epublishing store: Intro

Sexual Health eBook Volume1
Chapter 9

Gender Identity. From Dualism to Diversity, Dallas Denny and Cathy Ann Pittman

Almost from inception, the sex of an expected child is a subject of conversation and speculation by friends, coworkers, and family. When the baby is born, the first words spoken by those in attendance will nearly always be, “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” The infant will be assigned a sex, male or female, generally as the result of a hasty visual inspection of the external genitalia (Kessler, 1988, chapter 3).

These assignments of sex will in most cases last throughout life and will have a profound effect on the way the individuals are treated by their family and society (Cooper, 1999; Mercurio, 2003). The children will be given names, and gendered pronouns will be used accordingly. Their assigned sex will determine almost every aspect of their lives, including the clothing they will wear, their playmates, their speech and behavior patterns, and even their hopes and dreams. Rigid expectations will be placed on their interests, their career, and their sexual orientation and behavior (Burke, 1996, p. xv).

For most of us, this assignment of male or female seems natural and easy.
Our bodies match our internal sense of masculinity or femininity, and our families and societies reinforce our own beliefs. We feel confident and secure in our sense of being male or female, and we assume others are similarly comfortable with their own sex of assignment.
For some people, however, sex assignment is problematic. For any of a variety of reasons, their sex of assignment does not match their inner views of themselves. The rigid expectations placed on them by society can and do cause external conflict and inner pain.

In this chapter we talk about the development of the child in the womb, the assignment of sex at birth, and what happens thereafter. In particular, we discuss gender identity—the sense of oneself as male or female, man or woman—and gender role: the expectations society places on individuals on the basis of their sex of assignment. We begin with a discussion of the way in which sex is assigned in American society, and we follow with background information on intersexuality and transsexualism because we use these conditions to inform the ensuing discussion of gender identity and its formation. We include also a discussion of the newly developed term transgender and the community it defines. We draw upon these definitions and discussions in the last sections of our paper.

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