See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/324162008

Gender Identity

Chapter · December 2017

DOI: 10.1002/9781118430873.est0458

CITATIONS READS

0 10

1 author:

J. Edgar Bauer
70 PUBLICATIONS   31 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

In: (Dis)Entangling Darwin: Cross-Disciplinary Reflections on the Man and his Legacy. Edited by Sara Graça da Silva, Fatima Vieira and
Jorge Bastos da Silva. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012, pp. 85-102. View project

All content following this page was uploaded by J. Edgar Bauer on 02 April 2018.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Gender Identity
J. EDGAR BAUER
Author, Heidelberg, Germany
Gender identity designates the individual’s
self-perception and private sense of being
male, female, or neither. It is a constitutive
element of an individual’s culturally formed
gender as opposed to his or her biological sex,
and generally takes for granted the binary
articulation of sexuality. Given the growing
awareness of the difficulties in distinguishing
between nature and culture within sexuality,
and in defining the differences between mas-
culinity and femininity, gender identity is
increasingly becoming a theoretically unsta-
ble category. Its definitional uncertainties are
aggravated when gender identity – despite
its relatively recent coinage – takes over the
semantic field previously reserved for sexual
identity or when both concepts are utilized as
interchangeable synonyms.
While sexual identity has been pervasively
conceptualized in accordance with the alleged
naturalness of the man/woman disjunction,
the terminological options for specifying
gender identity generally exceed those of the
binary scheme on account of their cultural
dependency. Thus, non-dichotomous alter-
natives – such as queer, gay, or asexual – have
emerged in Western societies for designat-
ing neglected forms of gender liminality.
Concurrently, a new attentiveness to gen-
der complexities has sensitized people to
the occurrence of non-Western minority
groups, whose individual members are
strongly linked by an a-normative sense of
gender identity. The shared minority status
of groups such as the Samoan fa’afafine,
the Indian hijras, or the Omani khanith (or
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory. Edited by Bryan S. Turner.
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118430873.est0458
xanith), however, does not contradict the
ethnographically ascertainable fact that their
respective constructions of gender identity
are as much at variance with each other as
they are with Western identity constructions
of a “third gender.”
Besides its utilization as a descriptive
tool in sociology and cultural anthropology,
the concept of gender identity has been
implemented in contexts of clinical semi-
ology and its critique. Thus, opposing the
classification of gender identity disorder
(GID) as a pathological condition, critics
have warned against its implicit tendency to
medicalize social variance or dissidence from
regnant heteronormativity. Independently of
its nosological deployment, the term gender
identity has emerged as a key concept in
legal and judicial statements designed to
uphold the rights of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay,
bisexual, trans, and queer) people worldwide.
Most significantly, “The Yogyakarta Prin-
ciples on the Application of International
Human Rights Law in Relation to Sexual
Orientation and Gender Identity” (2006;
www.yogyakartaprinciples.org/) established
anti-discriminatory standards concerning
the way states are bound by international
law to promote and maintain the rights of
sexual and gender minorities. The document
exercised considerable influence on subse-
quent global declarations on LGBTQ rights,
including the resolutions on “Human Rights,
Sexual Orientation, and Gender Identity”
issued by the Organization of American
States (2008) and the United Nations Human
Rights Council (2014).
The terminological use of gender iden-
tity was facilitated by Robert J. Stoller’s
understanding of the sex/gender distinc-
tion in approximate correspondence to the
2 G E N DE R I DE N T I T Y
nature/nurture differentiation. While most
European languages eagerly adopted gender
as an American neologism, Stoller’s inten-
tion that the term be a rendering of the
Freudian phrase seelischer Geschlechtscharak-
ter [mental sexual character] (Stoller 1968:
viii) was overlooked. Indicatively, similar
expressions abound throughout the writ-
ings by German-Jewish sexologist Magnus
Hirschfeld (1868–1935), who theorized
gender and gender identity issues under
systemic assumptions quite different from
those of Stoller. As a philosophical monist,
Hirschfeld avoided binaries, not least in his
approach to the individual’s self-perception
and self-understanding. He resorted, instead,
to a biopsychological scheme of continu-
ously complexified descriptive layers, each
one of which features, without exception,
a non-repeatable combination of mascu-
line and feminine traits. Thus, according to
Hirschfeld, what would now be categorized
as the individual’s gender identity is not
determined by excluding one of the terms
of the man/woman binary, but in relation
to an open-ended system of as yet only par-
tially realized male/female conjunctions. By
deconstructing binary sexuality and recon-
ceptualizing the identity parameters of sex
and gender, Hirschfeld effectively anticipated
core insights put forward decades later by
postmodern critics of gender.
Prior to the establishment of gender studies
as an academic discipline in the early 1990s,
a spirited debate was taking place concerning
the roles of nature and nurture in deter-
mining gender identity. A focal point of the
discussion was the medical, psychiatric, and
legal case of David Reimer (1965–2004), who
was born with XY chromosomes but whose
penis had been severely damaged at the age of
8 months in the course of a failed operation
to rectify phimosis. To alleviate the burdens
of the accident, psychologist and sexologist
John Money (1921–2006) and the staff at his
Gender Identity Clinic decided that David
would be raised as a girl, and eventually
castrated. However, since David – by then
renamed Brenda – resisted the prescribed
treatment, the medical staff in charge decided
to allow him to “return” to live according
to the gender the therapy was supposed to
suppress. Eventually, Money’s approach was
seriously questioned, especially with regard
to his assumptions that what is masculine
and what is feminine remains essentially
malleable in early childhood, and that social-
ization plays the decisive role in the formation
of gender identity. Since, despite the over-
whelming evidence to the contrary, the clin-
ical records insisted on Brenda’s successful
gender adaptation, the case of David Reimer
became a crucial factor not only in disproving
Money’s constructionist gender theory, but
in compromising his professional credibility.
In her book Undoing Gender, feminist
and gender theorist Judith Butler contends
that the perplexities of David Reimer’s
self-perception and self-understanding
effectively disrupt the binary scheme of
gender, which, as she underlines, consti-
tutes an imitative reiteration of the sexual
disjunction (Butler 2004: 57–101). Argu-
ing likewise in Gender Trouble with regard
to the nineteenth-century hermaphrodite
Herculine Barbin (Butler 1999: 180), Butler
claims in general that “[t]here is no gender
identity behind the expressions of gender;
that identity is performatively constituted
by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to
be its results” (Butler 1999: 33). As But-
ler further maintains, gender identity is a
“regulatory fiction” (Butler 1999: 180) that
eludes true/false, real/distorted predications
by constructing “the illusion of a primary
and interior gendered self,” and, at times,
even by parodying “the mechanism of that
construction” (Butler 1999: 176). Gender
being the imitation of a non-existing original,
Butler easily dispenses with the notion of

