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Psychological Perspectives on Gender: An Intellectual History

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Psychological Perspectives on Gender: An Intellectual History

Alexandra Rutherford, York University
[Under review]

To apper in R. Sternberg & W. E. Pickren, Handbook of the intellectual history of psychology:

How psychological ideas have evolved from past to present. Cambridge University Press.

It is widely noted by scholars that the modern usage of the term gender (i.e., to refer to

human beings and non-human animals rather than a purely grammatical category) is of

relatively recent origin. How recent? As Haig (2004) has noted, “Prior to the late 1960s,

nongrammatical uses of gender were exceedingly rare” (p. 89). This observation provokes a

number of questions that are both historically and conceptually interesting. First, exactly when,

with what meaning, in what context, and for what purpose, did the modern usage of the term

emerge? Second, what conceptually similar terms or ideas existed before this change that can

help us reconstruct a relevant, if not continuous, history of gender in psychology? Finally, given

that the meaning of gender is always in flux, “multiple, contestable, and still a matter of

debate” (Capdevila & Lazard, 2014, p. 766) how is it possible to construct its intellectual history

at all?

While acknowledging all of these complexities, this chapter takes on the project of

constructing an intellectual history of gender by examining how ideas about gender have been

constructed and deployed in psychology since the late 19th century, largely in North America

and Western Europe (for accounts that look at the psychology of gender in different cultural

contexts, see Rutherford, Capdevila, Undurti, and Palmary, 2011). Thus, although the term

“gender” itself may not have been widely used in the contemporary sense before the 1960s,
 2

ideas about gender (or its conceptual relatives) have long played a foundational role in

psychological theories of human development and social organization, and the links between

the two (Hollway, 1989). Psychologists have, since the very beginning of the academic

discipline, drawn heavily on gender norms, stereotypes, and assumptions to propose theories

about the psychological characteristics and abilities of women and men (Shields, 1975, 1982,

2007). As Magnusson and Marecek (2012) note, “Since the early years of academic psychology

researchers have been interested in finding out what (if anything) distinguishes men’s and

women’s mental life” (p. 31). Since that time, the focus on differences between men and

women has given way to an emphasis on the social processes that constitute gender, or how

we “do gender” (West & Zimmerman, 1987), and to how this “doing” is then internalized as a

sense of oneself as having a gender. Even more recently, psychologists have begun to move

away from an exclusively binary conceptualization of both sex and gender that divides human

beings into women and men, male and female, towards a recognition of many different

sex/gender possibilities (see Schellenberg & Kaiser, 2018).

In the following sections I provide an overview of how ideas about gender have

influenced psychological theorizing, including how American and Western European

psychologists have theorized gender itself, since the end of the 19th century to the present. I

will, somewhat anachronistically, sometimes use the term gender even in this early history,

although sex – to refer to the status of being male or female - would have been used

consistently at the time. The complexity of the relationship between sex and gender will itself

become part of this intellectual history during the mid- to second half of the 20th century. 1

Gender and the New Psychology: Complementarity and Difference

 3

When the study of psychological subject matter became more systematic and scientific

towards the end of the 19th century, the “new psychologists” as they were called (and who

were largely, although not exclusively, men) adopted, for the most part uncritically, the gender

norms and stereotypes that surrounded them in the culture at large. These included strongly

held beliefs in various fundamental and innate differences between women and men, grounded

in evolutionary theory, and reinforced by the social and cultural restrictions experienced by

many men and women at the time (although these restrictions varied by social class,

race/ethnicity, and geography, among other factors).

One of these prominent beliefs was that women and men differed in complementary

ways on a number of psychological traits. These differences were congruent with the “doctrine

of separate spheres” which stated that men excelled in the public worlds of politics and work,

while women were best suited to the private realms of family and home, and of course, to

nurturing children. Accordingly, men were seen as agentic and independent, while women

were passive and dependent. Men were vigorous and passionate, while women were weaker

and more emotional (Shields, 2007). While women were moral, virtuous, and intuitive, men

were rational, intellectual, and strong-willed. Although not central to the complementarity

hypothesis, it was also widely believed that women overall, and men and women of different

races, were intellectually inferior to white men of European descent. This view was held by

Charles Darwin, who formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection, and by many early

psychologists and scientists (Daston, 1992; Shields, 1982).

Underlying the belief in the inferiority of the female intellect was another widespread

belief called the variability hypothesis. The variability hypothesis proposed that males of any
 4

species exhibited greater variability than females across a range of psychological and physical

characteristics, such as intelligence. Thus, while greater male variability might produce more

males at the lower end of the intelligence scale, this was compensated for by the greater

number of male geniuses. Women, by comparison, were restricted to the middle of the

distribution and were much less likely, on average, to occupy the extremes of either end.

Importantly, given that evolution by natural selection depended on variability of traits within

species, men were seen as the drivers of evolutionary progress.

G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924), a pioneer of the new psychology, held a complex set of

views about gender and race which drew both on the variability hypothesis and on the

recapitulationist theory of human development that was prominent at the time. This latter

theory proposed that children develop by passing through the same stages as our pre-human

ancestors. Hall argued that a child's progress from crawling, to walking upright, to ensuing

stages of social, creative, and intellectual activity basically repeated or reflected the

evolutionary sequence leading to modern civilization. In Hall's version of recapitulationism, as

children relived the evolutionary stages of the human race they would reach a point, typically at

puberty, when blood from different ancestral stocks would overwhelm them with an influx of

racialized traits, especially in children of “less pure” ancestry (i.e., non-Europeans). This

accounted for the emotional turbulence characteristic of adolescence, a period of life that Hall

named and studied (Hall, 1907).

But here Hall's thinking took another interesting turn. He was highly concerned about

what he perceived as the weak, ineffective, even overcivilized state of American manhood in

the late 1800s and early 1900s, especially among white, middle-to-upper class professional and
 5

businessmen. He observed that the physical and mental vigor of these American men had been

taxed by the pace of technological advance and they were becoming overwhelmingly

neurasthenic – a term used to refer to “weak nerves” or the tendency to become fatigued and

emotionally overwrought. To remedy this undesirable outcome of modern civilization – an

enfeebled masculinity - Hall recommended that teachers encourage boys, especially

“Caucasian” boys, to systematically relive all the racial strains of their diverse ethnic heritage in

order to reach the highest stage of evolution. This would require a prolonged adolescence in

which boys would express their "savage" origins and pass through them, eventually creating a

race of "super-men" who would reach their full evolutionary potential (see Bederman, 1995).

