behavior Scale (GRB, Athenstaedt, 2003 ) and a newly created measure of childhood gender conformity (see Appendix in Supplementary Material). Moreover, an Implicit Association Test (IAT, Greenwald et al., 1998 ) was used to measure implicit associations of self with masculine vs. feminine.

We assumed that the TMF would reflect a one-dimensional masculinity-femininity construct (Hypothesis 1). Furthermore, we expected that on each measure, straight women would score higher on femininity and/or lower on masculinity as compared to lesbians (Hypothesis 3a). Bisexual women should score in between (Hypothesis 3b). Additionally, on an IAT (see below for details), we assumed straight women to associate more with feminine and less with masculine than lesbians (Hypothesis 6). Gender-related measures should be correlated with each other (Hypothesis 7), and scores on each measure should predict sexual orientation. We also tested the incremental validity of the TMF over the other measures. The TMF should predict sexual orientation better than other gender-related scales (Hypothesis 8). Finally, the TMF should measure a higher-order factor “core” masculinity-femininity that mediates effects of sexual orientation on other gender-related scales (Hypothesis 5). If women differ in masculinity-femininity based on their sexual orientation, indirect effects of the more specific masculinity-femininity related measures via the TMF on sexual orientation should be observed.

Participants

Participants were 126 women from Germany and Luxembourg who took part in the study, voluntarily without compensation. Their age ranged from 19 to 47 years ( M = 31.13, SD = 8.52). Participants were recruited either at the University of Trier or by a snowball technique. Given their scores on a Kinsey-like scale, they were divided into three groups of 47 straight women (Kinsey scores: 6–7), 32 bisexual women (3–5), and 47 lesbians (1–2). Most of the women were well educated, with 50% possessing university entrance qualifications and 40% holding a university degree. With α = 0.05 and N = 126, based on Cohen's (1977) conventions, medium-size regression coefficients ( f 2 = 0.35) could be detected with a statistical power of 1 − β = 0.95 in a multiple linear regression with six predictors ( Faul et al., 2007 ).

Implicit association test

In essence, IATs comprise two combined tasks in which stimuli that belong to four concepts are mapped onto two responses in different ways. IATs are based on the following idea: If someone is able to react relatively fast when two concepts share a response, these concepts appear to be associated for that person. In detail, stimuli were presented that represent the concepts self, others, feminine , and masculine . In one task, stimuli representing self or feminine required one response, and stimuli representing others or masculine required the other response (e.g., left vs. right key press). In the other task, stimuli representing self or masculine required one response, and stimuli representing others or feminine required the other response. A person considering herself feminine should be able to react faster in the self-feminine/others-masculine than in the self-masculine/others-feminine task.

We labeled one dimension for the IAT “typically feminine” vs. “typically masculine.” The associated attributes presented were feminine, female vs. masculine, male (in German: feminin, weiblich; maskulin, männlich , see Steffens et al., 2008 ). The other dimension was “self” vs. “others.” The stimuli on that dimension were synonyms of the superordinate concepts ( me, self vs. you, others ; in German: Ich, Selbst; Du, Andere ). Participants were informed that concepts would be displayed throughout at the top left or right screen corner. Their task during the IAT would be to sort words belonging to these concepts by pressing the respective response key on the left or right as quickly as possible. A stimulus word would appear (e.g., feminine) after which participants would respond by pressing the appropriate key (e.g., left for typically feminine ). The word would then be replaced by the next stimulus (e.g., me ). Participants would again select the appropriate key (e.g., left for self ). Each crucial, combined task consisted of four blocks of 62 trials. The order of the eight stimuli was randomized within each block, and the same eight stimuli were presented over and over. The reaction-stimulus interval was 200 ms. Missing reactions and errors led to an appropriate visual feedback (e.g., in case of errors, F! was shown for 200 ms). Participants received feedback on errors and reaction times after each block (e.g., given 10% errors or more: “You committed many errors. Please react more slowly and more correctly.”).

The IAT effect was computed similar to the IAT D effect ( Nosek et al., 2005 , except that no “error penalty” was used, see Steffens et al., 2008 ): Specifically, the reaction time difference between the self-feminine/others-masculine and the self-masculine/others-feminine task was computed and divided by each individual's standard deviation across both tasks. In order to avoid artificially high scores obtained with very long scales, internal consistency was estimated based on the average reaction time difference in reaction to each of the eight stimuli. In other words, the IAT was treated as an eight item scale (following Steffens and Buchner, 2003 ). All internal consistencies are presented in Table 2 .

Table 2. Internal Consistencies (Cronbach's α, with number of items) and Correlations between Measures in Study 1 .

Bem sex-role inventory

We translated the English short version of the BSRI ( Bem, 1979 ) into German. It consisted of 30 items, 10 for the Masculinity Scale (e.g., self-reliant, ambitious), 10 for the Femininity Scale (e.g., warm, tender), and 10 neutral items with a 7-point scale anchored 1 ( never applies ) to 7 ( always applies ). Participants were asked to rate the extent to which the given traits were adequate to describe them.

Traditional masculinity-femininity

The TMF was used as described in the Section Scale Construction with two unipolar dimensions, masculinity and femininity (12 items overall, see Appendix in Supplementary Material).

Childhood gender role behavior (CGRB)

Five items were used with a 7-point-scale in order to measure whether participants remembered to have been rather feminine during childhood, or rather typical girls, or not (see Appendix A2 in Supplementary Material). For example, we asked whether they had played with girls and girls' games, and whether they had liked wearing skirts and dresses.

Sexual orientation

As indicated in Section Participants, participants' sexual orientation was assessed using participants' responses on the item: “Regarding sexual orientation, I identify as …” (on a Kinsey-like scale, from 1 ( exclusively lesbian ) to 7 ( exclusively straight ). This was also the first item of a translated version of the Assessment of Sexual Orientation Scale ( Coleman, 1987 ). Several additional items were originally used (sexual behavior: gender of partner and ideal partner; sexual fantasies, and emotional bindings). To be consistent with Study 2, we used only the first item to group participants as lesbians (scores 1–2), bisexual women (scores 3–5), and heterosexual women (scores: 6–7). The first item also correlated highly with the overall scale ( r = 0.95), corroborating the decision to use only one item.

Gender role behavior scale

Participants rated themselves on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 ( not at all typical ) to 7 ( very typical ) on 52 everyday typically feminine or masculine behaviors (GRB, Athenstaedt, 2003 ; e.g., “watch soap operas,” “change light bulbs”).

Participating students were tested at the University of Trier in a lab cubicle equipped with an iMac. The participants recruited via the snowball technique were tested individually in their homes or offices (as they wished) using an iBook. The instructions, the implicit tests, and the questionnaires were presented by a self-composed HyperCard computer program. Initially, participants were asked to report their age, educational background, and size of hometown. Then, they started with the IAT. IAT task order was held constant because of the correlational nature of the study (see e.g., Banse et al., 2001 , for discussion). All participants did the self-masculine/others-feminine task first. After the IAT, the questionnaires were presented in the order described in the Materials Section—accordingly, data for the TMF was collected before all other scales. Finally, participants were debriefed and thanked.

In all analyses in the present article, significance tests were conducted with α = 0.05 and all statistical analyses were done with SPSS 22. One might suggest that all other scales in addition to the TMF used in the present research should also be submitted to factor analyses. However, commonalities of several of them were too low for conducting confirmatory factor analyses. To illustrate, in Study 2 we observed GRB-M (<0.01) and GRB-F (<0.10). Therefore, means of all established gender-related scales were computed according to the scales' theoretical basis as suggested by their authors.

Factor Analysis

In order to check for one-dimensionality of the TMF, an exploratory PAF with oblique rotation (oblimin: 0) was conducted for all 12 items. Sample adequacy was confirmed by a KMO criterion of 0.86. All items were suitable for factor analysis as indicated by item-specific KMO values >0.77 and moderate to high commonalities (0.50–0.80). Several indicators are in line with the same one-factor solution as in the Pilot Study and in Study 2 below. According to a graphical scree-plot analysis, a one-factor solution was confirmed. There was a steep decline of explained variance from factor one (61%) to factor two (12%). Moreover, the factor matrix showed a strong first factor suggesting all items to measure something similar.

An alternative confirmatory factor analysis with one factor replicating the findings of the Pilot Study yielded an overall explained variance of 57.80% and showed all items to load highly on that factor (positive loadings for femininity items: ≥ 0.70; negative loadings for masculinity items: ≤ −0.67). Taken together, a one-factor solution was indicated. Factor, pattern, and structure matrix for the exploratory factor analysis and factor loadings for the confirmatory factor analysis can be found in Table B1 in Appendix B in Supplementary Material.

Group Differences

Table 3 shows overall scale means, average scores for each sexual-orientation group, and statistical tests. As expected, lesbians scored lower on TMF femininity and higher on TMF masculinity than bisexual or straight women. All differences between groups were statistically significant (based on a Scheffé test), except that bisexual women did not score significantly higher than straight women on masculinity. On the BSRI, no significant differences between groups were obtained. In contrast, regarding gender-role behavior and childhood behavior, expected differences between lesbians and straight women were obtained. Similarly, the implicit association of self with feminine was stronger in straight women than lesbians, confirming expectations.

