Article 2: The Future of Sex and Gender in Psychology: Five Challenges to the Gender Binary Flashcards
The division of humans into two categories
This division based on genitalia is often accompanied by the assumption that men and women belong to two distinct categories but scientific evidence refute this assumption for the brain. Human brains are not internally consistent for male typical and female typical features.
Social neuroendocrine research on gender
Androgens and estrogens are not two distinct sets of sex hormones. They are found in all humans. Levels of hormones are not fixed but dynamic.
Gender differences and similarities
Humans are characterized by a gender mosaic. Meta analytic findings point to the gender similarities hypothesis, which asserts that all females and males are quite similar on most but not all psychological variables. The small effect sizes for gender differences found in meta-analyses imply large overlap in the distribution of scores for men and women.
Transgender and nonbinary psychological research
Transgender and nonbinary people show that birth assigned categories are imperfect. Cis and trans people consider their gender to be either one or the other but others see it as continuous or irrelevant. Gender category self-labeling and gender roles and expectations are both necessary for understanding how individuals psychologically process the systems of socialization around them in ways that are not linked to birth assigned categories.
Gender and developmental psychology
Gender and sex categorization is overlearned early in life. The exaggeration of perceptual discriminability of gender, routine linguistic labeling of people by gender, and explicit and implicit sorting of individuals by gender contribute to childrens tendency to categorize themselves and others.
Costs of gender binary
Reliance on gender binary in research is an obstacle to scientific progress.
Gender binary denigrates the existence of individuals whose bodies or identities fall outside of the two categories.
Many cultures hold on to beliefs that men and women are very different which results in dictating of others behaviour, shaping of individuals conception of themselves, undermine people’s performance in stereotyped domains, shape legal and social policies.
