Gender Identity: Some Thoughts on an Old Concept

Gender Identity: Some Thoughts on an Old Concept BEVERLY I. FAGOT, PH.D., AND MARY DRIVER LEINBACH, PH.D. This paper presents some issues in defining and researching gender identity. The status of psychological theories of gender identity is discussed. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 24,6:684-688,1985. Gender identity implies self-designation as a member of one sex or the other, an identification both behaviorally expressed and known by the individual who possesses it. At its most basic level the designation is anatomical. When we say that a person develops or has a gender identity, all too often we do not specify whether we mean the concept of self which is the inner identification as male or female, or the presentation of the self as a sexual being, a possessor of gender, in the public and private worlds the person inhabits. The literature concerning gender identity has two major sources: clinical work, which by its nature tends to focus on atypical outcomes, and the developmental psychological literature, which attempts to delineate the usual course of growth and socialization as male or female. In the clinical area, Money and Ehrhardt (1972) have written extensively on the development of gender, or psychosexual differentiation, in children whose biological or chromosomal sex and sex of rearing may be mismatched, while others (Green, 1974; Rekers, 1979; Stoller, 1968,1975) have tended to focus upon problems of adjustment and their causes in cases of atypical sex-role or sexual behavior and orientation in individuals whose biological sex is not in doubt. In this literature, we see that biological sex, gender identity, sex-typed behavior, and sexual preference are ordinarily congruent, but they may vary independently. That gender identity is used both in reference to the self-concept alone and to include other behaviors and attributes leads to real problems in understanding this research. Money and Ehrhardt (1972) defined gender identity as The sameness, unity, and persistence of one s individuality as male, female, or ambivalent, in greater or lesser degree, especially as it is experienced in self-awareness and behavior; gender identity is the private experience of gender role, and gender role is the public expression of gender identity. Received Feb. 15, 1985; revised June 26, 1985; accepted June 28, 1985. Preparation of this manuscript was supported through a research grant awarded to the first author (1 ROl HD 17571-01). Requests for reprints should be sent to Beverly I. Fagot, Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403. 0002-7~38/85/2406-0684 $02.00/0 0 1985 by the American Academy of Child Psychiatry. 684 Conversely, gender role is everything that a person says and does to indicate to others or to the self the degree that one is either male, or female, or ambivalent; it includes but is not restricted to sexual arousal and response (p. 4). Money has since combined the two definitions and now refers to gender identity/ role to assert that gender identity and its expression are not separable but are merely two aspects of the same thing (Money, 1980). Other researchers have objected to his original definitions, largely on grounds of ambiguity (see Rosen and Rekers (1980)). However, there seems to be a real need for a precise term to describe the conceptualization of self as male or female. Green (1974) has used gender identity in this sense as one of three components of overall sexual identity (the others are sexual preference and adoption of masculine or feminine sex roles), and Stoller (1968) refers to the inner conviction that one is male or female as core gender identity. This usage corresponds fairly well to what is meant by gender identity in the developmental literature, but here, too, there are problems of ambiguity and overinclusiveness. Kohlberg (1966) presented an analysis of the development of sex-role identity that has generated an amazing amount of research into the cognitive aspects of psychosexual development. Kohlberg s major focus was on conceptual development; he defined gender identity as the cognitive self-categorization as boy or girl and held this to be the critical and basic organizer of sex-role attitudes (p. 88). However, Kohlberg s gender identity involves not just children s self-labeling as boys or girls but developmental change in the meaning of the categories as the children come to understand their genital basis and their unchangeability. In his writings, gender identity designates variously the first stage of this process, in which the child learns to label self and others accurately, the entire process itself, and the end result as well, which is constant gender identity or gender constancy. Kohlberg s description of the process of achieving gender constancy has been codified along with confirmation of its sequential nature by subsequent research gender identity is achieved when the child can label self and others; gender stability comes when the

GENDER IDENTITY 685 child knows that boys become men and girls become women; and gender constancy requires that the child understand that being male or female is a biological characteristic and cannot be changed by changing superficial attributes such as clothing and hairstyle. However, it is not always clear whether individual references to gender identity concern the first accurate categorizations or the completed process, nor whether other sex-typed knowledge is included. Eaton and Von Bargen (1981) attempted to clarify the terminology of Kohlberg s theory and the work stemming from it by designating the whole process as the development of gender understanding. They also saw the first step as the ability to identify self and others, and called this labeling. Their remaining stages are stability, the continuity of identity over time; motive, knowing that identity cannot be changed by wishing it so; and constancy, the recognition of permanence despite superficial changes in appearance. Their work indicates that children acquire