Gender identity

In sociology, gender identity describes the gender with which a person identifies (i.e, whether one perceives oneself to be a man, a woman, or describes oneself in some less conventional way), but can also be used to refer to the gender that other people attribute to the individual on the basis of what they know from gender role indications (clothing, hair style, etc.).

Relationship to gender role

The related term, "gender role," has two meanings that in individual cases may be divergent: First, people's gender roles are the totality of the ways by which they express their gender identities. Second, people's gender roles may be defined as the kinds of activities that society determines to be appropriate for individuals possessing their kind of external genitalia.

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There are probably as many shades and complexities of sexual identity and gender identity as there are human beings, and there are an equal number of ways of working those gender identities out in the intricacies of daily life. Societies, however, tend to assign some classes of social roles to "male" individuals, and some classes of social roles to "female" individuals (as society perceives their sexes). In some societies, there are other classes of social roles for, e.g., surgically neutered physiological male. See Hijra (India), for example.

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Sometimes the connection between gender identity and gender role is unclear. The original oversimplification was that there are unambiguously male human beings and unambiguously female human beings, that they are clearly men and clearly women, and that they should behave in all important ways as men and women "naturally" behave. (Compare Heteronormativity) Investigations in biology and sociology have strongly supported the view that "the sex between the ears is more important than the sex between the legs", and the implication has been that people with masculine gender identities will truthfully give external representation of their gender identities by adopting gender roles that are appropriate to men, and, similarly, that people with feminine gender identities will adopt gender roles that are appropriate to women. It may be very difficult to determine, however, whether a specific drag queen is someone who has a female gender identity and is learning a female gender role, or whether that person is someone with a male gender identity who enjoys mimicking a female gender role to entertain others, to taunt the more rigid members of his society, or for some other reason, such as to repudiate the value or validity of rigid gender roles. Some, such as RuPaul, refuse to be categorized.

Related Topics:
Gender role - Heteronormativity - Drag queen - RuPaul

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