Gender Identity

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Gender Identity
Gender identity is an extremely relevant topic today. Many people have their own ideas on what is right and what is wrong for each gender to act, and these people are very vocal and opinionated about their ideas. One recent controversial story about gender identity was when a couple refused to tell anybody whether their child named Storm was a boy or a girl. Their oldest child, Jazz, who was originally born male, “always gravitated to dresses, the colour pink and opted for long hair often fixed into braids” (Poisson, 2013). Jazz now asks to be called “she”, and her experiences with gender identity are what inspired her parents to raise Storm as a gender neutral child. People were so upset over this decision that it sparked a huge controversy about whether or not this was a bad thing for the child (Poisson, 2013). In this paper, I will be discussing the many different theories that cover gender identity and also will be explaining differences and simulates between being male and being female. Gender identity is a large part of development that is a spectrum defined by a combination of culture and biology, and is best created by raising children as gender neutral as possible.
Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis explains cultural differences in gender as a result of the unconscious. This theory comes from his idea that human life is driven by the need to satisfy desires for gratification. These desires, however, are repressed in early life and pushed into the unconscious. In terms of child development, Freud discovered what he called infantile sexuality, where infants have different stages of desires that need to be gratified in order to survive. During these stages, the child has no sense of identity, only dri...

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...S. L. (1983). Gender Schema Theory And Its Implications For Child Development: Raising Gender-Aschematic Children In A Gender-Schematic Society. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 8(4), 598-616.
Maccoby, E. E. (2002). Gender And Social Exchange: A Developmental Perspective. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 2002(95), 87-106.
Maccoby, E. E. (2000). Perspectives on gender development. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 24(4), 398-406.
Perry, D. G., & Pauletti, R. E. (2011). Gender and Adolescent Development. Journal Of Research On Adolescence, 21(1), 61-74.
Poisson, J. (2013, November 15). Remember Storm? We check in on the baby being raised gender-neutral. thestar.com. Retrieved December 9, 2013, from http://www.thestar.com/life/parent/2013/11/15/remember_storm_we_check_in_on_the_baby_being_raised_genderneutral.html

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