these concepts first in application to self, then to others of the same sex, and last to others of the opposite sex. Although Eaton and Von Bargen focus attention on the acquisition of labels for members of each sex and the ability to use them accurately, it is not clear whether labeling constitutes gender identity as the basic categorization as male or female or whether it includes the knowledge and adoption of appropriately sex-typed attributes. Huston (1983) attempted to bring order to the discussion of sex typing by devising a matrix of areas and constructs used in the vast body of literature on the subject. The rows of the matrix are sex-typed content area categories: biological gender, activities and interests, personal-social attributes, gender-based social relationships, and stylistic and symbolic content. An individual s relationships to the content categories are described by the sex-typing constructs which make up the columns: concepts or beliefs, identity or self-perception, preferences and attitudes, and behavioral enactment. In this scheme, gender identity is a psychological construct found in the cell where biological gender (content area) and identity or self-perception (construct) intersect. Gender constancy would occupy a different cell, the intersection of biological gender and concepts or beliefs. Engaging in sex-typed activities would be found where activities and interests meet behavioral enactment; preference for male or female lovers and sexual activity with others would occupy separate cells, where gender-based social relationships intersect preference and attitudes and behavioral enactment, respectively. Huston s scheme underscores the multidimensionality of sex-typing, and allows us to isolate some of the dimensions conceptually whether or not they are separable in any individual case. It may be that the question of what is to be included in a reasonable definition of gender identity must be addressed both in principle and at the level of the individual. At the more general level, it seems necessary to have a way of referring to psychological selfcategorization as male or female (Green s gender identity or Stoller s core gender identity) without specifying what other beliefs or behaviors are entailed, or even that the inner concept of self be congruent with biological sex. For any given person, however, the inner conviction of gender identity may manifest itself in any number of ways which are inextricably part of the self-concept, that is, which are part of the individual s perception and experience of self. Thus we would prefer to define gender identity as a private cognitive construct, the psychological identification or concept of the self as male or female, regardless of whatever else being male or female may mean to its owner. Freud s views of psychosexual development, and the psychoanalytic tradition, make up the background against which the two major psychological theories of sex role acquisition have been formulated. These views still constitute a powerful influence on the treatment of atypical outcomes. We will not attempt to review Freud s formulations here for several reasons in addition to lack of time and space. For one thing, his description of the Oedipal conflict and the child s resultant identification with the same-sex parent are not only too well known to need repeating but have received scant empirical verification. For another, his writing antedates the conceptual distinction between sex and gender and concern with the development of a basic or core gender identity. Finally, there does not appear to be a current definitive psychoanalytic position concerning gender identity, although several positions have been advanced (Lewis, 1979; Person and Ovesey, 1983; Stoller, 1975) (see also current feminist revisions of Freudian theory, e.g., Chodorow (1978)). However, Freud s placement of psychosexual identification, with its implications of self-categorization as critical to the development of a healthy personality has remained central to psychological theorizing for nearly a century. How does this basic self-categorization come about? Most investigators agree that it is acquired in interaction with the environment, and cite the work of Money and his colleagues showing that, in intersex children, gender identity follows sex of assignment so long as the child is reared unambiguously as a boy or a girl (Money and Ehrhardt, 1972). This literature indicates that the child has begun to identify itself as a boy or girl by about 18 months of age, and that once

686 B. I. FAGOT AND M. D. LEINBACH established, sometime between 24 and 30 months, this identity is highly resistant to change. It is this early and basic self-categorization that we mean by gender identity. Unfortunately, we are a long way from understanding just which aspects of parenting and what kinds of input from the environment are necessary and sufficient for the establishment of a gender identity that is in accord with biological sex, nor can we be absolutely certain that no physiological or hormonal processes are involved. Within developmental psychology, behaviorally oriented social learning theorists and cognitive-developmentalists have modified the Freudian views on the process of identification, but have not rejected the importance Freud placed on the concept. As outlined by Mischel (1966), the social learning position holds that ordinary principles of learning can account for sex role socialization. In this view, the child acquires sex-typed behavior patterns through the experience of reward, nonreward, and punishment, which may come from external sources or be self-administered, and by observational learning, which does not require that the observer be reinforced directly. Observational learning leads to imitation, which Mischel equated with identification in Freudian theory. Social learning theory is often charged with viewing the child as a passive organism, but Mischel specifically disavowed such a view, claiming that the person s previous learning history determines the effects of