10: Gender and Sexual Identity

Our gender is one of the most important components of our identity, yet most people understand little of the mechanisms responsible for the creation and maintenance of the categories we use to identify ourselves by gender. The gender categories we use are heavily laden with expectations and conditions that deeply affect the lives of us all. Where you live affects how others see you, how they label you, and how you understand yourself. Where you can go and what you can do is also the product of place-based gender roles. Geography matters from the day you are born.

Are you a boy or a girl? It seems a simple enough question, and for most people it is. For millions of people though, this question is not simple at all. There are dozens of chromosomal combinations, body types, and psychological orientations that fall outside of the traditional male-female binary widely used by governments, many religions, businesses, and most Americans. Still, thousands of intersex babies are born every day whose bodies make it difficult for doctors to put them easily into one of the two traditional categories: male or female. In the United States, doctors and parents generally assign a gender to such babies, often when the person is an infant. Traditionally, Americans have insisted that everyone “must be either a boy or a girl”, because only two gender categories are widely available in American culture. A person cannot be both. “Neither” was also unacceptable as a gender identity. Western cultures rarely recognize even a third gender, though there may be many physiological or psychological conditions that invite non-binary gender identities.

Keep in mind that gender categories, like race and ethnicity, are social constructions, and like most social constructions, they vary across time and through space. In other parts of the world, people who do not fit neatly into the gender binary used in the United States may have several additional gender categories available for them to select. People in these other categories are hard to describe using the English language because English has no terminology sufficient to the task. Native Hawaiians celebrated and respected the Māhū, third gender persons prior to colonization by Americans. Kathoey (Thai), Travesti (Brazilian Portuguese), Femminello (Italian), and Hijra (Hindi/Urdu/Bengali) are terms other languages use to express a range of gender identities that fall either between or outside, the man-woman binary known to English speakers. Alternative genders may be celebrated or condemned in other cultures. In Las Salinas, Dominican Republic, there’s a town where intersex children are common. They are called “Guevedoces” because their gender identity is often not evident until they are about 12 years old. In the US, those who do not fall into traditional categories are often subject to mistreatment and perhaps suffer from physical and/or emotional abuse. However, the plight of transgender people in the United States does appear to be improving, especially in certain parts of the country.

In recent years, there has been a growing recognition here in the United States that gender is more complex than our traditional binary conceptualization. Our growing consciousness of gender complexity has led to the adoption of the word transgender to help us to begin to conceive of a third gender category. In this context, it is interesting to note that elected officials, courts, and voters continue to argue, often in heated terms, about the legitimacy or desirability of permitting only marriages between a man and woman without pausing to even consider what the words “man” and “woman” really mean. The disconnect between the lived reality of millions of transgendered people and our vocabulary points to the profound influence our language has upon our ability to solve problems. Sometimes, the problems created by our culture’s resistance to recognizing more than two gender identities aren’t as profound or theoretical. Often, these questions are as mundane as, “which restroom should I use?”

Sports and Gender

Organizers of sporting events have struggled to address the disconnect between cultural concepts surrounding gender and the biological realities of gender. This happens in many sports at many levels, but perhaps nowhere are the challenges more evident than in Olympic sports, where female athletes have for many years subject to gender verification to ensure they were true “women”. In the past, the “test” for inclusion in a women’s events was a simple, but probably humiliating, visual inspection of the athlete’s genitalia. Sometimes, this visual inspection was inconclusive. So, a variety of blood tests have evolved to determine whether an athlete falls within some boundary of hormonal “normalcy” for women. It hasn’t been easy. The International Olympic Committee, FIFA and other sports governing bodies have struggled to find a way to allow everyone to compete against people who share similar hormonal and chromosomal profiles. During the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio, 800-meter gold medalist Caster Seymena was at the center of a controversy regarding her inclusion in the women’s division of the sport because hormonal tests had shown her to have exceptionally high, but natural, levels of testosterone. It is worth asking why if the International Olympic Committee with all their resources can’t conclusively determine who is a man and who is a woman based on biology alone, how can we expect ordinary people to make those determinations? It’s is also well worth noting that the psychological factors associated with gender are no less complex than the biology of gender and that the gender identities each of us have is a result of complex and ever-changing interactions between our biological and psychological states.

Same-Sex Marriage

Governments often grapple with questions about gender equity, but in the last decade, no issue put gender identity more in the spotlight than the debate over same-sex marriage. The topic is covered briefly in the chapter on Political Geography, but there, the focus is on questions about whether the government has a compelling interest in deciding who may marry whom, and the role of religion has in the shaping of laws regulating marriage. Another line of inquiry into the question of same-sex marriages is to call into question the government’s ability to identify or define “sex” in a legally consistent pattern. If the law of a state only recognizes “man” and “woman” as gender identities, what is to be done with people who have indistinct, or non-binary gender identities (biological and/or psychological)? What scientifically valid criteria can governments use to determine a person’s legal gender identity? Most laws fail to consider any of the complexities of gender identification, and therefore identity questions are not a common fixture of legal (or public) debates on marriage rights. As of 2020, only Connecticut and California have enacted gender-neutral marriage rights, either through legislation or court decisions.

• 10.1: Gender and Identity in San Francisco, California

• 10.2: Evolution of Gender Roles

• 10.3: Demographic Transition Model

• 10.4: Sex Ratio

• 10.5: Gendered Landscapes