A lot of people believe that they fully understand what gender identity is, but that’s a hard task to do because it’s much more fluid than solid. When I looked up “gender identity” to try to find a definition, most of the results failed at capturing what I read in my Women’s Studies books. So, I’m going to take a definition straight from them.
Judith Lorber, a professor of Women’s Studies and Sociology at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, believes that gender is “something that we ‘do’ and it is constantly created and recreated.” What she means is that gender is an activity that one expresses every day through certain things like what they wear, how they act, etc. Gender Identity is what gender we call ourselves and feel that we embody. According to The Living Rede, there are 63 genders that one can identify with.
The major aspect that often confuses people is sex; the difference between sex and gender is that one is born with a sex and one develops a gender. There’s debate, however, that sex can be fluid as well and not limited to simply male or female because of hermaphroditism and transpersons.
Gender construction is formed because it’s a way of “categorizing and stratifying social status” according Lorber. She believes that society constantly feels the need to categorize certain things like gender because everyone needs to be specifically labeled. If people identify anything other than cisgender, which means identifying with the same gender as your biological sex, they are seen as lesser than. If people identify as a cisgender woman, they are automatically put into this certain box by society that contains rules and regulations for how they are expected to act, look, etc. The same things goes for cisgender men.
Even though we can see instances in society where these genders are being forced onto people, we are making strides in the right direction to being more accepting of all people. For example, transpersons are having more and more visibility in the media today in shows like Orange Is The New Black with Laverne Cox and I Am Cait with Caitlyn Jenner. Those are just two of the more prominent examples. The trans community has made some complaints with the trans visibility in media today because it only depicts a certain kind of transperson, so there remains progress to be made obviously.
An important distinction to mention is the difference between gender identity and sexual orientation. As I said earlier, gender identity is who you identify as, which affects how you act, think, and simply live your life. Sexual orientation, however, is who you are attracted to sexually. Janet Mock, writer and transgender activist, describes it in the clearest way:
Simply put, our sexual orientation has to do with whom we get into bed with while our gender identity has to do with whom we get into bed as.
Something that may seem complicated can always be put into simpler terms. So, I encourage you, once again, to be more conscious of what you do, say, think because you may never know who you’re sitting next to.
Alli Mentch says
I didn’t realize that gender identity was an issue until my senior year of high school when one of my friends went from identifying as a female to not identifying with either gender. The whole concept of gender identity is pretty difficult for the older generation to wrap their heads around, but I think it’s important for them to recognize the issue. It’s crucial that we use the correct pronouns when addressing someone in order to respect them as a person.
Arianna Hilk says
I just learned and took a test in my Positive Psychology all about sex and gender, etc! It’s so weird that your blog post is about a topic that I just spent 2 weeks learning about. Anyway, I think in the present day, anything is possible. 63 different genders is crazy, that is something I didn’t learn in my class. I agree, other peoples’ sex and gender and how they identify is something only they can decide on, not someone else. Who are we to judge.
kkc5243 says
This was such a great post. It really helped to clear up some questions I had about the topic, and I think you did a great job explaining things. I think it’s so important for everyone to make an effort to understand the fluidity of gender, and to realize that people identify as so many different things, and that its legitimate. It makes me sad that so many people just chalk this up to being confusing, and don’t even make an effort to learn about genders that are not cisgender.
Julia Catena says
Wow I didn’t know there were 63 possible genders a person could identify with! I do agree that society just puts everyone in two groups, male and female, and often doesn’t consider other possibilities because the public is not very well educated on the psychology behind genders. I would say this is a fairly recent controversy, but I believe as time goes on, hopefully we will be better informed about this issue and have more of an open mind.