Our post last week covered the biological basis for gender, but as we know, biology is only one small part of human identity. The psychological and social factors that mold your internal sense of gender most likely have a much greater impact on how you construct your life. And all of these biopsychosocial factors are deeply intertwined. Your biology informs how society perceives you from the moment you’re born and the doctors slap you with a gendered label (or even before as many parents opt to learn the gender before birth). The subtle (or not so subtle in some cases) gender socialization that follows informs the development of your psychological sense of gender—how you personally come to identify yourself. From a young age, you have a strong instinct to fit into the social groups around you. And in order to fit in, you need to conform to the labels you’re assigned. As a result, the clash of psychological gender with social and biological gender can create deep feelings of distress and ostracism. And the more emphasis the social groups around you place on gender, the more difficult it can be to deviate from the norm.
A lot of the confusion surrounding gender stems from the idea that gender equates to biological sex. Part of the problem is semantic. We do often conflate the two. No doctor can tell you the “gender” of your baby. Babies don’t have identities—they are mindless screaming machines who haven’t had the time or mental capacity to develop a sense of self. And yet we throw “gender” reveal parties when what we really mean is “biological sex” reveal parties (which certainly has less of a ring to it). But more than just an issue of semantics, many people just aren’t used to the idea that gender is an identity.
Identity is our essential sense of self that stems from biological, psychological, and social factors (sound familiar?). For example, race is determined by the genetics you get from your parents, but racial identity is informed by those genetic factors combined with your internal and social experiences with race. Personality is also a component of identity, but unlike gender, we tend to attribute most of our personality to psychological and social factors. In reality, there are biological and genetic components to personality—they just aren’t as easily identifiable. We can see the effect biology has on personality by looking at identical twins. Even when twins are raised completely separately, they often have measurably similar personality traits.
Just like all the other aspects of our identity, gender is rooted in the complex beauty of biology, but it is ultimately so much greater than even biology can predict. To understand where gender comes from, let’s go back to our screaming, genderless baby. For about the first two years of life, a baby is in what is known as the sensorimotor stage of cognitive development, which is really just a fancy way of saying they scream and put things in their mouth. During this period, they absorb massive amounts of information about the world, how it works, and how they are meant to interact with it. At this point, babies have no sense of self at all. If you draw an X on the baby’s forehead and place them in front of a mirror, they will reach out for the mirror, thinking it’s another baby. But around two years old, babies develop a self-concept that allows them to identify that the X is on their own forehead. As they start speaking, they begin using words like “I” “me” and “mine,” indicating themselves as separate individuals with their own thoughts and feelings. They develop feelings associated with self-consciousness and shame or pride and self-esteem—feelings that rely on knowledge of how the self fits into its social context. Throughout the years of early development, children learn about their identity primarily through the lens of others via socialization.
Socialization is a large part of early cognitive development that helps children understand themselves and their place in the world. In the beginning, babies have very few preexisting instincts and essentially no information about the world. They learn what things are and how they work directly, using their senses. Similarly, they begin to learn who they are and who other people are in relation to them through interactions with others. At first, they imitate what they see in others and what others reflect back to them (turns out even babies know how to fake it till they make it). Later, they may start to play around with the identities they see around them—this is when children start to enjoy playing pretend. Then, children learn how to adapt their identity to different contexts and interactions. It’s only late in childhood that children start gaining a sense of their identity in a holistic sense.
Similarly, children develop their gender identity partly through socialization. In the beginning, babies absorb information about gender, gender roles, and their own gender from interaction with others. Between the ages of around 3-6, children develop a strong sense of their own gender identity and what it means based on the rules they learned from their earlier interactions. Children in this age group are very attached to these rules. It’s only around 8-9 that children develop a more flexible understanding of gender as they become more secure in their gender identity without external reassurance. Because early development of gender identity is so wrapped up in the social roles and stereotypes that young children witness around them, children often carry those ideas about gender with them into adulthood. In this way, gender stereotypes become self-reinforcing within social groups.
Throughout cognitive development, children learn to categorize objects, ideas, and people into helpful boxes that make the world easier to understand. We talked about schema—groupings of concepts your brain uses to save space and time—in our post on cognition. Children learn to use schema to categorize objects, people, and behaviors into gendered boxes based on their socialization, and over time, they come to associate themselves with a particular gender schema. When a child doesn’t identify with the schema determined by their biologically or socially determined gender, it can cause psychological stress in the form of gender dysphoria. Like gender itself, gender dysphoria has complicated roots in biology, psychology, and society. Many, although not all, transgender and non-binary people experience some degree of dysphoria surrounding physical or social gender cues. And some trans and non-binary people choose to undergo some degree of social and/or medical transition to alleviate gender dysphoria.
There is still a lot we don’t know about the complicated nature of gender identity. Really any aspect of identity is hard to pin down. Our identity is intrinsic to us, but it isn’t necessarily static. As humans, we learn and evolve as we grow, developing our sense of identity and our understanding of society. And this development continues from childhood throughout adulthood. Gender isn’t static either, and it doesn’t fit into the convenient boxes that our minds want it to. Instead, gender is a fluid, evolving part of our identities.
Science You Can Bring Home To Mom will be back in two weeks with a brand new series! For now, check out last month’s series on mental health. Comment on this post or email me at contact@anyonecanscience.com to let me know what you think about this week’s blog post and tell me what sorts of topics you want me to cover in the future. And subscribe below for weekly science posts sent straight to your email!
