Sex, Sexuality, and Gender

Abstract

This chapter examines gender roles relative to concepts of psychological masculinity and femininity, and incorporates an anthropological discussion of gender variance including the transgender community in the United States and other industrialized societies and cross-cultural gender variance. The extensive amount of energy vested in examining and trying to understand gender role behavior through the life cycle in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is largely a function of middle-class industrialized and, specifically, US culture. Prior to the early 1990s, transgender people were in their infancy as activist organizers, focusing on self-help and education. The phenomenon of transsexualism is in fact noted for its normal hormonal profile in individuals whose identity is variant. The anthropological literature on gender variance suggests the importance of the cultural overlay in understanding gender diversity. Cross-gendered roles suggest the embeddedness of concepts such as masculinity and femininity in culture.