Gender identity

Arnold M. Zwicky zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU
Mon Jun 4 18:25:54 UTC 2007


On Jun 4, 2007, at 10:43 AM, Jim Landau wrote:

> A buzzword I haven't seen before.

where have you been, jim?  over a million raw webhits, wikipedia
pages for this and for "gender identity disorder", a SIECUS annotated
bibliography on the subject, etc.  it's been around for quite some
time; anyone have some idea when it took off?  (OED has a cite from
1969, of a form suggesting that it had been around for some time
before.)

"sexual identity" might have been the natural choice to describe the
sex with which someone  identifies, or is identified, but that term
is also used the sexual orientation with which someone identifies, or
is identified.  so lots of people avoid "sexual identity" entirely,
and use either "gender identity" on the one hand and "sexual
orientation" or "sexuality" on the other.

the wikipedia article on "sexual identity" traces the use of "gender"
instead of "sex" with reference to psychological characteristics back
to John Money in 1955, when Money used the term "gender role".  the
wikipedia article sees "gender identity" as coined analogously to
"gender role".  i can't vouch for the accuracy of this history.

fwiw, Dynes's 1990 Encyclopedia of Homosexuality uses "gender
identity" without comment (or an account of the history of the term),
and seems not to use "sexual identity" at all.

in all of these contexts, "gender identity" is a technical term.
maybe not the one you would have chosen, but it's established
(apparently, for close to 50 years) and should just be treated as a
scientific idiom.

arnold

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