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Chapter 1 (continued)
Developmental Processes
This section will deal with three key concepts. They are gender identity, masculine identification, and gender role. Gender identity is a person’s awareness of being either male or female. This is usually established by age three. Most homosexual persons do not experience difficulty with gender identity.3(p185) Masculine identification could be described as a sense of belonging, or MUTUALITY, with men. It seems to begin with a sense of being like father and being accepted by father,4(p27) which is later generalized into an ability to attach to other same-sex models.4(p29, 34) Gender role (also called social sex-role3(p185) and sex-role identity6(p6)) is the behaviors that are expected of individuals because of their gender. These include “physical attributes, mannerisms, speech, interests, and personality traits.”3(p185)
Gender Identity
Gender identity begins with a young child’s most rudimentary recognition of categories. They become aware early on that there are two types of people—boys and girls—and they have been told that they are one or the other. But their comprehension of the fact that gender is a constant thing that does not change—for example, if a boy puts on a dress or a girl gets a hair cut—does not develop until later.5(p92) Between the ages of five and seven years most children become able to maintain stable categorizations of things. It is during these years that children acquire a constant sense of their own and others’ gender.5(p119)
Masculine Identification
Children begin life primarily identified with their mother, who is usually the main source of care and nurturance. For boys to gain a masculine identification it is necessary for them to shift their primary identification from mother to father, or some other adult male.4(p26) The most receptive time for this identification appears to be before the age of five years. Joseph Nicolosi considers the time between the ages of two and a half and three years old to be especially crucial.4(p26) The boy has some natural sense within him that he is not like his mother. Nicolosi describes this as “an intense intuition based on a bodily sense” that tells him he is different from his mother, but like his father. This is accompanied by an interest and desire to grow up to be like his father.4(p27) Masculine traits are established and reinforced largely due to identification with, and encouragement from, the father.6(p115) The mother’s reactions to the father, to other males, and to the boy are also important in this regard. This initial identification with the father prepares the boy for identification with other males4(p29, 34) who will reinforce and add to his growing sense of himself as a masculine individual.
Gender Role
Children begin to perceive role difference in infancy and associate certain roles with certain people. For example, mothers are associated with comfort and fathers with play.5(p93) By the age of two, children begin to sex-type items such as lawn mowers, tools, ties, purses, irons, and clothes dryers.5(p94) Younger children (through approximately age five) typically view the roles of their parents differently and according to stereotypes.5(p163-169) During middle childhood a number of influences outside the family contribute to the development of gender role, including schools, television, advertisements, and peers.5(p181-204) Cultural gender expectations, practices of the social institutions they are exposed to (such as family, school, and church), and their acquired individual attitudes and beliefs form the basis for gender role development in children.5(p6)
Robert Stoller wrote: “The first order of business in being a man is: don’t be a woman.”7(p29) In infancy and early childhood the mind distinguishes and separates things into different categories. With regard to gender, children create two categories, girl and boy, based on cultural prescriptions of masculinity and femininity. Part of knowing how to say and do “boy” things may be knowing how to not say and do “girl” things.8(p244) There can be significant consequences to openly disregarding socially accepted gender roles, such as being labeled deviant.3(p185)
For adult males, gender role includes all of their concepts of what “good” men are supposed to be and do. A man’s gender role definition may include such things as acceptable physical attributes, ways of self expression, ways of relating to women and children, athletic abilities, social class, sexual prowess, level of education, spirituality, and profession. A man’s gender role definition can have profound implications on his self-esteem. If his definition of gender role matches what he actually is, then he is likely to have a fair amount of self-confidence. But if he does not match his concept of gender role he will probably feel inferior to, and perhaps envious of, those men who are more like his definition.
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MUTUALITY: the quality of a relationship in which each participant experiences a sense that his way of being is accepted by the other and that he in turn accepts the way of being of the other; a supportive affirmation among two people.1(p219)