Being Gendered: Bringing the Body Back In.

Theoretical explanations of gender typically emphasize either biological essentialist or social constructionist arguments. But beyond their differences, both sides explain gender as intrinsically tied to sex and reinforce the binary categories of male and female, limiting the ability of these theories to offer satisfactory explanations of gender for people whose gender identity and biological sex is either not contiguous, or does not fit within the narrowness of the scope of society’s definition of gender as bipolar. Viewing life experiences from the standpoint of intersex and trans people raises critical questions regarding gender identity and the linkages between identity development, human biology, and social influences. In contrast to the thirty-year trend within the social sciences to consider gender in terms that are exclusively social constructionist, this paper proposes an alternate theory of gender identity, and examines the role of restrictive social messages that narrowly define the scope of gender-appropriate appearance, behavior, and physiology, in gender identity formation across all groups. In this paper I have argued against the dominant approach taken in Identity Theory, that as social beings, our identity is discovered, made known, reinforced and revised not in response to events, but out of the interpersonal interpretations of these events. Instead, I have refered back to the original arguments made by Morris Rosenberg (1979) regarding the motives and principles of the self-concept and engaging them to expand our knowledge of how identity, specifically gender identity, develops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]