This process would unfold, according to Hall, only for Caucasian boys of diverse ethnic

heritage, however. Non-Caucasians, he felt, did not have the advanced final stages of

evolutionary development in their ancestral past and they were destined to fall behind their

white peers in educational potential and achievement. Hall also believed in the variability

hypothesis. Since males were the carriers of the variability of the species, they were the only

ones who could pass on these advanced traits to the next generation. Although females might

be able to relive their primitive evolutionary heritage, they would be unable to develop

advanced traits that could be passed on to their offspring. In fact, it was widely believed that

educating young women during puberty and beyond could damage their reproductive organs

by diverting blood from their reproductive systems to the brain. Hall (among many others) thus

advocated a different, less intellectually strenuous, education for women, and even suggested

that educated women became ‘functionally castrated.’

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While Hall’s views may seem extreme to us now (and were not wholly accepted even in

his own time), aspects of these views were shared by many and were often taken as facts

rather than as hypotheses to be tested (e.g., Clarke, 1873). When these assumptions about

gender were questioned and tested, the studies were often conducted by women who were

entering the field (see Rosenberg, 1982). As highly educated, accomplished women, their very

presence in the discipline implicitly challenged many of these beliefs. They also conducted

empirical investigations of these assumptions and advocated for environmentalist instead of

biologically reductionist explanations. Mary Whiton Calkins (1863-1930), for example, one of

the earliest women to earn a PhD in American psychology, challenged her colleague Joseph

Jastrow’s contention that men evinced a greater “community of ideas” than women - that is,

that men could generate more associations to a stimulus word than women could, and that

women were far more likely to generate words reflecting a domestic orientation than were

men. She undertook her own systematic, empirical studies of the problem and used her

findings to challenge Jastrow’s claims (Calkins, 1896; Nevers & Calkins, 1895).

Helen Thompson Woolley (1874-1947), another early American psychologist, used her

PhD research to conduct a study of sex differences (Thompson, 1903). She found that men’s

motor abilities were in general better developed than those of women (probably due to their

greater physical strength), but that men and women did not differ from one another in the “life

of feeling” or in “general information and intellectual interests.” Women generally made finer

sensory discriminations than men and were better at memory tasks and associative thinking.

She concluded forcefully that there was no way to determine the cause of any of the
 7

differences given that the environments of girls and boys, men and women, were so different.

As she wrote:

Even in our own country, where boys and girls are allowed to go to the same schools and

to play together to some extent, the social atmosphere is different, from the cradle.

Different toys are given them, different occupations and games are taught them, different

ideals of conduct are held up before them. The question for the moment is not at all

whether or not these differences in education are right and proper and necessary, but

merely whether or not, as a matter of fact, they exist, and, if so, what effect they have on

the individuals who are subjected to them. (Thompson, 1903, p. 177)

As one final example of an early effort to combat sexist social beliefs masquerading as

science, Leta Hollingworth (1886-1939) conducted an empirical study to determine whether

women’s cognitive, perceptual, and motor abilities were impaired at certain times during their

menstrual cycles. This belief, called functional periodicity, was widely held and used to argue

that women should be prevented from undertaking a range of tasks and occupations because

of this biological impediment. Hollingworth’s study showed no such impairment (Hollingworth,

1914), but the belief persisted in various forms. A slightly later generation would call this the

code of menstrual invalidism – and continue to combat it (Seward, 1944). Indeed, beliefs in the

incapacitating mental and physical effects of menstruation have continued to exert a persistent

and tenacious hold on both scientific and popular imagination, despite many feminist

researchers’ careful attempts to dismantle and critique them (e.g., Caplan, McCurdy-Myers, &

Gans, 1992; Chrisler & Caplan, 2002; Parlee, 1973, 1982).

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Measuring Masculinity and Femininity

While early work on gender in American psychology tended to focus on sex differences

in the context of Victorian evolutionary beliefs and the doctrine of separate spheres, as

psychology developed new statistical techniques and an increasing concern with social control,

interest in the measurement of various psychological characteristics grew. This was reflected

not only in the rapid development and proliferation of intelligence tests, but in tests that

purported to measure temperament and personality. Masculinity and femininity (M-F) soon

came under the psychometrician’s gaze. As we shall see, the measurement of these constructs

was tied intimately to existing beliefs about sex differences, thus creating a rather unsettling

tautology in which M-F came simply to reflect and signify that which was believed to

differentiate males from females, whether or not these differentiations were meaningful or

valid in and of themselves.

One of the earliest research programs to take on the measurement of M-F was that of

Lewis Terman (1877-1956) and Catharine Cox Miles (1890-1984) at Stanford University. Terman

and Miles believed that M-F was a central feature of temperament around which all other

aspects of the personality were formed. As Constantinople (1973) later noted, however, despite

its centrality to their conceptual and measurement scheme, they had no theoretically-derived,

a priori definitions of M-F that guided the development of their scale. Rather, they drew on

existing research in domains of behavior indicating significant sex differences, and constructed

items reflecting these domains for their test. They then refined the lists of items by discarding

those to which men and women did not respond differently when they administered the lists to

various groups. The test was designed as a bipolar measure rather than multidimensional one,
 9

with a plus for a masculine response and a negative for a feminine response resulting in a single

score. Although Terman and Miles were not absolutely satisfied with their approach, the

Attitude-Interest Analysis Test (named so as to obscure its real purpose), did rather reliably

distinguish male respondents from female respondents, and it set a precedent for other tests

that followed. This led to what Constantinople (1973) noted as a major problem in this line of

research: “While it is clear that something is being measured by the tests of M-F, namely sex

differences in response, the theoretical explication that would tie sex differences, regardless of

content, to masculinity and femininity is absent” (p. 405). As she explained, while it may be

that the length of the big toe discriminates between men and women, does having a longer or

shorter toe as a man or as a woman necessarily make one more or less feminine or masculine?

Nonetheless, in their qualitative analyses of results from the M-F scale, published in Sex

and Personality (1936), Terman and Miles did sketch out a description of the gendered psyche:

masculine minds were adventurous, mechanically and object-oriented, aggressive, self-

assertive, fearless, and rough; feminine minds were aesthetically and domestically oriented,

sedentary, compassionate, timid, emotional, and fastidious. Morawski (1985) has suggested

that this repetition of the complementarity hypothesis/doctrine of separate spheres of an

earlier era may have served a prescriptive function, suggesting a reversion to a more gender-

conservative past in a period marked by dramatic (and threatening) changes in gender roles.

