VIRIEWS by

VIRGINIA

SEXUAL IDENTITY VERSUS GENDERAL IDENTITY - THE REAL CONFUSION

Virginia Prince, Ph.D.

Editor's Note: Once again I am filling the Virgin Views column with a paper. It is a paper read at the American Psychological Association convention in Toronto over Labor Day and it might be of interest and use to you to see what I told the psychologists.

I am afraid that I must start this paper by taking immediate excep- tion to the title of the symposium. What I will talk about and I suspect is at the root of what the others will deal with, is not sexual identity but genderal identity. After all, how many people are there who don't know whether they have a vagina or a penis and thus are female or male respectively? Unfortunately our society has operated so long on the idea, as so succinctly put forth by Sigmund Freud, that "anatomy is destiny" that we are unable to see beyond it. Anatomy is the basic social determinant of gender but it is gender which is "destiny," since it determines how one's life will be led. Anatomy determines an individual's role in the productive process but that is really all that it determines. The rest of the total of our life functions is not sex but gender and it is a psycho-social function and not an anatomical- physiological one.

Money and others have shown that gender identity is almost com- pletely established by the age of two or three and there is seldom much confusion about it in the mind of the child. The only way a child is liable to become confused is when the parents themselves are in doubt of the true sex, due to some genital anomaly. In that case they give contradictory signals to the child. Such children may develop what Stoller has termed "hermaphroditic gender."

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