Rethinking Gender/Sex Identity

Abstract

Until quite recently, investigations of gender/sex development operated from a baseline assumption that gender/sex is dichotomous or binary. Most such studies constructed gender/sex outside of or adjacent to specific cultures, and for the most part studied children from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) countries. In this paper I first advocate for four research guidelines-inclusivity, epistemic justice, materiality, and empiricism. I sketch out the historical background that still shapes contemporary studies into the psychology of gender/sex identity in infants and toddlers. Next, I point toward methods for the study of gender/sex in infants and toddlers that have the potential to make nonbinary development visible and to develop culturally diverse concepts of identity development. Finally, I challenge psychologists and others to view and operationalize the study of identity as a relational, phenomenological entity rather than a fixed feature of the individual psyche.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.