Although Terman and Miles did not weigh in with an explanatory model as to the origins

of sex differences (i.e., in nature or nurture), they did convey a clear message about the

psychological desirability of a correspondence between psychological M-F and biological sex.

Effeminate boys and masculine girls occupied a problematic place in Terman’s scheme –
 10

especially if they were of high intelligence (Hegarty, 2007; 2013). This was a reflection of the

then-popular sexual inversion theory of homosexuality, which posited a connection between

childhood gender non-conformity and the later development of homosexuality. It was, of

course, also connected to the rampant homophobia of the time. The extent to which gender

may play a role in a “healthy” personality, however, was taken up decades later in the early

1970s by feminist psychologist Sandra Bem (1944-2014) in her re-envisioning of the

measurement of M-F: the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) (Bem, 1974).

Bem’s feminist re-envisioning configured the psychologically health personality as one

constituted by an almost equal number of masculine and feminine traits as measured by the

BSRI. The BSRI measured M-F as bi-dimensional rather than bipolar, in that one’s endorsement

of masculine items generated a masculinity score, and one’s endorsement of feminine items

generated a separate femininity score. In the BSRI’s original scoring scheme, a comparison of

the two scores would reveal whether one was androgynous (reported an equally high number

of masculine and feminine traits), masculine (more M traits), feminine (more F traits), or

undifferentiated (reported a low number of both masculine and feminine traits). The

androgynous personality was the psychological ideal. Bem’s conceptualization was not

interlaced with any assumptions about the link between psychological gender and sexual

orientation, and drew attention away from the bipolarity of masculinity versus femininity. It

was embraced by some feminist scholars and was among a number of other scales that began

to measure gender in similar ways (e.g., Janet Spence’s Personality Attributes Questionnaire).

However, the extent to which it still fundamentally relied on stereotypic conceptualizations of

masculinity and femininity, did not undermine or challenge the “reality” of these constructs,
 11

and ultimately failed to reliably make the link between androgyny and psychological health, led

to a bit of a theoretical impasse. As Morawski (1985) wrote, androgyny models “renovate

rather than replace the rejected presuppositions about the ontology, structure, and desirability

of gender concepts” (p. 214).

Psychoanalysts Theorize Gender

If there is one psychological theory that is most centrally, if also most controversially,

associated with sex, gender, and sexuality, it is psychoanalysis. In addition to its explicit focus

on childhood sexuality, which was a break from culturally accepted and acceptable beliefs

about child development, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) notoriously postulated that girls and

boys proceed through different developmental stages in terms of their separation and

individuation from their same-sex and opposite-sex parents. He hypothesized that young boys

and girls experience a constellation of unconscious wishes involving the desire for sensual

gratification from the opposite-sex parent, which he termed the Oedipus Complex. Then,

between the ages of about 3 and 6, boys and girls pass through the Oedipal period during which

they become aware of the major anatomical difference between them, namely, the presence or

absence of a penis.

The awareness in boys that there are people without penises gives rise to intense

anxiety around the possibility of being castrated. They fear that if their fathers discovered their

sons’ desire for their mothers, they might castrate them as punishment. In order to deal with

this intense castration anxiety, boys internalize a greater degree of outward, in this case

parental, injunctions around appropriate behaviors and desires, thus creating a very strong
 12

superego. Girls by contrast, realizing that they are already castrated, do not experience the

same degree of anxiety as boys and instead develop a desire to be like a boy and have a penis, a

desire that Freud called penis-envy. They do not have to resolve the Oedipal Complex as

completely, and therefore do not develop as strong a superego as their male counterparts. This,

according to Freud, explained the tendency of women to have a less well-developed sense of

justice than men, and to be more often influenced by their emotions as opposed to principles.

Needless to say, this bit of fanciful Freudian theorizing (even Freud acknowledged that it

was based on observations of only a few clinical cases) was met with skepticism by some

female psychoanalysts. Institutionally, psychoanalysis had actually been much more open to

women’s participation than many other institutions of its time, and Freud himself had nurtured

his own daughter Anna’s important role in the burgeoning psychoanalytic movement. One of

the most well-developed critiques of this aspect of Freudian theorizing was formulated by the

well-established female psychoanalyst Karen Horney (1885-1952). Horney argued that Freud

had been blinded by male bias in his understanding of female development. In his

conceptualization of penis envy he had failed to consider the cultural and political advantages

of being male, advantages that would rightfully make any woman envious of having a

(symbolic) penis. Turning the tables, she argued that in fact boys and men should envy the

creative and procreative joy of being able to bear and give birth to children, an ability of course

given exclusively to women. Womb-envy was the logical antidote to penis-envy (Horney, 1967).

Building on Horney’s critique, American psychoanalyst Clara Thompson (1893-1958)

further emphasized that socially and culturally conditioned negative attitudes towards women’s

sexuality and sexual organs generated women’s feelings of inferiority, rather than any innate,
 13

intrapsychic, or essential inferiority. She argued that Freud’s own views about female sexuality

were heavily influenced by the sociocultural positioning of the female patients he happened to

treat. Not all female psychoanalysts of this period were as anti-essentialist as Horney and

Thompson, however. Helene Deutsch (1884-1982), wrote extensively on the psychology of

women, and centered female biology in her theorizing. She cast the female clitoris as an inferior

penis and wrote about female masochism in ways that would provoke the ire of subsequent

feminists (Deutsch, 1944/45).

Psychoanalysis Meets Feminism

Despite the misogynist leanings of classical Freudian psychoanalysis, the centrality of

sex, gender, and sexuality in psychoanalytic theory made it a promising focus for feminist

interventions (see Mitchell, 1974). Thus, despite ample feminist critique of psychoanalysis,

some second wave feminist scholars engaged deeply with psychoanalytic formulations to

theorize gender. American feminists Nancy Chodorow and Jessica Benjamin, for example,

contributed important pioneering contributions to the psychoanalytic understanding of gender,

re-focusing attention on female psychological development.

In 1978, Nancy Chodorow, a psychoanalytic sociologist and feminist influenced by the

Marxism of the New Left, undertook to understand the links between the psyche and the social

world in her classic work The Reproduction of Mothering. She argued that it in order to

understand the gendered division of labor in western (and indeed many non-western) societies,

one had to understand why and how mothering was a role almost exclusively undertaken by

women. She posed the question “[W]hy are mothers women? Why is the person who routinely
 14

does all those activities that go into parenting not a man?” (Chodorow, 1978, p. 11). She

pointed out that most social scientific theories simply viewed it as a biological or natural fact

that women should mother and so expended no special effort to understand it.