Table 3. Overall Scale Means (with SD ) and Means per Group, with Statistical Test of Difference (all df = 2, 123; with effect size; Tukey HSD) and Correlation with the Sexual Orientation Scale in Study 1 .

Bivariate Correlations

Table 2 shows bivariate correlations, along with internal consistencies. Internal consistencies of all measures were excellent, with the lowest score obtained for BSRI masculinity. A noteworthy correlation was a strong negative one between the TMF factors masculinity and femininity, suggesting that a one-dimensional measure could be sufficient. In line with the large negative correlation, people who judged themselves as “moderately feminine” (i.e., ticked the value 4) tended to also judge themselves as “moderately masculine” (i.e., ticked 4 again). Hence, we recoded all masculine items and then averaged all items of the TMF to obtain a supplementary measure, TMF total. TMF masculinity and femininity correlated in the expected direction with all other measures except for BSRI masculinity. BSRI masculinity did not correlate significantly with any other measure, suggesting that it measured something different from all other measures of masculinity in the study. All other correlations were in the expected direction. Of particular interest, the implicit association of self-feminine correlated positively with TMF femininity and negatively with TMF masculinity, as expected. Similar, but somewhat weaker relations were obtained between the IAT and most other measures.

Predicting Sexual Orientation

In order to test whether lesbians, bisexual, and straight women would be classified correctly based on the different measures of masculinity-femininity, we carried out an ordinal regression analysis. As predictor variables, the masculinity and femininity scores of BSRI, GRB, and CGRB were entered. In addition, TMF total and the IAT effect were used as predictors. The overall model was statistically significant, χ (8) = 72.01, p < 0.001, Nagelkerke's R 2 = 0.49. The significant predictors were TMF total scores [ B = 1.17, SE = 0.27, χ 2 (1) = 19.30, p < 0.001] and masculine everyday behavior [ B = −0.69, SE = 0.27, χ 2 (1) = 6.65, p = 0.01]. None of the other predictors was significant, p s > 0.21. Thus, based on their self-assessment on the TMF as masculine-feminine and based on the masculine everyday behaviors participants said they carried out, they could be classified quite well as lesbians, bisexual, or straight women.

Mediation Analyses

Based on the regression approach suggested by Hayes (2013) , we tested whether there are indirect effects of the BSRI and GRB dimensions on sexual orientation via the respective TMF dimensions. Because this approach needs a continuous dependent variable, in contrast to all other analyses in the present paper, we did not use the classification as lesbian, bisexual, or straight in this case, but the continuous Kinsey-like scale with scores ranging from 1 to 7. Figures 2 , 3 summarize the findings. Statistically significant effects of BSRI femininity and GRB femininity on TMF femininity were observed, and also of GRB masculinity and of BSRI masculinity (by trend) on TMF masculinity. TMF masculinity and femininity were related with sexual orientation in expected ways (in line with the findings reported in Table 3 ). Bootstrapping analyses, using 10,000 Bootstrap re-samples, demonstrated that the indirect effects of BSRI femininity, GRB femininity, and BSRI femininity on sexual orientation via the TMF were statistically significant (i.e., none of the bias-corrected 95% confidence intervals included 0). The indirect effect of BSRI masculinity via TMF masculinity missed the preset criterion of statistical significance. Only one direct effect was significant in addition to the indirect effect: Whereas all other findings were in line with the interpretation of full mediation via the TMF, masculine everyday behavior was still related to sexual orientation when the TMF was included in the equation. This suggests that the TMF mediated the relationship between sexual orientation and masculine behavior only partially.

Figure 2. Mediation of the relation between BSRI and sexual orientation by the TMF .

Figure 3. Mediation of the relation between GRB and sexual orientation by the TMF .

Summary of Findings

In Study 1, we found that the reliabilities of both the femininity and the masculinity subscales of the TMF were high. Moreover, they correlated so strongly (in a negative way) that one may also conceive of the scale as one-dimensional, ranging from masculinity to femininity. We found several pieces of evidence for the validity of the scale. First, it correlated in the expected directions with all other measures of masculinity and femininity that we used, except for BSRI masculinity, which largely confirms Hypothesis 7. Feminine traits as well as masculine and feminine behaviors can be predicted quite well from scores on the TMF. The strongest correlations were obtained with self-rated childhood gender conformity. Notably, confirming Hypothesis 6, correlations with an implicit measure of one's self-feminine vs. self-masculine association were in the expected order of magnitude (e.g., Hofmann et al., 2005 ) and higher than those of the implicit measure with any of the trait or behavior self-ratings. Additionally, the TMF was related to participants' sexual orientation more strongly than any other measure (see ANOVA results in Table 3 ), with lesbians reporting lower femininity and higher masculinity than bisexual or straight women (confirming Hypothesis 3a and b). When predicting participants' sexual orientation from the masculinity and femininity measures, neither feminine, nor masculine traits, nor feminine everyday behavior, nor the self-feminine association contributed. Instead, confirming Hypothesis 8, masculine everyday behavior and the TMF were able to predict participants' sexual orientation very well, attesting to the usefulness of two rather new conceptualizations of measuring masculinity and femininity.

Mediation analyses were in line with the idea that feminine traits and feminine everyday behavior differ by sexual orientation because of a globally more feminine gender-role self-concept. This confirms Hypothesis 5. Masculine traits also tend to differ by sexual orientation because of lesbians' globally more masculine gender-role self-concept. Further, masculine everyday behavior also differs by sexual orientation because of lesbians' globally more masculine gender-role self-concept, but a direct effect of masculine behavior on sexual orientation remained. A speculative explanation for the latter finding is that it may depend partly on the gender of one's relationship partner which behaviors one carries out. For example, given that couples typically divide housework in ways mirroring traditional gender roles (e.g., Croft et al., 2014 ; Steffens and Viladot, 2015 ), a woman considering herself rather feminine may mow the lawn more often when she is in a relationship with a woman than with a man. In other words, in addition to personal preferences, the presence or absence of other-gender people in the household who choose to take care of certain chores may determine which chores one does (i.e., typically male everyday behaviors if no man is around).

The aim of Study 2 was to replicate and extend Study 1's findings. We used data of a research project on social perception. As in Study 1, we used a known-groups approach, this time contrasting lesbians, gay men, and straight women and men. With the exception of small adjustments, gender-related scales were identical to Study 1. However, this time we used a different adjective-based instrument than the BSRI, namely the GEPAQ, the German version ( Runge et al., 1981 ) of the Extended Personal Attributes Questionnaire ( Spence et al., 1978 ). For determining criterion validity, we also focused on other features. Participants were instructed to provide information regarding frequency of contact with lesbians/gay men and straight people. Moreover, characteristics of participants' voice pitch were collected as well as evaluations from independent judges on whether participants' voices sounded straight or gay/lesbian and whether their faces looked straight or gay/lesbian. In order to determine the TMF's test-retest reliability, we re-invited male participants after 1 year (for female participants no contact data were available).

We expected highest masculinity/lowest femininity scores for straight men, followed by gay men, lesbians, and straight women, implying lowest masculinity/highest femininity for straight women (Hypotheses 2, 3, and 4). We expected gender-related characteristics to correlate moderately with the TMF (Hypothesis 7) and we assumed the TMF to predict sexual orientation better than the other gender-related scales (Hypothesis 8). Furthermore, we assumed that participants with higher gender-conform scores on the TMF would report less contact with lesbians and gay men (Hypothesis 10), would show rather gender stereotypical voice pitch characteristics (Hypothesis 11), and would be more likely to be rated as straight (Hypothesis 9). A moderate 1-year reliability was expected (Hypothesis 12) as well as a moderate predictive validity for the second measurement of gender-related features (Hypothesis 13).

Overall 111 German participants attended the study at the first measurement point. Their age ranged from 19 to 30 years ( M = 24.2, SD = 2.5). Participants were recruited at the University of Jena, the Technical University of Berlin, and on lesbian/gay dating websites. Based on their Kinsey-like scale scores, 15 participants who rated themselves as bisexual were excluded from further analyses because of the small group size. Among the remaining 96 participants, there were 24 lesbians (Kinsey scores: 1–2), 21 straight women (6–7), 25 gay men (1–2), and 26 straight men (6–7). Most participants were well educated, 60% possessing a university entrance qualification and 35% a university degree. As a post-hoc power analysis indicated, given the sample size and α = 0.05, between medium (0.25) and large (0.40) effects of f = 0.35 could be detected in the 2 × 2 ANOVAs below with a statistical power of 1 − β = 0.95.

A total of 37 men attended the post-test. According to their Kinsey-like scale scores 18 identified as gay (1–2) and 19 as straight (6–7). Between those attending the post-test and those who did not, merely one difference was significant after adjusting the significance level for multiple tests. The retest-group reported less contact with straight men during the first data collection [ M retest = 5.76, M no − retest = 6.53, t (49.47) = 3.33, p = 0.002].

