Where do you keep your gender?

(And no, I’m not being euphemistic and lewd here).

But where do you actually house that inner knowledge about what gender you are and what that means to you? What it might mean about you.

It seems there’s lots of science and opinions swirling around this gender stuff at the moment. People weighing-in on the side of either nature or nurture; suggesting that we’re born with our gender or that we learn it. One or the other.

(Which is often how society generally sees sex and gender in the first place – male or female, gay or straight, masculine or feminine – when it seems there are also plenty of places outside those prescribed roles too…).

And how can all of this be reliably measured anyway?

By whose yardstick?

For if you listen to the comments in the media at the moment, there seems a stack of different ways to interpret the results.

For instance, Dr Cordelia Fine in her new book “Delusions of Gender” exposes what she sees as “neurosexism.” She suggests that the idea that our gender could be hardwired into our brains, unchangeable, and that we innately have so-called ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ traits like those in “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” often stems from spurious science. (And that these concepts not only spring from sexist notions, but can also be used to further support and cement sexism).

Other commentators dispute that, and point to things like “gender dysphoria,” an official psychiatric diagnosis of “a strong and persistent cross-gender identification” that seems to start in infancy, and suggests a possible hard-wiring of sorts after all.

So is our gender hard-wired or not?

It seems hard to find a solid answer out there.

And maybe finding ‘the answer’ has limited value anyway?

For maybe what also matters is your own personal relationship to your gender. How you navigate all of this stuff on the inside, as well as in the public realm. What it means in terms of who you are, and who you might let yourself be and become.

So perhaps it’s worth exploring that side of things occasionally, too, to see what (or who) you might find.

In Part 2 of this post, we’ll look at some questions that may help uncover some of those things a bit more.

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Photo: Gabrielle Gawne-Kelnar

Gabrielle Gawne-Kelnar (Grad Dip Counselling & Psychotherapy) is a Sydney psychotherapist in private practice at One Life Counselling & Psychotherapy. Gabrielle also co-facilitates telephone support groups for people who are living with cancer, for their carers, and for people who have been bereaved through a cancer experience. She is the editor of a journal on counselling and psychotherapy and she provides regular therapeutic updates on facebook and Twitter @OneLifeTherapy.

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From Psych Central's website:
Your Gender: is it 'All in the Mind'? (Part 2) | The Therapist Within (October 19, 2010)

    Last reviewed: 19 Oct 2010