What is Gender Identity?
How does gender identity form in human beings psychologically? Dr. Z shares how she's starting to understand and conceptualize the formation of gender identity—not just transgender identity, but all gender identities. This isn't THE model or theory, just how she's conceptualizing it based on clinical patterns.
We have literature on gender construction from social, cultural, and historical perspectives, but we're lacking understanding from a psychological point of view: How do we develop what we call gender identity? What influences this development? How do we see ourselves in relationship to our gender?
Dr. Z addresses extreme views—one end says gender is determined only by biological sex/chromosomes (reductionistic and inflexible), the other end says gender is pure construct with no anchoring to anything. She proposes a middle ground that explains why some people have later onset dysphoria, why some identities are fluid while others are static, and why context matters.
Watch to find out Dr. Z's revolving pedestal model of subjective experience, why she believes gender identity exists, how lifespan development shapes it, and why divorcing gender identity from being deeply anchored by sex would reveal more fluidity.
