by Sandi Mann
The biological or evolutionary approach to gender concurs with what studies of chromosomally atypical men and women show: that males and females develop different characteristics as a result of biological programming. These different characteristics are designed to help the genders carry out their separate roles of survival, reproduction, rearing and caring for their young, and so on. This biological approach to gender assumes that these gender roles are instinctive and thus cannot easily be overcome by nurture and the environment.
However, other approaches (such as the biosocial approach) suggest that humans are not simply controlled by their biology and that other factors are important, too. For example, the biosocial approach to gender (Money and Ehrhardt 1972) argues that gender development is an interaction between nature and nurture; social labelling and differential treatment of boys and girls interact with biological factors to influence gender development.
Gender socialization: do we treat boys and girls differently?
The biosocial model suggests that many of the differences between how men and women behave are due to environmental factors – that is, the different ways in which males and females are treated from birth by their families, their school and their environment. Of course, much of this is culture-specific, with different gender roles assigned more or less strongly in different cultures. Parents may well follow the unwritten guidelines set by their own culture that govern how they speak to, interact with, play, dress and educate their child. For example, in many Western cultures, it is traditional to differentiate even newborn babies by the pink/blue code: pink if they are a girl and blue if they are a boy. Why is it considered so important in these cultures to indicate a baby’s gender to others? And does this early gendering affect how others interact with them?
Spotlight: Pink wasn’t always a feminine colour
As recently as the early 1900s, pink was seen by many as a boy colour and blue as a girl colour. In 1914 one paper advised readers to ‘use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention’. Another paper, the Ladies Home Journal, in 1918 reported that ‘the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl’. This was because pink was seen as a bold colour, close to red, whereas blue was seen as more delicate and appropriate for girls. Men happily wore pink: in the 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, a male character shows up to lunch with his mistress and her husband in a pink suit – a colour that was not considered feminine but ‘working class’. However, by the 1950s pink became more associated with girls in the United States and the UK – although it is not entirely clear why it went that way.
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that people do treat babies differently when they are aware of their gender. Baby girls are treated as if they are more delicate than baby boys, and baby boys attract more attention for gross motor skills (e.g. waving their arms or kicking their legs). Baby boys are more likely to be encouraged in rougher play, bounced in the air and tickled, while girls are more likely to be stroked and spoken to softly. Parents talk to girl babies more, they spend longer comforting female children and they let boys play farther away from them than girls.
Gender-related stereotypes also affect how we view a baby’s behaviour. A classic study by Condry and Condry (1976) involved showing college students a video recording of a baby reacting strongly to a jack-in-the-box. If told the baby was a boy, the students were more likely to label the baby’s reaction anger; if told the baby was a girl, they were more likely to label it fear. And our gender stereotypes also affect the views we have of babies’ abilities; in one recent study, mothers of 11-month-old infants with identical crawling and risk-taking ability were shown an adjustable sloping walkway and asked to estimate what steepness of slope their baby could manage and would attempt. The mothers underestimated girls and overestimated boys, both in crawling ability and crawling attempts.
Gender socialization carries on in this vein, perpetuating the stereotypes of how males and females should behave in society. Children receive gender-segregated toys, clothes and even furniture and tableware, all of which promote the image of girls as nurturing, caring and delicate, and boys as assertive, aggressive and competitive. It is this socialization that biosocial theorists believe is responsible for many of the differences between men and women.
The rise of non-gendered parenting
Gender-neutral parenting is a fairly new phenomenon that has arisen in response to the perceptions that gender roles are determined more by socialization than by biology. Some parents feel that this socialization limits their children by forcing them to conform to gender stereotypes that can even affect their career choices. They attempt to limit these influences for as long as possible by endeavouring to bring up their child as ‘gender-neutral’; some go so far as to give the child a gender-neutral name, referring to them as ‘it’ rather than ‘he’ or ‘she’.
Spotlight: Hen
The Swedish unisex personal pronoun, hen, is sometimes used to replace han (he) or hon (she). Sweden has gone to extraordinary lengths to impose gender neutrality in classrooms, regularly filming teachers’ interactions with children and analysing them for gender bias.
The gender-neutral movement is certainly growing. Toca Boca makes gender-neutral game apps for children and is second only to Disney for children’s downloads in Apple’s App Store. (Interestingly, Apple is one of the few retailers to organize children’s apps by age instead of boy and girl categories.) Tootsa MacGinty is a unisex children’s clothing label stocked in Selfridges, Fenwick and independent boutiques across the UK, as is the unisex Swedish brand Polarn O Pyret (which is stocked by Mothercare and John Lewis). And the movement against gender-segregated toys is spearheaded by the movement Let Toys Be Toys, which campaigns to remove signs in toyshops advertising ‘girls’ toys’ and ‘boys’ toys’.