The same measures as in Study 1 were used in the following manner. Because the femininity and masculinity subscales of the TMF were highly correlated, as were subscales of the Childhood Gender-Role Behavior Scale, they were combined to form one dimension each [TMF: 1 ( very masculine ), to 7 ( very feminine ); CGRB: 1 ( I strongly disagree ), 5 ( I strongly agree )]. Thus, the 6-item-version of the TMF was used. High values on CGRB indicated a high degree of gender conformity. Gender Role Behavior was assessed with a 6-point-scale this time and sexual orientation was measured with one item on a 7-point Kinsey-like scale [(“Regarding sexual orientation, I identify as…”); 1 ( exclusively lesbian/gay ), 7 ( exclusively straight )]. Moreover, we included the following measures.

German extended personal attributes questionnaire

We used the German version ( Runge et al., 1981 ) of the Extended Personal Attributes Questionnaire ( Spence et al., 1978 ). It consists of two independent scales measuring gender-related personality traits. The instrumentality scale (GEPAQ-M) contained eight items describing behaviors more socially desirable for men (e.g., independent), the expressiveness scale (GEPAQ-F) comprised eight items more socially desirable for women (e.g., emotional). Participants were instructed to indicate on a 5-point Likert-type scale (1 = non independent/not emotional, 5 = very independent/very emotional) the extent to which they felt each item described them.

Contact measures

In order to estimate the composition of participants' social environment, we measured current contact to same-gender lesbian/gay and straight people with one item each. The participants should “indicate how often you have contact to homosexual and heterosexual women/men” on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 ( never ) to 7 ( always ).

Voice pitch characteristics

To describe participants' voice pitch (i.e., the auditory correlate of fundamental frequency) distributions in spontaneous speech, we used three measures. Mean fundamental frequency (f0) indicates the average voice pitch, f0 standard deviation is a measure for voice pitch variability, and f0 range is used to evaluate voice pitch range. For computing f0 range, we computed the difference between the f0 97.5th percentile (estimator of the upper voice pitch boundary) and f0 2.5th percentile (estimator of the lower voice pitch boundary).

Perceived straightness

Participants' voices, facial photographs, and the combinations of both voices and faces had been rated as either “heterosexual” or “homosexual” by 101 judges (65 women, 31 men; age M = 28.0), participating in a different study (for details see Kachel et al., unpublished manuscript). To receive a relative measure of “heterosexual” judgments, all “heterosexual” responses were summed for each participant and divided by the number of judgments. Hence, higher scores indicate higher perceived straightness.

At first measurement, participants filled out an online questionnaire in which all psychological and sociodemographic characteristics were collected. The order of psychological instruments was TMF, CGRB, contact to girls and boys during childhood, GRB, GEPAQ, Kinsey-like scale, and finally current contact to same-gender lesbians/gay men and straight people. In the second step, they were invited to a speech lab to provide recordings of spontaneous spoken speech and text reading as well as a photograph of their face. The sampling of women took place in a phonetic laboratory in the Center of General Linguistics in Berlin and was done by a female investigator, whereas the sampling of men took place at a phonetic laboratory of the University of Jena and was done by a male investigator. Voice pitch characteristics were measured on the basis of spontaneous speech. In the last step we asked 101 judges to rate speech recordings, facial photographs, and the combination of both dichotomously regarding sexual orientation for a randomly selected subset of 18 lesbians, gay men, straight women, and men, respectively (Kachel et al., unpublished manuscript). For the rating of speech recordings, we used the same read sentence for all target persons (“It has been quite a long day,” German: “ Der Tag ist sehr lang geworden .”) in order to hold the conditions constant for every target and to control for the phonetic composition of the utterance.

Male participants were re-invited after 1 year to the phonetic laboratory of the University of Jena. Before speech recordings they were asked to fill out an online questionnaire containing several gender-related scales including the 6-items version of the TMF, the GEPAQ-M, and the GEPAQ-F.

All results refer to the first measurement except for those that are explicitly indicated to belong to second measurement.

In order to test whether the TMF scale is one-dimensional, an explorative factor analysis with PAF was conducted. It replicated all findings of the pilot study. In detail, a KMO criterion of 0.86 indicated that the sample was appropriate. All items were suitable for factor analysis (item-specific KMO values >0.81; commonalities:0.54–0.83). According to a graphical scree-plot analysis, a one-factor solution was confirmed. There was a steep decline of explained variance from factor one (71%) to factor two (13%). Each item was represented very well by this factor (loadings >0.73).

An additional exploratory factor analysis with PAF of participants at second measurement replicated the findings indicating a one-dimensional factor structure. In detail, a KMO criterion of 0.76 indicated that the sample was appropriate. All items were suitable for factor analysis because of item-specific KMO values >0.69 and moderate to high commonalities (0.42–0.69). The one-factor solution was confirmed by graphical scree-plot analysis. There was a steep decline of explained variance from factor one (60%) to factor two (14%). Each item was represented very well by this factor (loadings >0.65).

Differences on Gender-Related Scales Based on Gender and Sexual Orientation

Which of the gender-related instruments are able to predict a person's gender and sexual orientation? In order to answer this question, for all gender-related instruments separate 2 × 2 ANOVAs with the two between-subject factors gender and sexual orientation were computed. Simple-effects tests with Bonferroni adjustment were added. Table 4 shows main and interaction effects as well as mean scores for all gender-related instruments separately for lesbians, straight women, gay, and straight men.

Table 4. Group-Specific Means (with SD ) on Gender-Related Scales and ANOVA Results regarding Sexual Orientation and Gender in Study 2 at First Measurement .

On the TMF, we found an interaction of gender and sexual orientation, F (1, 92) = 21.42, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0.19, as well as a main effect of gender F (1, 92) = 100.54, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0.52. Both effects explained more variance in the TMF than in all other gender-related instruments in this study. Because straight women and men conform to gender roles more than lesbians/gay men, stronger gender differences should be expected between straight women and men than between lesbians and gay men. Hence, comparing lesbians and gay men constituted a stricter test of all scales. Although the TMF mean differences between straight women and men were more distinct (Δ M = 2.85), lesbians and gay men significantly differed, too (Δ M = 1.05). In short, the TMF showed the expected mean differences between all groups, it was the only scale in this study that was able to detect differences between lesbians and gay men, and it showed the largest mean difference between straight women and men.

Furthermore, the TMF differentiated the groups as expected (see Figure 4 ). Lesbians and straight women were on average clearly located on the scale's side that is associated with femininity (scores > 4) and gay and straight men's mean values were connected to masculinity (scores < 4). Additionally, the TMF was best in predicting gender on the basis of scale scores as can be seen in Table 5 in which results of binary logistic regression models for all gender-related scales are shown. Correct gender classification rate for the TMF was 80%. Almost identical percentages of women and men were correctly classified. Compared to all other measures under investigation, the TMF seemed to be the most precise instrument to differentiate between women and men regardless of their sexual orientation.

Figure 4. Mean TMF scores separately for gender and sexual orientation . Error bars represent standard errors of means.

Table 5. Results of Binary Logistic Regression Models in Predicting Participants' Gender based on Different Gender-Related Instruments in Study 2 at First Measurement .

Replication of Findings from the Female Sample

Group differences in women's sample.

Regarding TMF, group differences in women's sample were already mentioned above. As in Study 1, straight women described themselves as more feminine compared to lesbians on the GRB-F. However, in contrast to Study 1, other gender-related scales (GRB-M and CGRB) were not able to differentiate women regarding their sexual orientation (see Table 4 ). Means were particularly close together for adjective-based gender-related instruments such as the GEPAQ.

Bivariate correlations

Reliabilities and correlations on all gender-related instruments can be seen in Table 6 . Three out of five correlations with the TMF were significant. Besides the GRB-F there was also a correlation with gender-conforming childhood-experiences (CGRB) and with the exchanged adjective-based masculinity-scale (GEPAQ-M). The correlations for the first two instruments were in the expected direction: The more feminine the women rated themselves on the TMF, the higher their scores on behavior-based femininity (GRB-F) and childhood gender-conformity (CGRB). However, the TMF correlated positively with the GEPAQ-M, which is counterintuitive. We believe that this attests to deficiencies in the GEPAQ-M, along with its low reliability. Moreover, after adjusting the significance level according to the Bonferroni formula, the correlation was not significant anymore.

Table 6. Reliabilities and bivariate correlations of gender-related scales for women and men in Study 2 at first measurement .

Predicting sexual orientation

Can the TMF predict women's sexual orientation better than other measures? We added the TMF in the last step of a binary regression model. Results can be seen in Table 7 . In contrast to Study 1, the TMF did not outperform all other measures. Only the GRB-F was found to predict women's sexual orientation. However, when GRB-F was not included in the regression model, the TMF was the only significant predictor of sexual orientation in the model, B = 1.25, SE = 0.50, χ 2 (1) = 6.19, p = 0.013.

