Originally, sex referred to biological sex and gender was used when discussing grammatical categories such as masculine or feminine words that exist in some languages.1 As society began to use sex as a truncated form of sexual relations, some institutions began to instead use the word gender in official capacities to refer to an individua’s biological sex.2 In 1945, Madison Bentley published Sanity and Hazard in Childhood. In this publication, Bently took the grammatical masculine and feminine aspect of gender and applied it to an individual’s social expression by stating “In the grade-school years, too, gender (which is the socialized obverse of sex) is a fixed line of demarkation, the qualifying terms being ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine.’”3 The idea of associating gender with social expression further developed with John Money contributing the term gender role, and Robert Stoller and Ralph Greenson coining the term gender identity.4 5 6
Since the introduction of the alternate definition of gender, it has gradually become accepted by many that sex refers to biological differences and gender describes an individual’s expression or identity. However, not everyone agrees with replacing the definition of gender and many also question whether the concept of social gender is rooted in reality. The major question is whether there is an actual science behind gender as a social construct or if it is a desire that is the result of a belief, a mental health issue, or both.
The American Psychiatric Association maintains and occasionally publishes an updated version of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, commonly abbreviated to DSM. Within the 1994 published DSM-IV, the desire to be of the opposite sex, or to be of a different gender when using the social construct oriented definition, was called Gender Identity Disorder. When DSM-5 was published in 2013, the term was changed to Gender Dysphoria in order to avoid stigma associated with the word disorder. There is an interesting parallel between the removal of the word disorder in the desire to change additional related terminology. Some have made the request to replace Disorders of Sex Development with Intersex or Variations of Sex Development. In both cases, an attempt is made to not use the label disorder despite both being considered disorders by medical community consensus. Interestingly, DSM-5 still uses the term Disorder of Sex Development despite its changing of Gender Identity Disorder to Gender Dysphoria. With Gender Dysphoria being included in the DSM as a mental disorder, and the full title of the publication being Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the question of whether the social gender concept is a mental disorder appears to have been answered.
The goal of many who suffer from Gender Dysphoria is to have everyone accept their belief, to have everyone use alternate pronouns of various types upon the person with the condition, and to use bathrooms and enter sports of the opposite sex even when not affected by a disorder of sex development. Although mental conditions are very real and can be disabling for many sufferers, society doesn’t accept the occurrence in reality of, for example, the hallucinations of a person suffering from Schizophrenia, or that someone is following or conspiring against an individual with Paranoid Personality Disorder. Therefore, it stands to reason that society also wouldn’t accept the subjective reality of a Gender Dysphoria mental disorder as part of the objective reality of everyone else.
On the side of physical disorders, which are objective reality, society accommodates with developments such as wheelchair accessibility for those with mobility issues or tactile sidewalk paving for the blind. An office wouldn’t wrap its interior with foil to prevent the stalker from listening in on the schizophrenic, or have pretend conversations with the paranoid person’s hallucinated voices when the voices request to speak with others in the room. It follows that everyone shouldn’t be forced to use a gender dysphoric individual’s desired pronouns or to allow them into opposite sex bathrooms or sports when not affected by a disorder of sex development.
All of this is logical, except that a distinction has been made between Gender Dysphoria and being transgender. Many who are transgender state that they aren’t necessarily affected by Gender Dysphoria. The diagnosis of Gender Dysphoria in the various publications of DSM focus on the distress felt due to the incongruence between the biological sex, or current social construct gender, and the desired gender. This is where sex and gender as a social construct truly show their separation and it becomes necessary to examine the function of gender and use of words associated with sex and gender. Words such as Man, Woman, He, She, Him, and Her.
- https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article-abstract/31/4/561/170954/The-Nature-of-Gender?redirectedFrom=fulltext ↩︎
- https://www.oed.com/dictionary/gender_n?tab=meaning_and_use&tl=true#3045140 ↩︎
- https://www.jstor.org/stable/1417846?origin=crossref ↩︎
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14378807/ ↩︎
- https://pep-web.org/browse/document/IJP.045.0220A ↩︎
- https://pep-web.org/search/document/IJP.045.0217A ↩︎