But is such a gender-neutral upbringing likely to have negative effects on a child’s developing sexual identity and development? Critics of one couple’s decision to raise their child, Storm, as gender-neutral accused them of conducting a social experiment on their child, with some even going so far as calling what they were doing child abuse. The parents outline their story in their book Chasing Rainbows: Exploring Gender Fluid Parenting Practices. It is probably too early to know whether such practices are helpful or harmful to the developing sexual identity of a child.
Sexual orientation
Sexual orientation refers to the gender towards which a person directs their attraction or sexual interest. People who prefer their own gender are referred to as homosexual (‘gay’) and those who prefer the opposite as heterosexual (‘straight’). Many researchers believe that the distinction is not clear-cut and that a continuum best describes sexual orientation, with some people definitely gay, others straight, but some in the middle who are bisexual. Researchers estimate that between 2 to 10 per cent of adults in the United States identify themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual.
What determines sexual orientation is not clear. There are two main approaches: one is that a homosexual orientation is essentially dictated by genetic and/or biological factors – put simply, that people are ‘born gay’. The other theory is that homosexual attractions develop primarily as a result of psychological and environmental influences and early experiences. The former theory has gained in popularity over the years.
Most research into the causes of sexual orientation has focused on male homosexuality. A recent study of gay men in the United States found evidence that male sexual orientation is influenced by genes. Scientists tested the DNA of 400 gay men and found that genes on at least two chromosomes affected whether a man was gay or straight. The study confirms the findings of a smaller study that sparked widespread controversy in 1993, when Dean Hamer, a scientist at the US National Cancer Institute, investigated the family histories of more than 100 gay men and found that homosexuality tended to be inherited. More than 10 per cent of brothers of gay men were gay themselves, compared to around 3 per cent of the ge
neral population. Uncles and male cousins on the mother’s side had a greater than average chance of being gay, too.
However, while genes are likely to contribute to sexual orientation, this is unlikely to be the only factor, since homosexual people tend to have fewer children than heterosexuals – and yet the number of homosexuals in a population does not seem to change. Other multiple factors may well play a greater role, perhaps including the levels of hormones a baby is exposed to in the womb. For example, girls exposed to higher-than-normal prenatal levels of androgens (male hormones) tend to show traits and preferences more typical of males, and males exposed to lower-than-normal-levels of androgens show more female-typical patterns and choices.
Spotlight: Animals can be gay, too
Some biologists claim ‘gay’ animal behaviour has been spotted in 1,500 different species and reliably recorded in a third of these cases. In some cases there are reproductive reasons: for example, male Goodeid fish mimic females to dupe rivals and male dung flies appear to mate with other males with the aim of exhausting them and thereby reducing the competition for females. Long-term preference for same-sex mates is rarer in the animal kingdom, but 6 per cent of male bighorn sheep are effectively ‘gay’. A study of an albatross colony at the University of Hawaii revealed that one-third of the ‘couples’ who commit to each other for life, consist of two females who, after mating with a male, nest with their female companion.
Other approaches that appear to lend support to biological theories are those that study brain structure. For example, a handful of studies published during the 1990s claimed to offer evidence in favour of a biological cause for homosexuality, one of the most popular being that conducted in 1991 by the former Salk Institute researcher Simon LeVay. LeVay studied the brains of cadavers, including 18 men known to have been homosexual and one known to have been bisexual. He compared them with the brains of another 16 men and six women whom he presumed to have been heterosexual. He found that there was a cluster in the brain termed the INAH 3 that was more than twice as large in the heterosexual men as in the women. It was also, however, more than twice as large in the heterosexual men as in the homosexual men. This, he claimed, indicated that INAH is ‘dimorphic with sexual orientation [i.e. it shows a difference in structure between homosexuals and heterosexuals], at least in men, and suggests that sexual orientation has a biological substrate.’
His approach was, however, heavily criticized because of its serious methodological errors; for example, LeVay made questionable assumptions regarding the orientation of the ‘heterosexual’ cadavers. He assumed that they were all heterosexual, even though a number of the allegedly ‘heterosexual’ subjects had died of AIDS, a disease that remains far more common among homosexual men than among heterosexuals. All 19 of his homosexual subjects had died of AIDS, and LeVay noted that another ‘problem’ was ‘the possibility that AIDS patients constitute an unrepresentative subset of gay men, characterized, for example, by a tendency to engage in sexual relations with large numbers of different partners or by a strong preference for the receptive role in anal intercourse.’