Table 7. Stepwise, logistic regression analysis for predicting women's sexual orientation based on gender-related scales in study 2 at first measurement .

Comparisons within Men

The same analyses were computed for the male subsample.

Group differences

As indicated in Table 4 , all differences in the male subsample were in the expected directions. Straight men showed higher masculinity/lower femininity on each gender-related instrument than gay men except for the GEPAQ-M, where no significant difference was detected. The TMF (Δ M = 1.05) and the CGRB (Δ M = 1.10) were similarly able to predict sexual orientation.

At second measurement, gay and straight men differed more strongly on the TMF [ M gay = 3.85, M straight = 2.60, t (35) = 4.70, p < 0.001]. However, in contrast to the first measurement the GEPAQ-F was not able to discriminate between both groups, M gay = 4.02, M straight = 3.68, t (35) = 1.83, p = 0.075. The GEPAQ-M remained non-significant, M gay = 3.46, M straight = 3.56, t (35) = −0.51, p = 0.61.

All correlations with the TMF were significant (all | r | > 0.31, all p < 0.028) and in the expected directions (see Table 6 ).

As for the female subsample, the TMF did not predict sexual orientation better than other measures when it was added in the last step of a binary regression model (see Table 8 ). CGRB and GRB-M were the measures most closely related to sexual orientation. This could be interpreted as suggesting that TMF does not contribute at all to explaining sexual orientation. Moreover, one could be interested in the direct comparison of TMF and GEPAQ in explaining sexual orientation. To answer these questions, in a supplementary binary regression model, only adjective-based scales were included as predictors. In that analysis, TMF was the only significant predictor of sexual orientation, B = −0.89, SE = 0.41, χ ( 1 ) 2 = 4 . 61 , p = 0.032. Taken together, CGRB and GRB-M predicted sexual orientation best, and TMF predicted sexual orientation better than GEPAQ.

Table 8. Stepwise, logistic regression analysis for predicting men's sexual orientation based on gender-related scales in study 2 at first measurement .

Relations with Criterion Characteristics

We collected data on several psychological and acoustic criterion characteristics. We computed bivariate correlation coefficients for the TMF with these characteristics in order to test the criterion validity of TMF separately for women (see Table 9 ) and men (see Table 10 ). Additionally, correlations for all other gender-related scales included in Study 2 were computed as a comparison.

Table 9. Bivariate correlations of gender-related instruments and criterion characteristics for women in study 2 .

Table 10. Bivariate correlations of gender-related instruments and criterion characteristics for men in study 2 .

The more gender-conform women and men rated themselves on the TMF, the more likely they were perceived as straight based on voices, faces, and the combination of both (| r| > 0.31) however, the correlation for perceived straightness based on voice for women was only by trend). In contrast to men, all voice pitch characteristics correlated significantly with the TMF for women ( r > 0.32). All correlations were in the expected direction: The higher women spoke on average and the higher their voice pitch range and variability, the more likely they rated themselves as feminine. In contrast, one contact measure showed a significant correlation for men but not for women: The less contact men reported to gay men, the more masculine they rated themselves on the TMF ( r = −0.35).

The TMF showed 9 out of 16 possible significant correlations which is more than any other gender-related scale. CGRB followed with 6 out of 16 possible significant correlations. Hence, the TMF showed higher convergent validity than the other gender-related scales.

Test-Retest Reliability and Predictive Validity

Table 11 contains findings regarding test-retest reliability and predictive validity. According to the intercorrelation of TMF scores at first and second measurement, 1-year reliability for the TMF was 0.75 and higher than for the GEPAQ-F, though inter-correlations for the GEPAQ-M were even higher than for the TMF. Hypothesis 12 was confirmed.

Table 11. Reliabilities and correlations for gender-related measures between first (columns) and second (rows) Measurement in Study 3 .

In order to test its predictive value, the TMF at the first measurement was correlated with GEPAQ-M and GEPAQ-F at the second measurement. As can be seen in Table 11 , both correlations were significant, of moderate size, and in the expected directions, confirming Hypothesis 13.

In Study 2, we found that all TMF items loaded strongly on one single factor at first and second measurement, replicating the pilot study and confirming Hypothesis 1 again. The TMF showed sufficient reliabilities for women and men. Confirming Hypotheses 2, 3, and 4, the TMF turned out to be the best gender-related instrument for differentiating straight and gay men at first and second measurement and lesbians and straight women compared to all other scales used in Study 2 (see Table 4 ). In line with gender self-stereotyping and contradicting implicit gender inversion theory, gay men showed lower femininity/higher masculinity than lesbians. The evidence for high incremental validity in predicting women's sexual orientation from Study 1 could not be replicated nor extended to men.

Whereas, lesbians and straight women differed descriptively, but not significantly in GRB-M (see Table 4 ), in the logistic regression analysis (see Table 7 ), GRB-M predicted women's sexual orientation in a significant way in Step 2, along with GRB-F. We assume that the inclusion of GRB-F in the regression model reduced apparent error variance and thus changed the relation between GRB-M and sexual orientation from descriptive to statistically significant. However, as GRB-M was again non-significant in Step 3 of the regression model, we suggest that masculine everyday behavior was not strongly related to sexual orientation in our women's sample. However, when including adjective-based instruments only, TMF predicted sexual orientation in women and men better than established adjective -based instruments.

Partially confirming Hypothesis 7, the TMF showed moderate correlations with some other gender-related scales. Importantly, the TMF was connected to multiple criterion characteristics for women (e.g., higher femininity was accompanied by more gender-conform voice pitch characteristics) and men (e.g., higher masculinity was associated with less frequent contact to gay men) and outperformed other gender-related scales.

The TMF revealed moderate test-retest-reliability and predictive validity confirming Hypotheses 12 and 13. Scores on the first TMF measurement predicted scores on GEPAQ-M and GEPAQ-F at second measurement.

General Discussion

Gender research has developed many instruments to measure different aspects of self-ascriptions of gender stereotypical features, including attributes, behaviors, interests, and attitudes ( Beere, 1990 ). Supplementing these scales, the TMF scale is designed as an instrument for globally assessing people's overall, or “core,” masculinity-femininity. The TMF was shown to reliably measure an underlying, one-dimensional construct, and it was found to be a valid instrument for assessing masculinity-femininity because it (a) successfully differentiated between groups that were expected to differ (women vs. men, lesbians/gay men vs. straight women and men) and (b) it correlated moderately with other gender-related instruments, such as the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI; Bem, 1974 ) and the German Extended Personal Attributes Questionnaire (GEPAQ; Runge et al., 1981 ). Whereas, some well-established, adjective-based scales (e.g., BSRI, GEPAQ) have shown shortcomings in differentiating women and men in recent years ( Sczesny et al., 2004 ; Evers and Sieverding, 2014 ), our findings of consistent group differences support the TMF as a new tool for measuring gender-role self-concept.

Dimensionality of the TMF

In line with Choi and Fuqua (2003) , high correlations between the separate TMF femininity and masculinity scales as shown in Study 1 suggest a bipolar, one-dimensional use of this instrument reflecting laypersons' ideas of masculinity and femininity as two extremes of one continuum. This is also in line with findings reported by Spence and Bruckner (2000, see also Sánchez and Vilain, 2012 ). All items were shown to load on one factor and represent a one-dimensional construct (masculinity-femininity). This finding should be not taken as hint that one-dimensional masculinity/femininity models generally outperform two dimensional ones (e.g., agency, communion; competence, warmth; instrumentality, expressivity), but that all TMF items appear to refer to the same underlying construct. Moreover, in spite of its brevity, the TMF showed high internal consistencies across all studies as well as satisfactory test-retest reliability (in a sample of men). However, the one-dimensionality of the TMF was demonstrated with participants identifying themselves as women or men. Possibly, the two-dimensional TMF version is superior than the one-dimensional version for samples that comprise a larger number of participants transgressing or rejecting the binary gender system (e.g., transgender and queer people). Future research is needed to clarify that question.

One could object against using the bipolar TMF scale that its midpoint is ambiguous. In other words: what does a score of “4” mean? One could imagine that people scoring either high or low on both dimensions would erroneously be treated as one group. However, according to the high correlations between the separate TMF masculinity and femininity scales (Study 1) and a supplementary graphical scatterplot analysis we did, we found no groups of high/high (i.e., androgyny) or low/low scorers (i.e., undifferentiated). Hence, it can be deduced that people in our samples who scored close to “4” believed themselves to be moderately feminine and masculine.

