Definition
Gender is a socially constructed paradigm whose purpose is to differentiate between the biological sexes. From a sociological perspective, gender is separate to sex and is a socially constructed concept (Jackson and Scott 2002). More recently, Wood and Eagly (2015) defined gender identity as the social and cultural meanings ascribed to male and female which people incorporate into their own psyche and identities. Gender is viewed as a spectrum rather than a binary of male/female. For some individuals, the gender assigned to them at birth because of their sex may not be the gender they identify with.
Introduction
Until the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was commonly accepted by western societies that biological sex and gender were synonymous and fixed. A change began to occur in 1968 when Robert Stoller, a US psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, undertook work with individuals who had indeterminate sex classification, and this work raised new questions regarding gender (Stoller 1968...
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Hopkins, S., Richardson, L. (2021). Gender Identity: From Biological Essentialism Binaries to a Nonbinary Gender Spectrum. In: Leal Filho, W., Marisa Azul, A., Brandli, L., Lange Salvia, A., Wall, T. (eds) Gender Equality. Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95687-9_87
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