From the moment parents find out the sex of their baby a child’s life is largely defined by his or her gender. From the baby’s name, to how he or she is dressed, to how his or her room is decorated, gender suffuses the newborn’s life. Not only do parents construct dif­ferent environments for boys […]

Socialization into gender roles begins at birth and, nowadays, may begin even before! Parents can now know months before birth whether the fetus is a boy or a girl and can begin to prepare accordingly. Parents even speak to the unborn child—a mother simply by talking and the father by putting his mouth close to […]

Toby: An Asexual Person Though such a child has a genetic gender (that is, has XX or XY chromosomes), the child has no biological gender. Most are assigned a gender in childhood, are given hor­mones, and live as male or female. The Personal Voices on page 90 tells the story of an asexual named Toby, […]

Transsexuals stretch our usual concepts of gender by suggesting that there can be a fun­damental and irreconcilable break between our psychological and biological genders. However, some cultures challenge our notions and even have a gender category that is neither male nor female—a third gender. Many traditional Native American societies had a category of not-men/not-women, known […]

Transsexualism has profound implications for our conceptions of gender categories. In the Western world, we tend to think of gender in terms of biology; if you have XX chro­mosomes and female genitalia, you are female, and if you have XY chromosomes and male genitalia, you are male. This is not universally true, however. A male […]

In the last few years there has been an active increase in attention paid to transgen­derism. The transgendered community includes those who live full or part time in the other gender’s role, transsexuals, and transvestites (we will talk more about transvestites in Chapter 16. See Table 16.2 for more information about transgendered groups). Some professional […]

Up until the 1970s, masculinity and femininity were thought to be on the same contin­uum. The more masculine you were, the less feminine you were, and vice versa. However, in the 1970s, researchers challenged this notion by suggesting that masculin­ity and femininity were two separate dimensions and a person could be high or low on […]

When someone says, “She is a very feminine woman,” what image comes to mind? The president of a corporation? A woman in a frilly pink dress? A soldier carrying her gear? In American culture, we associate femininity with qualities such as beauty, softness, em­pathy, concern, and modesty. In fact, in almost every culture, femininity is […]

From the moment of a baby’s birth, almost every society has different expectations of its males and females. In many societies, men must go through trials or rights of passage in which they earn their right to be men; few societies have such trials for women. For example, the! Kung bushmen have a “rite of […]

Culture and social structure interact to create sex typing, a way of thinking that splits the world into two basic categories—male and female—and suggests that most behav­iors, thoughts, actions, professions, emotions, and so on fit one gender more than the other (Liben & Bigler, 2002; Maccoby, 2002). Today we are finding that although there are […]