Gender Identity In Literature

Sex and gender have been used in literature underlying different meanings. Being both complex processes to describe and distinguish, there has been some confusion in the psychological literature on the operationalization and the conceptualization of these two notions. Unger (1979) is the pioneer of the discussion about the differences between sex and gender. She argues that there are two types of people: those who consider sex as a mainly biological variable and tend to assume that psychological differences between males and females are the result of sex; and those who consider sex as a commonly social phenomenon and lean towards to assuming that the sex of males and females is a result of their different experiences. In addition, there

According to this, gender identity could be a more significant predictor of the individuals’ behavior than is biological sex. Whereas gender involves the mannerisms and comportments considered characteristic of each sexual category, gender identity is more properly used when these attributions are made with oneself as the stimulus person (Unger, 1979). Gender identity takes multiple forms and can be a concept filled with ambiguity and uncertainty, because the messages about gender can come from a large number of sources (e.g., society, organizations, friends, family) that are often uneven and contradictory. This identity is a social construction under a constant development where social norms, structures, people and the self have are very important (Ely & Padavic,

Gender was established as a personal characteristic and an individual attribute, which didn’t favor gender as a concept constructed socially. Some earlier origins of gender proposed the notion that men and women were unitary and mutually exclusive types. This meant that people would only have one gender and never the other or both. The concept of woman was defined by what a man, her opposite, was not. An appropriate discrepancy between sex and gender, would be referring to the differences that were not biological between women and men as gender rather than sex. In the 70s, authors discussed gender as a given characteristic of individuals, instead of a singularity that is socially produced. This simply definition of gender as a personal attribute covered the importance of the social nature of gender and contributed to the problem in distinguish the terms gender and sex. From their review, Ely and Padavic (2007) also discovered that sex was defined as a biological set linked with an individuals’ chromosomes and expressed in the reproductive organs and hormones of each other. In contrast, gender was classified as a social category linked with multiple social processes that generate and sustain differences between women and men not making it an innate concept for