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? Have you ever felt like you were good at being your gender? 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-adornment, physical posture and gestures, and other elements of self-presentation.
- gender identity: the gender we experience ourselves to be.
- gender policing: imposing or enforcing normative gender expressions on someone who is perceived to be not adequately performing those gender norms via their appearance or behavior, based on their sex assigned at birth.
- gender socialization: the process by which people learn the norms, stereotypes, roles, and scripts related to gender through direct instruction or by exposure and internalization.
- genderqueer: an umbrella term that covers gender identity and expression that falls outside the binary/non-normative labels.
- hegemonic masculinity: the masculine ideal commonly viewed as superior to any other kind of masculinity and any form of femininity (Connell 1987; Connell & Messerschmidt 2005).
- identity formation: a process of coming to understand ourselves and differentiate ourselves in relation to our social world.
- intersex: people with differences in sexual development (DSD) sometimes identify as intersex.
- misgendering: the harmful practice of referring to people by a gender other than their stated gender identity (Kapusta 2016).
- nonbinary: refers to gender identities beyond binary identifications of man or woman/masculine or feminine.
- sex assigned at birth: the assignment and classification of people as male, female, intersex, or another sex based on a combination of anatomy, hormones, and chromosomes.
- sexually dimorphic traits: variations within a species, including secondary sex characteristics, that indicate sexual differences but are not necessarily related to reproduction.
- social construct: shared meaning that is created, accepted, and reproduced by social interactions between people within a society.
- social stratification: a set of processes in which people are sorted, or layered, into ranked social categories based on factors like wealth, income, education, family background, and status.
- socioeconomic status (SES): individual or group’s place within a system of social stratification. SES can be influenced by race, social class, religion, and other socially constructed categories or human differences, including gender.
Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
- Discuss the social construction of gender from a sociological perspective.
- Describe biological indicators of sexual difference.
- Discuss the gender identity formation process from a sociological perspective.
- Differentiate between gender identity and gender expression.
- Reflect on your personal experience of gender socialization
Licenses and Attributions for Chapter Introduction
Open Content, Original
“Chapter Overview” by Nora Karena is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Open Content, Shared Previously
Figure 2.1. “Alok Fashion Collection 2018” by Abhinav Anguriais is in the Public Domain, CC0 1.0.
the meanings, attitudes, behaviors, norms, and roles that a society or culture ascribes to sexual differences (Adapted from Conerly et.al. 2021a).
refers to gender identities beyond binary identifications of man or woman/masculine or feminine.
applies the tools of sociology to explore how gender, including sexuality, gender expression, and identity, is socially constructed, imposed, enforced, reproduced, and negotiated.
an awareness of the relationship between a person’s behavior, experience, and the wider culture that shapes the person’s choices and perceptions. (Mills 1959)
a systematic approach that involves asking questions, identifying possible answers to your question, collecting, and evaluating evidence—not always in that order—before drawing logical, testable conclusions based on the best available evidence.
consists of the combination of social characteristics, roles, and group memberships with which a person identifies. Social identity can be described as “the sum total of who we think we are in relation to other people and social systems” (Johnson, 2014, p. 178).
a limited system of gender classification in which gender can only be masculine or feminine. This way of thinking about gender is specific to certain cultures and is not culturally, historically, or biologically universal.
the gender we experience ourselves to be.
a process of coming to understand ourselves and differentiate ourselves in relation to our social world.
the way our gender identity is expressed outwardly through clothing, personal grooming, self-adornment, physical posture and gestures, and other elements of self-presentation.
the process of learning culture through social interactions.