internal and external stimuli which control social behavior. Mischel did not address the notion of gender identity, but he noted that children acquire concepts and a semantic repertoire via sensory and cognitive processes which may be facilitated by but do not depend on reinforcement. Children simply learn the physical and social similarities and differences between the sexes, and rapidly identify their own sex (p. 60). Presumably, children come to value and imitate members of their own sex as they learn to discriminate sex-typed behavior patterns and recognize the sex to which they belong. Kohlberg s (1966) cognitive-developmental theory is concerned with sex typing as a cognitive process; the theory disregards behavior in much the same way Mischel (1966) disregarded cognition (its existence is acknowledged, but not given much attention). Adhering to Piaget s description of cognitive development, Kohlberg proposed that sex typing is first and foremost the child s own mental construction and is bound by limitations in the ability to think about the physical world. Preoperational children (approximately ages 2 to 6) simply do not have the cognitive structures which would enable a concept of gender as an unchangeable attribute, as they do not yet conceptualize the constant or invariable identity of physical objects. Children hear and learn the words boy and girl, usually by the age of 3. These words are at first arbitrary designations, like one s own name, and their use, even for accurate self-labeling, does not imply much understanding of their meaning. In particular, the child at this age may be aware of genital differences but not be aware that they are crucial to classification; the child relies largely upon differences in physical size, clothing, and hairstyle to categorize others. The process of self-categorization does not culminate in a secure and stable gender identity (gender constancy) until it rests on the ability to classify the body, the knowledge that boys and girls grow up to be men and women, respectively, and that sex is an attribute that does not change. This does not occur until the child is at least 5 or 6 years of age. This should not be taken to mean that Kohlberg saw the younger child as vascillating with regard to its own sex, but that the child does not truly understand why it is a boy or a girl and believes that its status as one or the other could be changed. Kohlberg saw the formation of a stable gender identity as the prime organizer of sex typing and the adoption of appropriate attributes as motivated by the desire for consistency between one s self-concept and actions, and the tendency to value that which is like the self. More recently, there have been several attempts to fit sex tying into information-processing models. Bem (1981,1983), Martin and Halverson (1981), and Constantinople (1979) have all described sex role development as the construction of gender schemas, assuming that children s sex-typed attitudes and behavior result from the basic cognitive proclivity for organizing information into related chunks. For Bem (1983), this involves a generalized readiness on the part of the child to encode and to organize informationincluding information about the self-according to the culture s definitions of maleness and femaleness (p. 7). Martin and Halverson view gender as a stable and easily discriminated natural dichotomy children use in defining themselves and others. They propose that children develop an overall in-group-out-group schema containing the information needed to sort things out as being for males or for females, and an own-sex schema, more detailed and specific, which applies to members of their own sex. Constantinople proposed the learning of categories or rules in general as the most useful model for sex role acquisition, and included the contribution of affect and environmental contingencies as well as cognition to the construction of gender categories. Like Kohlberg (1966), Constantinople and Martin and Halverson suggested labeling the sexes as the starting point of the category-building

process, but self-categorization is assumed more than explained. Bem (1978) did not stress the acquisition of labels with regard to the development of gender understanding, but she has clearly articulated her belief in the importance of gender identity as having a healthy sense of being male or female. The status of gender identity (core gender identity or self-categorization) varies in each of these theoretical orientations with regard to how explicitly the notion is stated, but belief that the child does categorize itself by sex must underlie the assumption of conscious adoption or expression of any attribute on the basis of its desirability or appropriateness for one sex or the other, at least implicitly. But an explanation of how self-categorization comes about is conspicuous by its absence. We believe a major reason for this lack is that most research concerning gender identity has neglected children who are actually in the process of forming their own. Until recently, most of the work on sex role acquisition has looked at children who were 3 years of age or older, perhaps because of Freud s emphasis on this age period as chcial in psychosexual identification. In our view, studying the development of gender should begin with the infant s earliest perceptual experience, virtually from birth. Certainly one must investigate the period from about 12 to 30 months during which children come to label themselves as boys or girls and begin to adopt behaviors which are sex-typed. Fagot (1985) has found that by 25 months boys and girls react differently to the responses their actions elicit from other people. Teachers responses influenced the subsequent behavior of girls, regardless of the kind of behavior involved, as did the responses of other girls. Teacher reactions had little influence on boys, but when boys were engaged in male-appropriate behavior, they reacted to the responses of other boys. Thus at this young age there are already indications that children have