Contextualizing Validity Findings

In terms of validity, using a known-groups approach as an established psychological method for validity tests (e.g., Howitt and Cramer, 2008 ), the TMF repeatedly showed expected gender differences, with men scoring higher on masculinity and lower on femininity than women. With reference to sexual orientation, straight and bisexual women rated themselves higher on femininity and lower on masculinity than lesbians did (Study 1). Moreover, the TMF was the only gender-related scale used in the present study that distinguished straight men, gay men, lesbians, and straight women (from high masculinity/low femininity to low masculinity/high femininity, Study 2) which supports gender self-stereotyping rather than implicit gender inversion theory ( Kite and Deaux, 1987 ). According to implicit gender inversion theory, gay men should have scored higher than lesbians on femininity and lower on masculinity, which was not the case in our sample. It appears that gay men and lesbians rather self-stereotype as men and women, respectively, and thus construct their self-concept in line with their gender group. Based on these findings, we conclude that the TMF's ability for determining gender and sexual orientation was generally high, and higher than that of all other gender-related measures investigated in the present studies. Finally, we found evidence for the idea that differences in “core” masculinity and femininity measured by the TMF underlie differences in lesbians' and gay men's vs. straight women and men's self-ascriptions in gender typicality measured by other scales, such as the BSRI (see Study 1). Hence, the TMF was shown to be a valid scale for assessing gender-role self-concept.

It was expected that the TMF would correlate moderately with other gender-related scales. That was the case for all gender-related scales in Study 1 where only a female sample was tested. This indicates that the TMF measures other aspects of people's conceptualizations of their own masculinity/femininity than the BSRI or the Gender-Role Behavior Scale ( Athenstaedt, 2003 ) and complements them well. An explanation for this findings is that the TMF does not measure attributes associated with masculinity/femininity, but rather, these constructs themselves. Only correlations with the Childhood Gender-Behavior Scale were high, which could be due to selective memory recall and hence reflect current gender-related self-assessment (see Bailey and Zucker, 1995 ) measured with the TMF. Alternatively, the high correlation is due to actual gender differences during childhood, which would be a hint for constancy of conceptualizations of people's own masculinity/femininity. Correlations between the TMF and gender-related scales were smaller for a second sample of women (Study 2) which could be due to differences in sampling and substitutions of scales (e.g., instead of the Bem Sex Role Inventory, the Personal Attributes Questionnaire was used). Connected to that, the incremental validity of the TMF for predicting women's sexual orientation was demonstrated in Study 1 only. However, the male sample in Study 2 showed overall moderate correlations of the TMF and gender-related scales, but no additional ability of the TMF to predict sexual orientation. The fact that the TMF did not always demonstrate additional predictive value for explaining differences between groups does not indicate that it is superfluous. Rather, other facets of self-ascribed masculinity/femininity, such as everyday behavior, turned out to be highly capable of predicting sexual orientation as well. And the TMF predicted sexual orientation still better than established adjective-based instruments in women and men in Study 2 (which was demonstrated after excluding the most predictive scales).

To deal with a common critique that self-report instruments measure differences in social desirability rather than true differences, we used an implicit measure of women's self-feminine vs. self-masculine associations. Study 1 showed that the correlations of these associations were higher for the TMF than for self-ratings of traits or behaviors. This is a strong hint that the TMF is able to reflect “true” differences in core masculinity/femininity rather than social desirability only. It is also a substantive finding of the present studies that goes beyond mere scale validation.

In a similar vein, in order to test the criterion validity of the TMF, we selected several criterion characteristics which can be categorized into three groups (Study 2): These included contact to same-gender straight women/men and lesbians/gay men, voice pitch features, and assessment of sexual orientation by laypersons based on visual and auditory stimuli. Correlation analyses showed that gender-conformity on the TMF was significantly linked to perceived straightness for almost each presentation mode (voice, face, and the combination of both) for men and women. Moreover, higher femininity in women was associated with higher voice pitch features (average, variability, and range) and higher masculinity in men was connected to less contact to gay men. Compared to other gender-related scales, the TMF was superior in convergent validity. Taken together, self-ratings of masculinity/femininity go along not only with gender and sexual orientation differences, but also with differences in social behavior (i.e., contact to same-gender people differing in sexual orientation), with objective voice characteristics, and with assessments of sexual orientation based on facial and voice features. In sum, this indicates that the TMF measures something fundamental regarding gender-related self-assessment. It is also another substantive finding of the present studies that goes beyond mere scale validation. A limitation is that patterns of findings partially differed between women and men, and which specific criteria mattered in which sub-sample appeared a bit arbitrary (e.g., voice pitch features for women and contact variables for men). It appears that women and men express their masculinity/femininity in different ways, which is an interesting topic for future research.

Theoretical Considerations Regarding the TMF

One might assume that a one-item-measure could be sufficient for assessing masculinity/femininity by simply asking how masculine/feminine people believe themselves to be. We checked this idea in an exemplary fashion for Study 2 using the “I consider myself as…”-item for a comparative analysis because of highest corrected item-total correlations for the whole sample in the Pilot Study. However, in every case (determining and predicting gender and sexual orientation, convergent, and criterion validity), as a rule the TMF was better than the one-item-measure (e.g., compared to the one-item measure the TMF showed higher correlations for almost all gender-related measures in the male subsample except for GEPAQ-M where a higher correlation was found for the one-item measure). This is in line with state-of-the-art conceptions in psychological assessment that consider every item in a scale to be a piece of puzzle and hence uncover a different detail of a somewhat bigger picture ( Bühner, 2010 ). Moreover, it is also consistent with Constantinople's (1973) view that the masculinity/femininity-construct is captured best when gender role adoption, preference, and identity are measured in conjunction.

The TMF is designed as a self-assessment instrument for masculinity-femininity on a rather global level with regard to two different respects. First, the TMF is based on a trait rather than a normative approach (see Thompson and Bennet, 2015 ) and conceptualizes masculinity-femininity as a long-term characteristic varying between people. However, it does not exclude variation on masculinity-femininity within a person depending on different social, temporal, or regional contexts. Its focus is on a trait-like (global) average score across contexts. Second, it is more global because it focuses on a higher-order masculinity-femininity construct which is beyond specific components such as traits, interests, physical characteristics, or attitudes, and asks for an aggregated self-assessment across these domains. The high test-retest reliability obtained over a 1-year period indicated stability rather than variance. However, it would be interesting to know which components mainly account for an individual's judgment of their own gender-related identity. The TMF could be a valuable instrument for future research dealing with that question.

In spite of this trait-like approach, the TMF is based on the idea that masculinity/femininity is socially determined (see Smiler, 2004 ). The scale is about how people relate or conform to social standards (how masculine/feminine do they believe themselves to be?), but not how they consider social norms to be appropriate for men and women (i.e., what people consider as masculine/feminine). To trigger a reference to social norms in the participants' minds when testing gender-role identity aspects, we used the term “traditionally” in the beginning of the corresponding items. However, the TMF does not measure if participants' conceptions of gender-role identity aspects correspond to traditional views. Thus, we concede that there could be variations in people's understanding of “traditionally” which could affect their self-evaluations. However, large differences are not likely because people within one culture know about traditional gender roles.

Because of the TMF's broader scope compared to established scales, such as the BSRI and PAQ, it is reasonable to be positive about the TMF's ability of measuring masculinity/femininity also in the future. Hence, it seems plausible that the problem of item aging is mitigated for the near future because of the more global wordings. Additionally, we are positive that the TMF can be used in different countries and cultures because of its global level of measurement. To date, the TMF has only been applied to one other German sample by Roth and Mazziotta (2015) . They found that the TMF was moderately connected to different aspects of social identification with one's own gender in the expected directions for men and women. According to Leach et al. (2008) , social identification is a multidimensional multicomponent higher order construct. The TMF was shown to be linked to almost all of its different components (individual self-stereotyping, in-group homogeneity, satisfaction, solidarity, and centrality) for women and men except for in-group homogeneity for men. Future research should provide evidence for the applicability in non-German samples.

Concluding Remarks

In a nutshell, as long as societies assume differences in interests, attitudes, clothing style, and behavior between women and men, we suggest that the TMF provides a valuable addition to researchers' toolbox. For example, are self-ratings on the TMF related to biological markers of masculinity-femininity such as waist-to-hip ratio and finger length (i.e., two-digit-four-digit ratio)? Do self-ratings on the TMF predict behaviors in which large gender differences have been observed, such as socio-sexuality or animal cruelty? Are self-ratings on the TMF related to performance in domains where gender differences are reliable, such as mental rotation? Finally, are self-ratings on the TMF related to personality traits in which gender differences have been observed, such as self-esteem and social dominance orientation? Generally, we believe that many different research questions related to gender-related self-assessments could benefit from using the TMF.

Author Contributions

Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work and the acquisition and analysis of the data: SK, MS; interpretation of data for the work: SK, MS, CN. Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content: SK, MS, CN. Final approval of the version to be published: SK, MS, CN. Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved: SK, MS. We thank Kornelia Schertzl, Karoline Nestler, Dirk Hertrampf, Felicia Schuld, and Alexander Makosch for help with data collection, Susanne Fuchs, Stefanie Jannedy, and Joerg Dreyer for providing laboratories in the Zentrum fuer Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, and Anders Sonderlund for language editing. Additionally, we thank Julia Scholz and the reviewers for critical and valuable comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. The TMF was originally developed by MS and Kornelia Schertzl.

The current research was partially funded by grants from the German Research Foundation (DFG, STE 938/10-2, FOR 1097, and STE 938/11-1).

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.