She began by reviewing various theories about why women take on parenting to such a

greater degree than men, including bioevolutionary, maternal instinct, and socialization

theories. She concluded that these were insufficient in explaining women’s sole position as

mothers and the way that mothering is reproduced and thus persists across generations. She

argued that to understand these processes one must grapple with how female development is

internalized into a psychological structure: “Women are prepared psychologically for mothering

through the developmental situation in which they grow up, and in which women have

mothered them” (Chodorow, 1978, p. 39).

Counter to much of the psychoanalytic theory of the time, which focused almost

exclusively on the salience of the Oedipal phase for masculine development and the

relationship of fathers to sons, Chodorow turned to British object-relational theory to answer

the question “Why do women mother?” She focused on the mother-child relationship and

argued that gender differentiation begins very early in development as female and male

children encounter a primary caregiver who is almost always female. Because girls encounter

mothers, they develop a sense of self that is continuous with others, that seeks relationship

over individuation, and that has more flexible and permeable ego boundaries. Since girls never

give up their pre-Oedipal attachment to their mothers or their Oedipal attachment to their

fathers, they develop an internal object world that has a more complex relational constellation.

Boys, by contrast, develop a sense of self that is based on denial of relation and connection to
 15

the mother, as well as a denial of femininity. Since boys are parented primarily by women and

seek to separate from them to resolve the Oedipus complex, masculinity is a more reactive

quality in men than is femininity in women.

Chodorow then argued that since mothers are more often physically and emotionally

available to both girls and boys than are fathers, a girl’s gender identification is based on an

ongoing, real relationship that is continuous with her primary identification. Boys, however, are

most often forced to learn their masculine identification in the absence of a continuous

personal relationship with their fathers and must rely instead on cultural images of masculinity.

As a result, Chodorow claimed that masculine identification is predominantly a gender role

identification while feminine identification is predominantly a parental identification

(Chodorow, 1978). This produces a psychic structure in women that reproduces the capacity

for mothering and perpetuates women’s and men’s differential participation in systems of

production and reproduction. Since women have more developed relational capacities and

preoccupations than men, they are defined by and associated with social interaction and

personal relationships in a way that men are not.

Appearing ten year after Chodorow’s classic text, Jessica Benjamin’s The Bonds of Love,

also emphasized the importance, for the (pre-Oedipal) developing self, of relating to others

versus individuating from them, but she shifted attention away from the extent to which we

separate from or stay merged with others to how we actively engage with and make ourselves

known to the other. Benjamin has argued that it is the act of mutual recognition (being

recognized by and recognizing the other) and its consequences for psychological development

that is at the core of her theoretical contribution. The mother, in her formulation, is not an
 16

object that responds to/recognizes the infant, but is someone whom the infant recognizes as

well, as a fully subjective being in her own right. As Benjamin (1988) put it, “It must be

acknowledged that we have only just begun to think about the mother as a subject in her own

right, principally because of contemporary feminism, which made us aware of the disastrous

results for women of being reduced to the mere extension of a two-month-old” (p. 23).

For Benjamin, the sense of “being with” another, in a stance of mutuality and sharing,

informs the process of identification. Importantly, it breaks down the oppositions between

powerful and helpless, active and passive, doer and done to. This intersubjective reformulation

provided an alternative to the overvaluing of separation that Benjamin identified as a strong

bias in psychoanalytic theory. She argued that the classical formulation in which dependence

on the other was a threat to individuation and autonomy generated a psychology of

domination: “Opposites can no longer be integrated; one side is devalued, the other idealized”

(p. 50). Ultimately, since irrational oneness with the mother is most threatening to the

individuated self, it is the feminine that is devalued and the masculine (rational, separate,

dominating) that is idealized. This, according to Benjamin, is the psychic representation of many

of the long-standing dualisms of Western culture, namely, irrationality-rationality, object-

subject, and dependency-autonomy, and is the pattern “for every form of domination” (p. 218).

Clearly, psychoanalytic theorizing about gender has progressed a long way from Freud’s

original, perhaps somewhat hasty, proposals about castration anxiety and penis envy. Many

contemporary thinkers take seriously the challenge of how to move beyond the primarily

intrapsychic formulations of classical psychoanalysis to understand and explain how the

material and social representations of gender are interconnected with our psychic structures.
 17

John Money, Intersex, and the Birth of Gender

During the 1950s, as the golden age of psychoanalysis in American popular culture was

reaching its height (Hale, 1995), there emerged a historic line of research that would

fundamentally change how we view the relationship between sex and gender. This was

psychologist John Money’s work at Johns Hopkins University on the clinical management and

treatment of intersex infants. It was Money’s critique of Freud’s psychosexual theory that, at

least in part, started him on a path that would lead to a new way of thinking about biology and

culture as they related to one’s gender, and indeed even bring the word “gender” into use in a

new way.

As a doctoral student in the Psychological Clinic and Department of Social Relations at

Harvard in the late 1940s, Money (1921-2006) undertook a historical review of psychosexual

theory for a course paper. After attending a presentation of the case of an intersex man who

was raised and identified as male despite having a clitoris and developing female secondary

sexual characteristics at puberty, Money became intrigued and revised his project into a

critique of Freud’s first essay on sexuality, arguing that the instinctual, drive-based theory of

psychosexual development posited in Freud’s system did not exist (Germon, 2009). He

reviewed the medical literature on the psychology of “hermaphroditism” (as intersex was then

called), and wrote up four of his own case studies. He came to the conclusion that

“psychosexual orientation” was not, as Freud suggested, the product of an internal drive, but

was in large part the result of learning and social experience that was then internalized as

psychological. Money went on to conduct a much more ambitious and comprehensive study for
 18

his doctoral dissertation, and reiterated his general conclusion that psychosexual orientation, as

he was calling it, was not instinctual but acquired.

In the course of his research Money developed relationships with a range of

professionals involved in the research and care of intersex individuals, from urologists to

endocrinologists to psychiatrists. Upon graduation he was offered a position at Johns Hopkins

University Hospital where he could continue his work with intersex cases in a multi-disciplinary

environment. Quickly, he became dissatisfied with the terminology being used to refer to the

“manliness” or “womanliness” of people born with “indeterminate” sex status and began to

search for a new term. The term sex itself was unwieldy because it referred to the status of the

body as having a biological sex, as well as to the act of having sex. The terms sexual identity and

sex role were similarly inexact. Money was looking for a term that could offer a way of talking

about a person’s outlook, demeanour, and orientation (including but not limited to their sense

of their own sexuality) as masculine or feminine. He chose gender as this term, often using

‘gender’ and ‘gender role’ interchangeably in his early work.