some form of gender identity they can use to guide their behavioral choices. To try to understand how children s early gender identity interacts with their adoption of sex-typed behavior, we developed a task which enabled us to test the ability of very young children to discriminate between pictures of male and female children and adults (Fagot et al., in press). We found, as expected, that children learned the adult discrimination first, but there was no indication that this knowledge was related to sex-typed behavior. It is our hypothesis that distinguishing between men and women is an early part of the development of gender categories, but that this knowledge is not yet assimilated to the self-concept. We hypothesized, however, that when children can identify boys and girls and assign themselves to the correct category, they must GENDER IDENTITY 687 have at least a rudimentary gender identity, and we found that children who could correctly identify boys and girls showed more sex-typed behavior than children who were still struggling with such discriminations. We fully concur with those who see the ability to recognize and label members of each sex as a major milestone. However, we do not agree with those who talk about the child s construction of gender categories as a purely cognitive process relatively unaffected by the environment-the relationship of gender categories and sex typing will reflect the world as the child sees it and will be moderated by the specific behavioral contingencies each child experiences. We suggest that gender labels become attached to very broad categories that are under construction virtually from birth. These developing gender categories include the adoption of gender-specific voice and motor patterns. These kinds of knowledge may be rooted in the earliest forms of imitation, but we simply do not know how they become embedded in the child s behavioral repertoire. In addition, the infant s experience with its parents and other people of both sexes must, inevitably, have an effective component of which we know very little. We see the advent of accurate gender labeling as a turning point, not the start of the course. We believe that the ability to label self and others correctly, no matter how incompletely the labels are understood, marks the point at which the child can demonstrate conscious awareness of male and female as separate categories. At this point, children can use knowledge of the categories to guide behavioral choices, deliberately adopting appropriate behaviors and interpreting experience in light of what they know. We would like to see those who study all aspects of sex role development broaden the scope of their investigations. The process of acquiring an appropriate gender identity is clearly more than the sum of reinforcements and more than a cognitive achievement. Although there is very little information on how affect influences sex role development, anyone who has watched children attempt to maintain same-sex peer goups can attest to the intensity of their emotional commitment to doing what boys and girls are supposed to do. We will not have an adequate grasp of normal gender identity, nor of atypical outcomes, until we can explain how affect interacts with both information from the environment and the children s own quest for understanding. References BEM, S. L. (1978), Beyond androgyny: some prescriptions for a liberated sexual identity. In: Psychology of Women: Future Directions for Research, ed. J. Sherman & F. L. Denmark. New York Psychological Dimensions.

688 B. I. FAGOT AND M. D. LEINBACH - (1981), Gender schema theory: a cognitive account of sextyping. Psychol. Rev., 88354-364. - (1983), Gender schema theory and its implications for child development: raising gender-aschematic children in a gender- schematic society. Signs, 8598-616. CHODOROW, N. (1978), The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. CONSTANTINOPLE, A. (1979), Sex-role acquisition: in search of the elephant. Sex Roles, 2:121-133. EATON, W. 0. & VON BARGEN, D. (1981), Asynchronous development of gender understanding in children. Child Develpm., 52~1020-1027. FAGOT, B. I. (1985), Beyond the reinforcement principle: another step toward understanding sex role development. Develpm. Psychol., 210. FAGOT, B. I., LEINBACH, M. D. & HAGAN, R. (in press), Gender labeling and the adoption of sex-typed behaviors (manuscript submitted for publication). GREEN, R. (1974), Sexual Identity Conflict in Children and Adults. New York Basic Books. HUSTON, A. C. (1983), Sex-typing. In: Handbook of Child Psychology (Ed. 4, Vol. 4), ed. P. H. Mussen. New York Wiley. KOHLBERG, L. A. (1966), A cognitive-developmental analysis of children s sex-role concepts and attitudes. In: The Development of Sex Differences, ed. E. E. Maccoby. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. LEWIS, H. B. (1979), Gender identity. Bull. Menninger Clin., 43:145-160. MARTIN, C. L. & HALVERSON, C. F. (1981), A schematic processing model of sex typing and stereotyping in children. Child Develpm., 52:1119-1134. MISCHEL, W. (1966), A social-learning view of sex differences in behavior. In: The Development of Sex Differences, ed. E. E. Maccoby. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. MONEY, J. (1980), Love and Lovesickness. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. -& Ehrhardt, A. A. (1972), Man and Woman, Boy and Girl. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. PERSON, E. S. & OVESEY, L. (1983), Psychoanalytic theories of gender identity. J. Amer. Acad. Psychoanal., 11:203-226. REKERS, G. A. (1979), Psychosexual and gender problems. In: Behavioral Assessment of Childhood Disorders, ed. E. Mash & L. Terdal. New York Guilford Press. ROSEN, A. C. & REKERS, G. A. (19801, Toward a taxonomic framework for variables of sex and gender. Genet. Psvchol. Momn.. 1 - I 102191-218. STOLLER. J. (1968). Sex and Gender: Vol. 1. The DevebDment - of Mascuhnity and Feminity. New York: Jason Aronson. -(1975), Sex and Gender; Vol. 2. The Transsexwl Experiment. New York Jason Aronson.