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00956

Abbreviations

BSRI, Bem Sex Role Inventory; BSRI-F, Bem Sex Role Inventory-femininity scale; BSRI-M, Bem Sex Role Inventory-masculinity scale; CGRB, Childhood Gender Role Behavior; f0, fundamental frequency; GEPAQ, German Extended Personal Attributes Questionnaire; GEPAQ-F, German Extended Personal Attributes Questionnaire-femininity scale; GEPAQ-M, German Extended Personal Attributes Questionnaire-masculinity scale; GRB, Gender Role Behavior; GRB-F, Gender Role Behavior-femininity scale; GRB-M, Gender Role Behavior-masculinity scale; IAT, Implicit Association Test; PAQ, Personal Attributes Questionnaire; TMF, Traditional Masculinity-Femininity; TMF-F, Traditional Masculinity-Femininity-femininity scale; TMF-M, Traditional Masculinity-Femininity-masculinity scale.

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Keywords: gender stereotypes, gender roles, gender-role self-concept, femininity, masculinity, actual and perceived sexual orientation, scale construction, voice pitch characteristics

Citation: Kachel S, Steffens MC and Niedlich C (2016) Traditional Masculinity and Femininity: Validation of a New Scale Assessing Gender Roles. Front. Psychol . 7:956. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00956

Received: 02 August 2015; Accepted: 09 June 2016; Published: 05 July 2016.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2016 Kachel, Steffens and Niedlich. 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: Sven Kachel, [email protected] Melanie C. Steffens, [email protected]

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Masculinity Is Tragic

L ate in the Iliad , the Trojan Lycaon begs Achilles to spare his life on the battlefield. Achilles refuses his supplications:

Come, friend, you too must die. Why moan about it so? . . . And look, you see how handsome and powerful I am? The son of a great man, the mother who gave me life a deathless goddess. But even for me, I tell you, death and the strong force of fate are waiting. There will come a dawn or sunset or high noon when a man will take my life in battle too— flinging a spear perhaps or whipping a deadly arrow off his bow.

Achilles exemplifies the Ancient Greek morality of struggle and victory, wherein glory cannot exist apart from winners and losers, killers and their slain. Vitalist thinkers from Nietzsche down to Bronze Age Pervert have found in this portrait of pagan warrior virtue a compelling antidote to the enervating force of modernity, which they blame on Christianity. Indeed, as moderns, we are conditioned within a Christian humanist paradigm of solicitude for victims. Under this paradigm—at least in its current, grotesquely swollen form—we aren’t supposed to see anything glorious in an Achilles exerting himself over weaker men. But we need not spurn empathy or embrace an ethic of “might makes right” for this scene to resonate, and even inspire.

“Man was called by his original God-given vocation to be master of the created world,” writes Edith Stein in her essay “Separate Vocations of Man and Woman.” “Hence his body and soul are equipped to conquer it.” Masculinity requires competition—against oneself and others. Likewise, victory and mastery mean nothing without the risk of defeat. The masculine desire to develop capacities for expansive action in the world is a given of the created order; as such it is good, as is the attendant desire to foster development in others. This latter, Stein notes, is most fulfilling in child-rearing, where “man’s more intense drive and potential for achievements make him responsible for guiding the child to fulfill his particular potentialities, to ‘make good.’”

Stein’s description of men flies in the face of the therapeutic language constraining most “crisis of masculinity” discourse. The therapeutic worldview, according to Philip Rieff, seeks to reconcile individuals to their own desires (and pathologies), rather than to their families, communities, or the created order. Under therapeutic logic, the innate orientation of men toward pursuing excellence and dominion is a cause of psychological distress. For example, the American Psychological Association reframes the natural givens of masculinity as “traditional masculinity ideology,” which promotes “anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence.” The APA counsels us to reject these norms and instead to affirm denatured, diverse “masculinities.”

This approach to masculinity does not resonate with many men, despite its ubiquity in the broader culture. Men do not want to have their feelings of failure and weakness validated if it will not make them less of those things in reality . Men do not want to hear that life is about finding happiness and inner peace by accepting oneself as one is, regardless of the quality of one’s character.

The APA may blame traditional masculinity for male depression, anxiety, and lassitude, but society still depends as much as ever on male achievement and the status hierarchies it produces. That it makes men anxious does not change the fact that women prefer highly-educated , wealthy men —nor should it. 

Young men gravitate to figures like Jordan Peterson precisely because they denounce the language of therapy. What’s more, they recognize the essentially tragic character of masculinity. 

Masculinity is tragic because it presents a double bind: The competitive pursuit of excellence is always attended by the enervating threat of defeat. Femininity may contain double binds of its own, yet only men seem to derive motivation and purpose from the knowledge that failing to “make good” is a terrible fate. Men are imperiled by the weight of expectations to outcompete other men at something society values; but without strong pressure to compete, especially from other men, they are completely adrift.

Mark Driscoll tapped into the tragic, painful elements of masculinity. Driscoll, a one-time meteoric megachurch pastor, is the subject of the podcast “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill,” a retrospective on the 2014 collapse of his church, hosted by Christianity Today ’s Mike Cosper. Many elements stand out, but of particular interest is Driscoll’s way of talking to young men, a group he was extremely effective at evangelizing. As Cosper describes, Driscoll did not speak to young men in an encouraging “you can do it” way, but attacked them “for the way they’ve been lured by the surrounding culture into being passive, lazy, weak.” Former Mars Hill staffer Aaron Gray says of the church’s male-only small groups, “there was this language, like, ‘well it’s time to go to [small group] again, time to go get kicked in the balls again’ . . . like it was this weekly bludgeoning.”

Driscoll’s rhetoric was so appealing because it sharply contrasted with therapeutic language; rather than trying to make men feel safe and affirmed, he made them feel imperiled by their own weakness. Instead of comforting men, he challenged them. He understood that men need a telos worth struggling to realize.

All this having been said, the tragic streak in masculinity, while reflective of a present reality, does not represent final reality. Masculinity in its present form is fallen, its competitive energies tainted by the libido dominandi . These energies must be continually reoriented toward God. Masculinity and femininity are not themselves products of the Fall, but when properly ordered reflect the image of God. We know this from Genesis 1:28: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” There will still be men and women in the new heaven and earth with masculine and feminine natures, but those natures will be sanctified, transcending even their prelapsarian perfection.

Twenty-first-century Nietzscheans who long for a return to a pre-Christian world are right to see something poignant in Achilles’s single-minded pursuit of victory, his acceptance of death, and his contempt for Lycaon’s begging. And yet, the world of warrior virtue inhabited by Homer has not had the last word. Just a few hundred years after Homer in the fifth century b.c. , philosophers like Plato were beginning to reason away from the idea that “might makes right” to the principle that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it. As Susannah Black Roberts has argued , in the centuries leading up to Christ’s birth many Greco-Roman writers seemed to acknowledge the inability of paganism to answer the question of mortality. This is present even in Homer: Achilles, once in Hades, laments that he’d “rather be a paid servant in a poor man’s house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead.” 

Christ, as the archetype of perfected humanity, presents the fullest model of masculinity. And he showed that it is more ennobling to die to self in loving service to God and neighbor than to sack Troy. The heights of human potential are realized not by the most physically powerful or the most cunning, but by the most loving. Achilles could not conquer death because his soul never knew the power of love necessary to overcome mortality. Jesus was more manful than Achilles because Jesus knew that masculinity is only perfected through participating in love’s dominion. The highest excellence, the most expansive, generative action, is kenosis .

James Diddams is managing editor of Providence Magazine.

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Some Conservative Christians Are Stepping Away From the Gender Wars

Far from the shouting, Christian therapists, writers, parents and their trans children are trying to create a space within conservative circles to acknowledge differences in how people experience gender.

By Ruth Graham

Ruth Graham writes about religion and belief. She spent several months speaking with conservative Christians, transgender people and their families in Colorado, New York and Texas.

Andrew and Debbie James are evangelical Christians. Born in England, the couple moved to Denver years ago and raised their children there. Mrs. James had a profound religious conversion experience early in parenthood, and their large nondenominational church quickly became the focal point of their lives. They used to say that if the doors were open, they were there.

“We always joked that we had this perfect little scenario,” Mrs. James said. “We had our boy, then we had our girl, and they were two years apart and they were just perfect.” They were strict parents — too strict, they say in hindsight, with the goal to “shield them from absolutely everything.”

When the couple’s older child was 19, living at home as a college student, Mrs. James got a call from the pharmacy informing her that her child’s prescription for estradiol, or estrogen, was ready. In a panic, she searched the teenager’s room, confronting her that evening.

It went badly. They initially refused to use their daughter’s chosen name, Lilia, and Mrs. James could barely be in the same room with her when she was wearing a skirt. Then a pastor at the church encouraged them to kick their daughter out of their home.

“This must be biblical advice,” she recalled thinking. “This must be what we’re supposed to do.”