In their examination of the history of intersex and John Money’s invention and use of

the term ‘gender role,’ gender studies scholar David Rubin argues that “Intersex literally gave

birth to gender” (Rubin, 2012, p. 904). By this Rubin means that the term ‘gender’ was originally

invented in the context of Money’s attempts to make intelligible, organize, and manage bodies

that presented as sexually “ambiguous” because of incomplete or inconsistent gonadal,

hormonal, genital, or chromosomal sex. This invention took place in a specific masculinist,

heteronormative cultural context that disallowed anything other than dimorphous sex (i.e., one

must be either exclusively male or exclusively female).

 19

Seeking a way to makes sense of intersex bodies that did not conform to the sex

dimorphism that was culturally demanded at that time (and arguably, still is), Money searched

for a guide as to how to intervene on these bodies. While acknowledging the theoretical

possibility that sexual polymorphism could be a “proper” state of nature, Money was

nonetheless impelled by his own cultural positioning to find a way to line up biological sex with

one’s felt sense of being male or female, masculine or feminine. This is how he came to the

term ‘gender role,’ defined specifically as “the overall degree of masculinity and or femininity

that is privately experienced and publicly manifested in infancy, childhood, and adulthood, and

that usually though not invariably correlates with the anatomy of the organs of procreation”

(Money, 1995, pp. 18-19).

Based on his research, Money was convinced that gender roles were learned, and could

therefore be taught and reinforced. Since the very young intersex infants that Money and his

team saw could not yet express their private experience of gender, and because it was felt to

be imperative that a gender decision be reached as soon as possible, their parents – but more

frequently their physicians - decided it for them. After codifying and considering the myriad

combinations of gonadal, hormonal, and chromosomal markers of sex as possible determinants

of sex assignment, Money and his team decided to use the appearance of the external genitalia

as their criterion for sex assignment If the external genitalia appeared male (i.e., presence of a

viable penis), despite other markers of femaleness, or if the external genitalia appeared female

(i.e., presence of a clitoris) despite other markers of maleness, and if the genitalia could not be

surgically changed to create a serviceable rendition that would be congruent with the other

markers, then the child was assigned the sex that matched the existing external genitalia and all
 20

surgical and hormonal interventions were focused on enforcing this assigned sex. Importantly,

once this decision was made, doctors, parents, families, and others were also trained to

rigorously reinforce the gender role that was congruent with the assigned sex. As gender

scholar Jennifer Germon has written, Money “was not denying the workings of the body in

gender, but he was suggesting that the body in turn could be worked upon – surgically and

socially – to produce a gender, indeed an exemplary gender” (Germon, 2009, p. 42).

Money’s role in the history of intersex is decidedly controversial (see Colapinto, 2000;

Goldie, 2014). This is in part due to the tragic case of David Reimer, a Canadian man who was

brought to Money as a child for treatment after his penis had been destroyed due to a botched

circumcision. When his parents brought him to Money for a consultation in the late 1960s,

Money recommended sex reassignment and raising him as a girl. Accordingly, he was subjected

to both the surgical and gender socialization steps of Money’s Intersex Case Management

protocol. After following the case for a few years Money publicly declared “Brenda’s” sex and

gender reassignment a success, but Reimer was never comfortable as a girl and by the age of 15

reassumed his male gender role. At age 38 he committed suicide after years of depression and

financial and relationship troubles.

Robert Stoller’s Contributions to Gender Theory

Money articulated the notion of gender or gender role as one’s private orientation and

public manifestation of masculinity or femininity. While this marked an important linguistic and

conceptual shift, arguably even more important for gender theory in psychology was Robert

Stoller’s differentiation between gender identity and gender role (Money saw them as more or
 21

less interrelated, two sides of the same coin). Stoller (1924-1991) was a psychoanalyst who

formed the Gender Identity Project at the University of California Los Angeles Medical School in

the late 1950s in order to study what was then called “transsexualism.” In working with

patients whose sense of themselves as male or female did not match the sex they were

assigned at birth, Stoller was led to conceptualize gender identity as the psychological self-

understanding and awareness of oneself as male or female, whereas gender role was the

awareness of the behavioral and social expectations associated with belonging to a gender.

According to Germon (2009), this allowed Stoller to separate the psychological (gender identity)

from the cultural (gender role), and to then focus on the psychological, which was congruent

with his training as a psychoanalyst and with his clinical focus. Focusing on gender identity also

allowed him to free gender from the biological trappings of sex, and this to conceptualize

transsexualism as a mismatch between assigned sex and gender identity.

Unlike Money who saw gender as primarily the result of social experience, Stoller did

believe that a core gender identity was formed early in life and that some kind of biological

substrate (yet to be determined) likely underlay the development of this identity. But the

essentialism of core gender identity was tied more to psychological processes than biological

ones in his actual work, given the state of “sexual science” at the time. That is, although his own

explanations of gender identity development focused on intrapsychic processes, he could not

abandon the idea that unknown biological forces played a strong role in determining core

gender identity, albeit in some yet-to-be-discovered way (see Stoller, 1968).

Stoller’s final contribution to gender theory was that he conceptually separated gender

from sex in a way that was highly useful for subsequent feminist theorizing. By drawing a clear
 22

conceptual line between sex as a biological phenomenon, and gender as a psychological and

social one, it became possible to analyze social and political inequalities between men and

women in terms that were free of the constraints of biology and biological determinism. In

some respects, this fueled an incredibly productive line of thinking about gender that was

completely untethered from the material body. In other respects, it set up a problematic to

which feminists would ultimately have to return. The too-simple dichotomy of sex equals

biology and gender equals culture proved to be difficult to sustain and justify. It inevitably led

back to the thorny questions: What is sex? What is gender? And what is the relationship

between them?

