2.1 Chapter Introduction
Chapter Overview: What Determines Gender?
What is gender? How do you identify a person’s gender? Is gender indicated by the presence or absence of certain reproductive organs or physical sex characteristics people are born with? Is it the clothes they wear, or the presence or absence of hair on parts of their body (figure 2.1)? It is common practice to identify babies at birth as either “boys” or “girls” based on their visible sex characteristics. While most people identify as the same gender they are assigned at birth, 1.6 million people in the U.S. identify as a gender that is different from the gender they were assigned when they were born (Herman et al. 2022).
Here are a few more questions: What does it mean to be a boy, or a girl, or trans, or nonbinary? How do you know? How did you learn this? Or do you feel like your gender isn’t something that you need to “get right?” Is gender something you do, or is it something you are? These are some of the complicated questions that the sociology of gender explores.
This chapter uses sociological imagination, research-based evidence, and social theories to explore gender as a social identity that is socially constructed, imposed, enforced, reproduced, negotiated, and challenged. This chapter will also demonstrate that the dominant gender binary is real but not true. The chapter begins with the basics of sexual differentiation and explores how the meaning of sexual differentiation is socially constructed as gender. This chapter will also explore how individuals form their gender identity. The chapter will close with a look at how the intersectional feminist social movement for gender equity and social justice has revolutionized gender theory.
Key Terms
This section contains a list of foundational key terms from the chapter. After reviewing them here, be on the lookout for them as you work through the rest of the book.
- agents of socialization: social institutions that create and maintain normative expectations for behavior.
- deadnaming: the harmful practice of continuing to call trans people by the name associated with the gender they were assigned at birth rather than the name they ask you to call them. It is closely related to misgendering.
- differences in sexual development (DSD): describes genetic, hormonal, or anatomical variations that produce atypical sex characteristics, including variations in chromosomes, gonads, sex hormones, or genitals.
- emphasized femininity: expressions of femininity that emphasize women’s subordination by accommodating the interests and desires of men.
- feminine apologetic: the expectation that women learn to balance their interest in “masculine” activities and traits with feminine gender expression.
- gender dysphoria: a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and their assigned gender (APA 2022).
- gender expression: the way our gender identity is expressed outwardly through clothing, personal grooming, self-adorn