‘A space of curiosity’

Many progressive and Mainline Christian congregations have moved to affirm transgender and nonbinary members. But for many conservative Christians, the rise of transgender identities in both visibility and in sheer numbers, particularly among young people, has been a profoundly destabilizing shift. Almost 90 percent of white evangelicals believe gender is determined by sex at birth, according to the Pew Research Center, compared with 60 percent of the population as a whole.

Austen Hartke realized he was transgender in seminary, where he was studying the Hebrew Bible; he came out as soon as he graduated. It was 2014, the same year that Laverne Cox was on the cover of Time magazine, and it felt to Mr. Hartke that the culture around him was steadily improving, that awareness and acceptance would go hand in hand, including in conservative spaces.

That is not what happened. If trans people in conservative churches encountered clumsiness and ignorance around issues like pronouns back then, he said, now they face outright hostility.

“If you’re afraid of change, that’s what trans people now represent,” he said.

Some Christians have fought against expanding gender norms with vociferous opposition to everything from drag shows to hormone treatments. In churches and Christian schools, transgender people have been mocked, kicked out and denied communion . Transgender young people from conservative Christian families have shared stories of being banished from homes and relationships, often with devastating effects on their mental health. In many ways, conservative Christians have become the face of the American anti-trans movement.

But in the quieter spaces of church sanctuaries, counseling offices and living rooms, there are earnest searches for understanding. Churches are hosting panel discussions and film screenings, training their youth leaders, rewriting their statements of faith, and rethinking how they label bathrooms and arrange single-sex Bible studies. Even those that continue to draw a hard line against homosexuality are sorting through new questions raised by gender identity.

In the most intimate cases, Christians are steering through agonizing, unfamiliar conflicts between their families and their God, or as some put it, between love and truth.

It is a search that echoes uncomfortable conversations in secular realms, as Americans of all political and ideological persuasions grapple with changes to deeply ingrained notions of masculinity and femininity.

And in a landscape in which furious rhetoric blazes through statehouses and across social media, some are staking out a kind of middle ground. It is one that takes seriously the moral and theological concerns shared by many Christians, and refuses to set them aside. But it also guides them to accept the reality of gender dysphoria, or distress over one’s sex, and to remain open to a spectrum of outcomes.

Julia Sadusky, a psychologist in Colorado, is one of relatively few expert voices who has stepped into that fraught territory between anti-trans fear and zeal on the right, and what some see as a progressive orthodoxy on the left that leaves little space for parental doubts. Her degrees are from conservative Catholic and evangelical universities, and these days, she spends most of her time speaking with conservative Christians in intimate settings. In her private practice in a suburb of Denver, she sees bewildered and sometimes angry clients whose children have told them they are transgender or nonbinary.

When parents ask if she can steer their child away from a transgender identity, she declines and guides them to consider accompanying their child through a range of paths from there. She has clients who have transitioned socially, and who have pursued medical transition, although she acknowledges having concerns about potentially irreversible medical interventions on teen patients in particular.

She also addresses audiences of churchgoers attempting to process tectonic cultural shifts around them. Many of her listeners have received alarming and sometimes false messages about those shifts from conservative media and word of mouth.

On a rainy Sunday afternoon last summer, Dr. Sadusky was in New York City, onstage in a former Elks Lodge in Queens, leading a roomful of evangelical Christians through a slide show about gender identity.

“I’m inviting you into a space of curiosity as opposed to judgment,” she told the crowd of about 100 people at New Life Fellowship church. Some of them jotted down notes. Others snapped photos of her slides — with lists of terms like “demigender” and “agender,” and charts of rocketing rates of transgender identity among young people.

She encouraged attendees to use other people’s preferred pronouns, explained why she does not like loaded terms like “social contagion” and discouraged pat catchphrases like “God doesn’t make mistakes.”

“None of us are God here,” she said. “But we do need to answer to him.”

‘Is there no truth?’

The theological foundation of Christian opposition to the concept of transgender identities announces itself in the first chapter of Genesis. “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them,” the passage reads. “Male and female he created them.”

Christian advocates for transgender people point out that the Bible depicts a surprising range of gender diversity without apparent judgment. Jacob, a patriarch of the nation of Israel, is described as a “smooth” young man who stays in the family’s tent and is favored by God over his more traditionally masculine brother, the hunter Esau. Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew that some men are born eunuchs.

But in the New Testament, mostly in the writings of the Apostle Paul, several passages lay out distinct roles for men and women. Women are to cover their heads in church and submit to their husbands; men are to lead their families and love their wives. Though they are debated by scholars and ordinary Christians, these texts have profoundly shaped the family structures, career paths and spiritual lives of billions of people around the world.

For some Christians, then, the rise of transgender identities poses a blunt danger, potentially undermining family stability, definitions of truth and authority structures they have built their lives around. As parents, conservative evangelicals tend to prioritize keeping children in the fold rather than encouraging them to push boundaries. Many evangelical parenting resources emphasize obedience and authority, with the goal of raising children not to “find themselves” but to carry on traditions.

“You can see something happening that’s shaping how we understand the nature of the human person,” said Mary Rice Hasson, a senior fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, where she directs a program whose aim is in part to help parents “counter gender ideology.”

Ms. Hasson, who is Catholic, described recent cultural shifts around gender as upending fundamental assumptions about the universe: “Can you trust your senses? When you see something, can you name it, does it have an objective reality? Or is there no truth?”

The gender issue has also thrown new fuel on smoldering debates over sexual orientation, which have divided multiple Christian denominations and institutions for decades. Those disputes had largely cooled in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which made same-sex marriage legal across the country. But the less-settled landscape on gender issues has prompted new confrontations and disagreements, and revived older debates about sexuality.

Some conservative evangelical churches have turned to a document called the Nashville Statement to help them navigate the theology of contemporary gender identity. The statement, crafted by leaders of the conservative Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood in 2017, initially made headlines as a document that articulated a sharp position against homosexuality and same-sex marriage.

But its writers also address gender identity, stating that God enables people to “forsake transgender self-conceptions” and to “accept the God-ordained link” between their biological sex and their gender.

Denny Burk, the president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, who helped write the statement, said that the most urgent matter for Christians in the public sphere now is bringing clarity to foundational questions about what it means to be human — questions that trace back at least to the sexual revolution, and were accelerated, as he sees it, by the Obergefell decision. “What does it mean to be a person, and in particular what does it mean to be male and what does it mean to be female?” he said. “You’re seeing Christians having to articulate what used to be assumed.”

Mark Yarhouse, a clinical psychologist who heads the Sexual and Gender Identity Institute at evangelical Wheaton College, has identified three broad frameworks through which Christians tend to see gender identity: On one end of the spectrum is the traditional conservative view that asserts that male and female are God-ordained categories to which people must conform. On the other is a celebratory embrace of new identities.

In the middle is a view that diversions between gender identity and biological sex are an unfortunate departure from the norm but not a moral failure.

Dr. Yarhouse said at least 80 percent of the speaking and consulting requests he gets now pertain to gender identity rather than sexuality, where his career began. “This is a wave that is going to crest over the evangelical church, and the church is not ready,” he said.

‘We have to allow for questions.’

Finding a foothold for compromise within such a stark landscape can feel impossible, and even the notion of “compromise” is offensive to many. That is why many Christians with nontraditional gender identities end up leaving their conservative churches.

“I never wanted to be away from God; it was just that God’s people scared me to death,” said Lesli Hudson-Reynolds, who is nonbinary and gay. Raised Southern Baptist in Texas, and active in ministry in college, they were essentially pushed out of the church when they came out as a lesbian. (Mx. Hudson-Reynolds uses they/them pronouns.)

Things began to change when their wife died in 2009, and a local evangelical pastor agreed to host and pay for her funeral without question. The church treated Mx. Hudson-Reynolds with respect, as a grieving spouse. “I hadn’t been treated like a human being by Christians in a very long time,” they recalled. That began their path back to the church.

Mx. Hudson-Reynolds’s own views on gender and sexuality have evolved. They have chosen to be celibate going forward, and consider themselves a “Side B” Christian, a term developed by gay Christians who believe the Christian life requires them to abstain from sexual behavior outside traditional, heterosexual marriage but reject the notion that all L.G.B.T.Q. people can or should become straight.

“A lot of Christians call you a heretic, and a lot of gay people call you a traitor,” said Mx. Hudson-Reynolds. They went on to work for Posture Shift, an organization that consults with pastors and parents with the goal of making churches and homes “safe for LGBT+ family and friends.”

Dr. Sadusky often recommends Posture Shift’s resources to her clients, including its guidebook for families, which added new material on gender in its latest edition.

The questions Dr. Sadusky said she hears from parents with transgender children in her private practice are immediate and personal: Does this mean I won’t have grandchildren? (“That’s the No. 1 thing they’re worried about.”) If they don’t immediately affirm the child’s identity, they worry their child will be told the parents are irredeemable bigots, cut off the relationship, or even that the child will take their own life.

Once a month, Dr. Sadusky leads a group discussion by video chat for other therapists to seek peer advice on challenging cases. On a Friday afternoon last spring, a group of six counselors from across the country, most of them Christians who work largely with Christian clients, had gathered. (The counselors allowed a reporter to sit in on the meeting on the condition that they would not be named and that no identifying details of their cases would be shared.)

