Gender Idenity

There are many terms that are used to differentiate the male from the female. Biological development if the most obvious. Physical characteristics that help identify the female are being born with a vagina, uterus, and ovaries. Males are born with a penis, testes, scrotum, and a prostate gland. Around the age of 10-12 children experience puberty. When both sexes have growth spurts approaching adolescents and secondary sexual characteristics develop. Females develop a menstrual cycle, enlarged breasts, wider hips, public hair, and fat deposits. Males develop deepening of their voice, facial and public hair, and coarser skin.

Gender identity is the individual’s sense of being male or female. A person’s gender identity is defined as the psychological aspects of being a male or female. A person’s culture, development of their personality and the sense of who they are shapes the definition of gender. Gender does not only effect the way a male or female may feel about themselves, but their relationship with their friends, coworkers and intimate partners as well as what others think of them. For example males are expected to dress masculine, do masculine activities and interact with other males as friends not intimate partners. Females are expected to dress feminine, such as wear a bra, do feminine activities like paint their nails, and interact with other females like discussing boyfriends and how they find them attractive sexually. Many times these male and female behaviors are directed by cultural clues. In other words how the adults in that society expect the males and females to act. For example in the U.S. for a male to wear a dress would be greatly discouraged and not expected. In Africa males wear dresses and are recognized as a norm, especially for special cultural occasions.

Gender identity is the process of a person becoming a male versus a female. Obviously physical development plays a role, but environmental factors enter into the development as well. Gender typing has a big influence of how males and females learn from their culture expectations in behavior. For example if a boy is taught to place with Barbie dolls it may affect his gender identity towards being more feminine in character. If a girl is encouraged to act more masculine, do masculine chores, activities and act rough and tough it may effect her gender identity towards being more masculine. However researchers have not concluded which factors, biological versus environmental, may have more of an affect on the child’s gender identity development. So cultural clues can have a big effect on the way males and females carry out their life roles.

Gender development can be effected by many factors, biological, environmental as well as cultural. A person’s development of their being is effected by all of these areas. However one must also consider that just because all of these factors come into play in the development of a person, one can not be assured the outcome. In many cultures roles of the male and female are blurred and vary from one culture to another. The development of a person is very complex and can also change over time.
Some individual’s feel that they are supposed to be a different sex than what they are. This is called gender identity disorder. Some will even have surgery to become the other gender. A functional magnetic resonance imaging showed that areas involved in emotional and sexual were more strongly active in men that in women.