Feminist Psychologists Theorize Gender

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, in tandem with the growing women’s liberation

movement, a systematic set of critiques took aim at existing psychological theories of gender

and psychology’s own sexist institutional practices. One of these critiques was Naomi

Weisstein’s 1968 published address Psychology Constructs the Female (Weisstein, 1968), in

which she argued that psychology - especially clinical psychology, personality psychology, and

psychiatry - had nothing useful to say about women because of its over-reliance on intrapsychic

and trait theories and inattention to social context. Without a consideration of the social

expectations about women and the social conditions under which they lived, Weisstein argued,

psychology would have very little of relevance to say about women (see Rutherford, Vaughn-

Blount, & Ball, 2010). Other psychologists took up with renewed vigor the task of exploring and

exposing the inadequacies of intrapsychic explanations, but also the androcentrism (using the

male/masculine as the standard) that infused psychology’s and society’s views of gender.
 23

In 1970, Broverman et al. documented the androcentrism inherent to our constructions

of mental health by showing that traits rated as masculine overlapped much more than traits

rated as feminine with those associated with good mental health. They concluded that the

healthy adult person was really a healthy adult male (Broverman et al., 1970). The extent to

which psychology and society pathologized both being overly feminine (passive, dependent)

and not feminine enough (rebellious, outspoken) was identified by Phyllis Chesler in her 1972

book Women and Madness (Chesler, 1972). Here Chesler exposed not only the tendency to

place women in the aforementioned double bind, she also exposed the abuse of women by the

mental health establishment. She documented the frequency of sexual exploitation in therapy,

in which women were often abused at the hands of their male psychiatrists and psychologists.

It would take several more years and the activism of feminist psychologists before sexual

contact with clients was made explicitly unethical according the American Psychological

Association’s own ethics code (Kim & Rutherford, 2015).

Along with critiques of psychological theories about gender and psychology’s own sexist

practices came critiques of research methods. These critiques noted the tendency for

psychological research to rely heavily on white male undergraduate subjects, but to generalize

the findings as though they were universally applicable. The absence of research on topics

pertaining specifically to women, except perhaps when they were framed as problems

(menstrual invalidism and mother-blame, for example), was also noted. Feminist psychologists

also wrote extended and sophisticated analyses of the biases of psychological research

grounded in growing work on the sociology of knowledge (e.g., Sherif, 1979). In addition to

valuable critique, a whole new body of research that took sex and gender as central foci or axes
 24

of inquiry coalesced. It was christened the “psychology of women” although there was some

disagreement that this was the most appropriate name for this new area (see Parlee, 1975).

Later, the psychology of men and masculinity would be formed as the counterpoint to this field

(see Cochran, 2010), and the more expansive name “psychology of gender” would also be

adopted. There quickly emerged several lines of research that took up this focus on sex and

gender in different ways.

Sex/Gender Differences Research

Reprising the much earlier (and indeed ongoing) preoccupation with male/female sex

differences, one line of research in the psychology of women that has continued unabated (and

is practiced by feminists and non-feminists alike), revolves around the question of sex

differences. In 1974, Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin surveyed the state of the field and

published their findings in The Psychology of Sex Differences (Maccoby & Jacklin, 1974). In

addition to reviewing all available research at the time to try and establish the most reliable

findings, they also reviewed existing evidence for three explanatory models: genetic-biological

factors, shaping and reinforcement of sex-typed behaviors, and imitation of same-sex parents

or social learning.

They reviewed articles that tested for sex differences in more than 80 separate traits or

skills. They concluded from this comprehensive review that there existed four reliably

empirically supported differences: 1) girls have better verbal ability than boys; 2) boys have

better visuo-spatial ability than girls; 3) boys have better mathematical ability starting in

adolescence; and 4) males are more physically and verbally aggressive than females. They also
 25

concluded that genetic-biological factors appeared to have some explanatory force in the area

of visuospatial ability and aggression, while the reinforcement of sex-typed behaviors had been

implicated in some differences but not others, and that imitation of same-sex parents seemed

to have the least support as an explanatory model.

In hindsight, Maccoby and Jacklin’s work was influential not because it established the

truth about sex differences (many subsequent studies using statistical techniques such as meta-

analysis have generated very different results, see Hyde, 2005), but because it did further

debate about whether these differences were consequential or not, about how to

conceptualize the origins of potential differences, and - for some – whether the pursuit of

difference was a worthy goal of feminist psychology.

One contemporary manifestation of debates over male-female difference is how to

account for women’s continued underrepresentation in Science, Technology, Engineering, and

Mathematics (STEM). Is this underrepresentation the logical consequence of women’s innate

inferiority in the cognitive skills required for these careers? Is it about inborn or socialized

preferences for non-STEM activities? Or is it about structural barriers and stereotypes about

gender and science that make STEM careers difficult for women to access and thrive in (Carli et

al., 2016; Reuben, Sapienza, & Zingales, 2014)? Today, psychologists are researching all of these

areas.

In light of the large and robust literature on sex differences and gender stereotypes,

some social psychologists have attempted to study the relationship between the two. One

prominent and well-developed theory in this area is Alice Eagly’s social role theory (Eagly,
 26

1987). This theory takes the congruence between empirically established sex differences and

gender stereotypes as something to be explained. Eagly uses the concept of social roles to

explain how sex differences are maintained. According to social role theory, when individuals

act in ways that are congruent with their gender roles, they directly confirm stereotypes about

sex differences – what is seen to be “natural” or appropriate in terms of being a man or a

woman. They also gain experiences that reinforce and reward the behaviors associated with

enacting these social roles, thus ensuring more gender-stereotyped behaviors in the future.

Thus “differences and similarities arise primarily from the distribution of men and women into

social roles within their society” (Eagly & Wood, 2016). Social role theory contrasts with

theories that purport the existence of innate personality differences, attributing more

prominence to social context. As social context changes, so should the activation and acting out

of gender roles, and as different social roles become available to more women and men, so too

should findings about gender differences.

Recently, Eagly and her colleague Wendy Wood have evaluated the claims of

evolutionary psychologists and developed a model that aims to integrate biology and culture,

or nature and nurture into a “biosocial interactionist” theory of gender (Wood & Eagly, 2012).

Claiming that feminist perspectives in psychology may have ignored biology at their own peril,

and that the claims of evolutionary psychology are scientifically untenable, Eagly and Wood

(2013) propose that the link between “societal gender and sex-differentiated behaviors is

mediated by biological, psychological and social processes” (p. 553).

A final body of research on sex/gender differences that must be mentioned is the recent

resurgence of claims that sex/gender are hardwired in the brain. Many who make this claim
 27

accept a theory of brain organization suggesting that steroid hormones at a critical period of

fetal development produce permanent structural and functional sex/gender differences in the

brain (for a critical review, see Jordan-Young, 2010). Others, such as Baron-Cohen (2007) use

the extensive existing literature on sex/gender differences to argue that there is such a thing as

a male brain and a female brain, each with its own characteristic strengths. The male brain is

characterized by its ability at “systemizing” and the female brain by its ability at “empathizing.”

While there appear to be some major flaws in both the science and the reasoning underlying

these approaches (see Fine, 2010), the allure of brain-based discourse combined with the allure

of sex-difference discourse continue to exert a powerful pull on the imaginations of scientists

and the public alike.