A marriage and family therapist in the Mountain West presented the first case: a family in which the parents were strongly resisting their older teenage child’s desire to publicly present herself as female, refusing to use her new pronouns because they view it as “lying,” and thus a betrayal of their faith. The counselor felt stuck; the parents’ objection was a barrier to maintaining a relationship with their daughter, but it was so deeply rooted in their values that it was hard to see how they could set it aside.

The idea that using preferred pronouns might be “lying” is common for some Christians, Dr. Sadusky told the therapist. She suggested proposing to the parents that they think of using their daughter’s preferred pronouns not as a statement of belief but as a form of hospitality, a concept from Gregory Coles, the author of “Single, Gay, Christian.” Compare it to being a missionary in a Muslim country, Dr. Sadusky offered: You would probably use the term “Allah” for God in that context, for the sake of staying in conversation.

Over the course of Dr. Sadusky’s decade-long career, she has seen rapid shifts in the way her clients view their own gender identity. She now sees fewer people who report longstanding distress and more who say a version of, “It’s not distressing, it’s who I am and I want to make these modifications,” she said.

Most people, including conservatives, she said, are fairly comfortable with the idea of an adult who was raised male, say, and began to understand herself as female early in childhood with little relief over many years. Those people might have differing opinions about the proper responses to that kind of distress, but they are not as threatened by its existence as a phenomenon experienced by a small minority of individuals.

The larger threat to many conservatives, she said — and one she would like to challenge — is the notion that responding compassionately to such distress means disregarding all beliefs about differences between men and women.

This is not an altogether satisfying approach for many progressive Christians, who view Dr. Sadusky’s balancing act as not going far enough to fully embrace L.G.B.T.Q. people.

“I think of it as being a harm-reduction strategy,” said Mr. Hartke, who came out as trans after seminary and went on to found Transmission Ministry Collective, an organization that supports transgender and “gender-expansive” Christians. If Mr. Hartke is talking with parents who are dead set against their child’s transgender identity, he sees Dr. Sadusky’s work, in particular her books written with Dr. Yarhouse, as a resource that “moves them along from where they were to a place that can be less harmful.”

But Mr. Hartke, who is active in a Lutheran church, said he would prefer that Christians listen most intently to transgender doctors, scholars and psychiatrists, who combine experience and expertise.

The notion that the very categories of “man” and “woman” will someday be erased strikes Mr. Hartke as far-fetched. But he sees an analogy between explorations of gender and of faith.

“If we actually want people to feel solid in their identity,” he said, “we have to allow for questions in the same way that if we want people to feel solid in their faith, we have to allow for questions about their faith.”

‘We were good little soldiers.’

Andrew and Debbie James defied their pastor’s advice to kick their daughter out of their house.

But Lilia moved out anyway, frustrated by her restrictions in the home. Her parents began reading, including books by Dr. Yarhouse and by David Gushee, a Christian ethicist who has argued for rethinking traditional Christian approaches to inclusion. They prayed. And they participated in a support group through Embracing the Journey, a network of small groups intended to “build bridges” among L.G.B.T.Q. people, their families and the church.

The group’s founders, Greg and Lynn McDonald, live near Atlanta and have a son who is gay. Their first reaction when he came out, informed by groups like Focus on the Family, was that his sexuality was a sin, and one that had been caused by a failure in the home — an absent father or an overbearing mother. They changed their approach after reading the gospels together, paying attention to the Bible’s accounts of how Jesus actually treated people.

“I felt I needed to choose: Choose God or choose my son,” Mrs. McDonald recalled. “God told me, ‘No, you get to do both.’”

The McDonalds said almost half of the families that participate in Embracing the Journey now come to them because they have children who are transgender or nonbinary, like the Jameses. Eventually the Jameses started leading groups for other parents; they have now led at least five groups, counseling more than 100 parents.

Lilia James is now 25 and lives in Wisconsin. She has a strong relationship with her parents. She got engaged in June before a trip to Colorado with her girlfriend, and they have contemplated getting married at the same courthouse where her parents married.

“It was a fight between loving their child unconditionally or believing and following what their religion was telling them,” she said on a video call last summer from her parents’ back porch. “For a long time it seemed like those two things were at odds and they would have to pick.”

She added: “I’m so proud of them.”

Like many conservative Christian families with children with gender distress, the Jameses eventually left their church. They sometimes stream services at a church they like in Atlanta, and occasionally try attending local congregations that affirm L.G.B.T.Q. relationships and identities. They remain strongly committed to their faith but do not consider themselves as having a “church home.” Their worries now are about the political climate hostile to their daughter, and the fact that both their children have walked away from Christianity.

For so long, “we were good little soldiers,” Mrs. James said. Now, “we live in the gray.”

Ruth Graham is a national reporter, based in Dallas, covering religion, faith and values for The Times. More about Ruth Graham

Woman Loses It On Husband After His ‘Fragile Masculinity’ Costs Their Family Thousands

T he clothes we wear, the hairstyle we choose, even the car we drive are all parts of how we want to present ourselves to the world. But none of them can be chosen based solely on what we wish for, due to such things as financial constraints or practicality, just to name a couple.

This redditor’s husband didn’t seem to care much for either when making decisions regarding the family car. Refusing to invest in a minivan in fear of being mistaken for a “soccer mom”, he didn’t seem to fear conflicts with his wife equally as much.

Bored Panda has reached out to the redditor and she was kind enough to answer a few of our questions. You will find her thoughts in the text below.

Numerous things have to be considered when choosing a family car

Image credits: Shadman Samee (not the actual image)

This dad refused to buy a minivan as he didn’t want to be compared to a “soccer mom”

Image credits: varyapigu (not the actual image)

Image credits: voronaman111 (not the actual image)

Image credits: Practical-Drama-5549

The woman admitted likely being too harsh with her husband

In a recent interview with Bored Panda , the OP revealed that the thing that annoyed her the most was not feeling safe with the car, and feeling like her husband was downplaying her fears. “I did have a few nightmares about it in the past and when he’d comfort me he’d always say something along the lines of ‘Stuff like that doesn’t happen’ and ‘You’d know what to do in that situation’. This would bother me because he knew the car was horribly unreliable but he glossed over it.”

The redditor said that her husband didn’t like minivans because according to him, they were too “feminine and mommy”; however, she admitted being too harsh with her partner over his views on said cars. “In retrospect, I feel like I was a bit too harsh; I don’t think he’s truly insecure, I was so annoyed at that moment that I spoke without thinking it through.”

It’s not uncommon for people’s insecurities to be related to masculinity or femininity, though, both of which tend to be strongly shaped by certain views in society (even though things seem to be slowly shifting).

Take masculinity, for instance; there seems to be a way a “real man” should look or act (strong, sometimes even aggressive, rarely showing emotion or, perish the thought, crying) but putting men into a rigid frame can lead not only to situations like the one the OP found herself in—fighting with her husband over driving a minivan—but serious mental health-related consequences, too.

In a piece in the Washington Post titled ‘The many faces of masculinity”, an associate professor of psychiatry at UConn Health, Dr. Wizdom Powell was cited saying that the common narrative around men and boys teaches them “that boys don’t cry or that they should be able to walk it off, take it like a man”, which can be seriously detrimental.

“You could imagine how the habitual practice of not telling anyone about your pain or worries could have significant implications,” Dr. Powell told the Washington Post. “There are downstream consequences of not really having a healthy outlet to dispense negative emotions.”

An Australian study on toxic masculinity found that young men who conform to traditional definitions of manhood are more likely to not only suffer harm themselves, but do harm to others, too. According to said study, nearly seven-in-ten (69%) men say that society expects them to act strong or fight back when pushed (60%).

Society can be harsh, too, with expectations set for “masculine men”

A survey on people’s views on masculinity and femininity found that close to 40%—38%, to be exact—of American men consider themselves the “manliest men” there are and only 5-6% say they are at least somewhat or completely feminine . As for women, 40% of them believe that they represent the most feminine version possible, and only 2% consider themselves completely or very masculine.

Though, as suggested above, the traditional views towards femininity and masculinity seem to be changing, as data suggests that it’s the older Americans who are more likely to see themselves as completely masculine or feminine.

The survey also found that despite a slight shift in society, most men find it important that others perceive them as masculine; and that’s not necessarily good. As pointed out by the Institute For Family Studies , higher levels of masculinity are linked with men reporting more aggression, loving a good fight, and even taking advantage of others.

In addition to that, it is also linked with general assertiveness like taking charge, which is what the OP had to deal with when trying to decide what car was best for the family . However, things seem to have taken a turn since then.

“He has apologized and reiterated his commitment to ensuring the kids and I have a safe and reliable way of getting around,” the redditor told Bored Panda. “We were car shopping yesterday and have been comparing the Honda Odyssey and Kia Carnival. As things stand now, we are leaning slightly in the direction of the Kia.”

The woman provided fellow netizens with more details

People shared their views in the comments, they didn’t think the wife was being a jerk.