What are the factors that make up gender identity?

     Neuroscientist David Linden has published Why People Are Different: A Scientific Perspective on Human Personality. The author talks about why the representatives of the human race are so diverse: from hair color and character traits to household habits and sexual preferences. Among the factors of these differences are genetic variability and environmental influences, learning and individual experience. As Linden writes in the prologue, “the study of the origins of individuality is not only a task for biologists.

    Anthropologists, artists, historians, linguists, literary critics, philosophers and psychologists also take part in it. But it turns out that the most important aspects of this topic involve fundamental questions about the development, genetics, and plasticity of our nervous system.” We publish a fragment from the chapter on gender and gender identity.

    So far, we have talked about the biological field determined by sex chromosomes, variations in hormonal signals, and developmental randomness: female, male, or intersex. Now let's move on to talking about gender. According to the World Health Organization, "the term 'gender' refers to the socially determined roles, behaviors, activities and other manifestations that a particular society considers appropriate for men and women." Being a social construct, gender identity will change depending on the culture - in modern Japan, "male" means very different than in Spain in the Middle Ages. If even sex, a biological phenomenon, does not make it easy to divide people into categories, then what can we say about gender, which is much more mobile.

    Most people are cisgender, that is, their biological sex and gender identity are the same. Recall that, on average, men and women differ in height by about two standard deviations. And in terms of gender identification, men and women differ by almost 12 standard deviations. In other words, most people identify with the biological sex they received at birth. But for about 0.6% of the US adult population (about one person in 167), things are more difficult; this situation is called transgender. Some transgender people consider their gender to be different from what they were assigned at birth. Others do not feel strongly connected to any gender and thus identify as agender, or genderqueer, or whatever (there are now 70 options to choose from when registering on Facebook).