Relational/Cultural Approaches

A different approach to theorizing male-female differences emerged in the mid-late

1970s. In 1976, psychiatrist Jean Baker Miller published Toward a New Psychology of Women.

In this classic volume, she suggested that characteristics typically ascribed to women and

culturally devalued, such as vulnerability, emotional weakness, helplessness, relationality and

connectedness, could actually be re-conceptualized as strengths. If women’s lives were placed

at the center of analysis, these qualities could be re-evaluated. Miller’s ideas developed into a

relational-cultural model of psychological development that places the ability to sustain

relationships as central to human growth and sees disconnectedness as a threat to

psychological well-being (Miller, 1976). According to this theory and the therapy that has been

developed from it, disconnectedness can arise out of power imbalances that impel one member

in a relationship to hide or distort authentic feelings for fear of being ridiculed or invalidated.
 28

Although the power imbalances between women and men are one example, relational

disruptions can also occur as a result of racism, classism, heterosexism, and other

discriminatory societal practices that affect power relations.

At the same time that Miller was developing her ideas, Harvard psychologist Carol

Gilligan was conducting interviews with women on self-other relationships and moral decision

making that led her to formulate the importance of the ‘relational voice,’ the voice that insists

on maintaining connection with others, especially with other women (Gilligan, 1982). In 1973,

the landmark decision in Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in the United States. Intrigued by

how individual women might approach the question of whether or not to have an abortion,

Gilligan set out to listen to their voices. She discovered that women’s moral decision making

processes did not map particularly well onto prevailing psychological theories constructed

within a completely (but invisibly) androcentric framework, such as her mentor Lawrence

Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development. In Gilligan’s interviews it was clear that women

often valued remaining in relationship, not inflicting pain, and used both thinking and feeling as

the basis for moral decision making. She developed these findings into a framework that she

called “an ethic of care” that contrasted with the more abstract, justice-based moral reasoning

that Kohlberg had privileged in his model (Gilligan, 1982).

While both Miller and Gilligan’s work made the important shift towards understanding

women’ experiences on women’s own terms, the relational-cultural school has sometimes been

critiqued for essentializing women and presenting women’s supposedly unique qualities as

characteristic of all women, regardless of their social position. It has been argued that other

vantage points may be equally or more important to many women, such as those afforded by
 29

social class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Critics also argue that making the claim for

women’s uniqueness, and positioning them as in many ways superior to men, simply fuels the

gender differences debates. In response, Gilligan has argued that it has never been her position

that the “ethic of care” is necessarily essential to women. She is interested in the question of

how men and women come to speak of themselves in certain characteristic ways, of how girls

and women learn to silence themselves, and how to make an ethic of care a more prominent

part of all human development.

Beyond Differences: Social Constructionist and Discursive Approaches

In her 1979 article “Toward a redefinition of sex and gender” feminist social psychologist

Rhoda Unger argued that traditional questions about sex differences usually took the male as

the standard and examined women’s deviation from that, and as such were not very feminist

questions. She argued that they diverted attention from the much more common similarities

between the sexes, and they obscured consideration of the social constraints and conditions

governing gender. In addition, she also clarified the distinction between sex and gender. She

defined sex as a stimulus variable that reflected one’s presumed biological maleness or

femaleness. Gender was the socially constructed sets of characteristics, qualities, and traits

associated with maleness or femaleness. With this distinction in place, it became possible for

psychologists to study gender apart from sex, thus opening the field to move beyond sex

differences research based on comparing groups of biological males and females towards

studying gender as a social process (Unger, 1979; see also Cole & Stewart, 2001). [There has

been considerable conceptual slippage between these terms, and even though sex differences
 30

research is now called gender differences research it is usually still based on comparing groups

of presumed men and women].

With gender separated from sex, psychologists could ask questions about how gender

takes on different meanings, how it is expressed in different contexts, how bodies become not

only “sexed” but also gendered, how gender functions to regulate access to power and status,

and how it interacts with other social formations such as race/ethnicity and class to affect

people’s experiences in the world. Gender, as feminist historian Joan Scott pointed out,

becomes a category of analysis - a tool for unpacking the processes through which power

relations are enforced and maintained, often in combination with race and class (Scott, 1986).

In psychology, Stewart & McDermott (2004) propose that gender is also an analytic tool that

can help us study how traits, for example, become gendered, and what functions that

gendering serves to regulate interpersonal and personal experience, public discourse, and

access to opportunities.

But how, exactly, might gender itself be enacted and reinforced? In their 1978 book

Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach, psychologists Suzanne Kessler and Wendy

McKenna immersed themselves in the lives of members of the “transsexual” community to

illuminate the day-to-day processes through which gender is socially constructed. They did this

by examining how members of this community accomplished acquiring a new gender. As they

showed, acquiring and maintaining a gender followed strict rules requiring, at least for a time,

constant vigilance (e.g., maintaining “proper” talk, gestures, responses, gait, etc.). Although the

“rules of gender” were put into relief due to the challenges faced by transgender people in

acquiring a new, socially accepted, gender, these rules also reveal the myriad ways gender is
 31

performed by everyone to maintain the “natural” appearance of masculinity and femininity

(Kessler & McKenna, 1978).

Almost ten years later, sociologists Candace West and Don Zimmerman’s formulation of

“doing gender” also proposed that gender is enacted continuously in everyday social

interactions. In order for it to appear natural it must be continuously and repetitively

reconstructed (West & Zimmerman, 1987). Their formulation went beyond theories of gender

socialization, which posited that girls and boys, by the time they reach a certain age, have

internalized a set of gendered norms that will remain relatively invariant throughout their lives.

Doing gender, they argued, was an ongoing aspect of everyday life.

A few years later, feminist philosopher Judith Butler’s influential formulation of the role

of language and discourse in constituting gender pushed scholars to think about gender beyond

the binary (Butler, 1990). Butler, influenced by French poststructuralism, argued that gender

was performative – that language and action constitute, maintain, and reproduce gender, and

specifically the gender binary. Gender, and indeed the subject who performs gender, has no a

priori status outside language. Further, Butler contended that the maintenance of the binaries

of sex and gender and their correspondence (male sex=masculine gender) is reinforced by the

system of compulsory heterosexuality. She challenged the reader to disrupt this system by

queering gender and imagining other gender possibilities. While West and Zimmerman did not

trouble gender as much as they attempted to explain how gender norms are produced and kept

in place, Butler was interested in troubling it. Her goal was to “insist upon the extension of

legitimacy to bodies that have been regarded as false, unreal, and unintelligible” (p. xxv, 1999

preface).
 32

Feminist psychologists who have been influenced by these views of gender tend to use

methods that allow them to examine how discourses around gender and other social categories

come to structure personal experience and understanding, and with what effects (see Clarke &

Braun, 2009; Gavey, 1989). How can we create new discourses about gender, and new

gendered possibilities? How might we allow for a broader range of gendered expression and

gendered subjectivities? They also trouble, as does Butler, the ontological status of sex. Sex,

they argue, is as much a discursive formation as gender. How do we come to attach sexes and

genders to bodies?

