Ethics Finder

Gender Identity

Until recently ‘gender’ was simply a grammatical category (masculine, feminine, common, and neuter: e.g. in pronouns ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’ and ‘it’). However, beginning with the work of the French writer, social theorist and feminist critic Simone De Beauvoir (1908-1986) and her book The Second Sex (1949) there developed the idea that gender is a form of cultural and social classification distinct from that of biological sex. Whereas the latter is a form of scientific identification, gender is a cultural construct. Thus ‘female’ is a biological description but ‘feminine’ is a social one. In its early stages gender theory was associated with feminism and with the rejection of ideas of ‘womanhood’ or ‘femininity’ that were said to have been fashioned by men to control and exploit women. More recently, however, gender theory has included such claims as that psychological and cultural self-identification, rather than biology is determinative of one’s identity. This has led to disputes between some feminists and radical gender theorists.

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