a pre-discursive “sex,” which reveals itself
as being not only a mere construction, but
one that is essentially undistinguishable from
the “gender” it allegedly grounds. By “ex-
posing [the] fundamental unnaturalness” of
sex (Butler 1999: 190) and dismantling the
replicative rationale of actually “groundless”
gender identities, Butler contributed to over-
coming the “troubles” that hinder the creative
proliferation of non-mimetic genders.
Testimonial and autobiographical con-
tributions by transgender authors have
anticipated or corroborated key aspects of
Butler’s critical analysis of gender identity.
In her 1983 seminal essay “Genderbending:
Playing with Roles and Reversals,” Pat Cal-
ifia – now a bisexual trans man known as
Patrick Califia – unsettled received assump-
tions about gender identity by denying the
need for transsexuals to become “real women”
or “real men,” instead of just being transsex-
uals. As Califia provocatively asks: “After all,
aren’t there some advantages to being a man
with a vagina or a woman with a penis … ?”
(Califia 1994: 178). Further undermining
the alleged self-evidence of binary gen-
der identities, female-to-male transgender
author Leslie Feinberg (1949–2014) suc-
cinctly resumed the intricacies of his gender,
contending: “It’s not my sex that defines me,
and it’s not my gender expression. It’s the fact
that my gender expression appears to be at
odds with my sex” (Feinberg 1996: 101).
Following a similar line of critical thought,
playwright and queer theorist Kate Bornstein
rejected in Gender Outlaw the two core bina-
ries that organize gender in Western culture:
“I identify as neither male nor female, and
now that my lover is going through his gen-
der change, it turns out I’m neither straight
nor gay” (Bornstein 1995: 4). As a conse-
quence, Bornstein seeks to subvert the idea
View publication stats
GENDER I DENT I T Y 3
of “being an identity” (Bornstein 1995: 243),
indicating that only those who are not an
identity are capable of dealing playfully with
the identities of their choice. Mindful that “we
rarely think about the concept of belonging
to something as being owned by something”
(Bornstein 1995: 125), Bornstein ultimately
pleads for a Zen Buddhism-inspired idea of
“no-gender.” As Bornstein’s autobiography
reports, “I was born a male and now I’ve got
medical and government documents that say
I’m female – but I don’t call myself a woman,
and I know I’m not a man” (Bornstein
2012: x).
SEE ALSO: Gender; Gender and the State;
Gender Diversity; Hirschfeld, Magnus; Sex;
Sexuality and the Law; Sexual Identity;
Transgender and Transsexual
REFERENCES
Bornstein, Kate. 1995. Gender Outlaw: On Men,
Women, and the Rest of Us. New York: Vintage
Books.
Bornstein, Kate. 2012. A Queer and Pleasant Dan-
ger. A Memoir. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and
the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
First published 1990.
Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York:
Routledge.
Califia, Pat. 1994. Public Sex: The Culture of Radical
Sex. Pittsburgh, PA: Cleis Press.
Feinberg, Leslie. 1996. Transgender Warriors: Mak-
ing History from Joan of Arc to Rupaul. Boston,
MA: Beacon Press.
Stoller, Robert. 1968. Sex and Gender: On the
Development of Masculinity and Femininity.
New York: Science House.
FURTHER READING
Herdt, Gilbert, ed. 1994. Third Sex, Third Gender:
Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and His-
tory. New York: Zone Books.