Intersectionality as a Framework and Analytical Tool

Throughout this chapter I have been discussing the theorization of gender in psychology

as though it were possible to separate gender from the multiple other social categories that

comprise our identities and structure our material and social experiences. The inadequacy of

this approach was highlighted by the contributions of Black feminist scholars such as Patricia

Hill Collins and Kimberle Crenshaw (Collins, 1986, 1990; Crenshaw, 1989, 1991). They

formulated and formalized the concept of intersectionality in the late 1980s (although

intersectional thinking was expressed earlier, see Cole, 2009 for a brief history). Since then it

has become a widely used and variously applied framework, concept, theory, and analytical

tool. As Cho, Crenshaw, and Williams (2013) have written, intersectionality was proposed as a

“heuristic term to focus attention on the vexed dynamics of difference and the solidarities of

sameness in the context of antidiscrimination and social movement politics” (p. 787). It drew

attention to the interdependent relationships among different social categories (race, gender,

class, etc.) in shaping experiences of oppression, and was expressed in such metaphors as the
 33

matrix of domination and the interlocking nature of oppression (Collins, 1986, 1990). While

originally derived to address the specific experiences of Black women, as intersectionality was

taken up more widely across disciplines scholars began to use it as a tool for understanding not

only how gender intersects with race, but also how it operates in relation to multiple other

social formations, and how intersectionality can help us chart the dynamics of both oppression

and privilege.

In American psychology, some of the earliest published expressions of intersectional

thinking can be found in work that examined racism and sexism in the lives of Black women

(Reid, 1988; Smith & Stewart, 1983). Soon, scholars highlighted the remarkable absence of

intersectional approaches in psychology, noting psychology’s near-exclusive focus on gender in

isolation from race and class. As Reid (1993) noted, “For the most part, theory and empirical

study in the psychology of women have failed to recognize many distinctions among women.

Indeed, the focus of feminist theory and research has been directed to the explication of

women’s essential experience of gender, as if this could be separated from the confounds of

class and race….[H]uman behavior would be best represented by a more complex model” (p.

134). This “more complex” model would begin to make its way more thoroughly and explicitly

into academic psychology over the next decade or so (see, for example, Buchanan & Ormerod,

2002; Fine & Weis, 1998; Settles, 2006). In 2008, a special issue of the journal Sex Roles was

devoted to empirical studies employing intersectionality (Shields, 2008), including a discussion

of how to overcome some of the methodological challenges that this more complex model

poses (Bowleg, 2008). In 2009 Elizabeth Cole published a call for increased use of
 34

intersectionality in psychological research, and presented a framework for doing so. Within this

framework, she encouraged psychologists to ask three questions as they designed their studies.

The first, “Who is included in this category?” is designed to disrupt assumptions about

the homogeneity of social categories, encourage thinking about diversity within categories, and

encourage the inclusion of traditionally marginalized or understudied groups, those with

multiple subordinate identities – the “intersectionally invisible” (Purdie-Vaughans & Eibach,

2008). The second question, “What role does inequality play?” highlights the important point

that categories such as gender and race are not properties of individuals but rather structural

categories and social processes. Race and gender position individuals in different ways to

receive opportunity, or conversely, experience discrimination. It also attends to historical and

cultural contexts in which individuals are embedded. The final question, “Where are there

similarities?” pushes researchers and activists to consider similarities in experience that may

move across multiple identity categories so as to promote coalitional politics. It asks them to

consider not what race and gender are but what they do so as to create ways of thinking about

research that can bridge across difference and inform social issues and public policy (Cole,

2009).

Conclusion: The Future of Gender Beyond the Binary?

Despite all of these developments in gender theory in psychology, including the

theoretical challenges of queer theory and intersectionality, one aspect that seems to persist is

– if not a belief in, then at least a continued operationalization of - binary thinking. Binary

thinking, as I have shown, is well-entrenched in the ways that psychologists have measured
 35

gender and how they have deployed it in research studies. The existence of well-recognized yet

separate subfields of the psychology of women (see Rutherford & Granek, 2010; Rutherford,

Marecek, & Sheese, 2012), and the psychology of men and masculinities (see Cochran, 2010),

seems itself to mirror (and continue to reify) the persistence of the binary. There are, however,

some indications that psychologists are beginning to think “beyond F and M” (Schellenberg &

Kaiser, 2018, p. 163). In survey and questionnaire research, a first small step involves

reformulating the sex/gender categories to which respondents may subscribe. But as

Westbrook and Saperstein (2015) have pointed out, if the survey content itself still conveys

assumptions based on binary thinking this is at best a superficial intervention.

Another promising development is the increased awareness of how gender

assumptions, including binary thinking, influence each stage of the research process. Although

many feminist psychologists have critiqued gender bias in psychological research, or how to

think critically about research on gender (e.g., Caplan & Caplan, 1998;, Grady, 1981; Wallston,

1981), acquiring a set of analytic tools to design more gender-sensitive and gender-

transformative psychological research that includes the rigorous incorporation of non-binary

gender assumptions remains of key importance (for a relevant resource, see

[Link]

That said, there are indications that a more fluid, multidimensional approach to gender

that acknowledges and even theorizes the subjectivities of intersex, trans, gender queer, and

gender non-conforming folks may be on the horizon. Psychology is immersed in the culture of

which it forms a part. In January of 2017, a special issue of the magazine National Geographic,

entitled “Gender Revolution” was devoted to profiling people of all different genders, including
 36

intersex, transgender, bi-gender, androgynous, genderfluid, genderqueer, agender, gender-

nonconforming, and cisgender folks. If history is any guide to the future, with these social

changes should follow a psychology that allows the possibility of sex/gender subjectivities that

move far beyond the binary.

 37

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Endnote

1 Many feminist scholars have demonstrated that it is not possible to maintain a rigid distinction
between sex (referring to the biological state of being male, female, or intersex), and gender
(referring to the socially constructed and culturally ascribed qualities associated with
masculinity, femininity, etc.). The two are entangled and interdependent (see Fausto-Sterling,
2012).

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