Many researchers today ascribe to the view that sexual orientation is the result of both biological and environmental factors. One interesting theory, referred to as ‘exotic becomes erotic theory’, developed by Bern (1996), tries to integrate the findings on biological and environmental influences. The theory suggests that children who grow up feeling different from their own gender for whatever reason (e.g. they are more aggressive or more passive) tend to view the other members of their gender as different (exotic) and thus undesirable; these perceptions will cause arousal that they interpret as dislike, discomfort or sometimes even anger or fear. Once the child reaches puberty, this arousal is cognitively reinterpreted as attraction.
Transgender and transsexual
Transgender is the state of one’s gender identity or gender expression not matching one’s assigned sex. Transgender is independent of sexual orientation: transgender people may identify as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual and so on. The term ‘transgender’ was first mooted in 1965 in Sexual Hygiene and Pathology by the psychiatrist John F. Oliven of Columbia University. By 1984 the concept of a ‘transgender community’ had developed, in which transgender was used as an umbrella term. A 2010 study of 121 transgender people found that 38 per cent of them had realized that they had gender variance by age five.
Transsexual is often used interchangeably with transgender, but transgender is the umbrella term for people who feel they do not identify with their biological gender but who may not feel the need to have gender realignment surgery to change genders. Transsexual refers to a person who does not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth and wishes to realign their gender and their sex through medical intervention. The American ‘bible’ of psychiatric conditions, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-V, labels transsexual people as ‘gender dysphoric’, to describe the emotional distress that can result from ‘a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender’ – a label contested by many ‘trans’ people, who say the problem is physical, not mental (in 1973 homosexuality was similarly declassified as a mental disorder in the USA).
Case study: Jazz Jennings
Jazz Jennings, a Florida teen, was born a boy and ‘longed to be a girl’ from age three when she was diagnosed with gender identity disorder. In 2014 Jazz was named one of TIME magazine’s 25 most influential teenagers – alongside Taliban victim and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Malala Yousafzai. She started to live as a female at the age of five and plans to undergo gender realignment surgery when she is 18. Jennings’s story has been covered by national television shows 20/20 and The Rosie Show. In 2014 Jennings published a children’s book titled I Am Jazz, with writer Jessica Herthel, about herself and her life as a transgender child.
Many theories abound to try to explain what makes a person transgender or transsexual. Research in 2011 found that differences in the brain’s white matter that clash with a person’s genetic sex may hold the key to identifying transsexual people before puberty. A team at the National University of Distance Education in Madrid, Spain, ran MRI scans on the brains of 18 female-to-male transsexual people who had not had treatment and compared them with those of 24 males and 19 females. They found significant differences between male and female brains in four regions of white matter – and the female-to-male transsexual people had white matter in these regions that resembled a male brain.
In a separate study, the team used the same technique to compare white matter in 18 male-to-female transsexual people with that in 19 males and 19 females. Surprisingly, in each transsexual person’s brain the structure of the white matter in the four regions was halfway between that of the males and females; in other words, the brains of the male-to-female transsexuals were not completely masculinized but not completely feminized – but the individual still felt female.
Case study: David Reimer
David Peter Reimer (1965–2004) was a Canadian man born in Winnipeg, Manitoba – biologically male and initially named Bruce. At the age of six months, after concern was raised about how he and his twin brother urinated, the boys were diagnosed with phimosis (a condition where the foreskin is too tight to be pulled back over the head of the penis). They were referred for circumcision at the age of seven months but this left Bruce with such a damaged penis that it was beyond repair (following the disaster, his twin did not go through the procedure and his phimosis eventually cleared up on its own).
His parents, naturally worried about their son’s future, took him to see John Money at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Money was a psychologist whose work with intersex patients (whose genitals are ambiguous or missing) was gaining him a reputation as a pioneer in the field of sexual development and gender identity. Money’s view was that gender identity developed primarily as a result of social learning from early childhood and that it could be changed with the appropriate behavio
ural interventions; he called this the ‘Theory of Gender Neutrality’. Money thus persuaded the baby’s parents that sex reassignment surgery would be in Reimer’s best interest. And so, at the age of 22 months, baby Bruce underwent surgery to reassign him to be raised as female and he was given the name Brenda.
When, early in his life, it was considered that his gender reassignment surgery had been successful, this was presented as evidence that gender identity is primarily learned – especially as Brenda had a twin brother who was a perfect control in this experiment. However, Reimer failed to identify as female after the age of nine and transitioned to living as a male at age 15. He went public with his story in a book, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, in order to tell the world just how wrong the theories that had led to his transition were. His story influenced several medical practices and even current understanding of the biology of gender. The case accelerated the decline of sex reassignment and surgery for ambiguous XY male infants with unclear genitals, various other rare congenital malformations and penile loss in infancy.
Tragically, in 2004 David committed suicide after suffering years of severe depression. His twin brother, Brian, had earlier died of an overdose of anti-depressants.