Gender and the Life Course

Alice Rossi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351329026
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Gender and the Life Course is an interdisciplinary collection of essays on the lives of women and men as they are affected by history, culture, demography, economic and political stratification, and the biopsychological processes that attend maturation and aging. The book covers three major topics. Part I, which examines gender and the life course in broad historical perspective, includes a summary of recent work in biological ecology and primatology, and an analysis of the persistence of cultural and gender differences in role organization in societies undergoing the transition from agrarianism to industrialism. Other essays trace the changes in sources of household income of industrial workers over the life span, and review temporal and gender differences in life span transitions.Part II examines gender differentiation in a variety of contexts: psychological, psychobiologi-cal, and sociological. Alice Rossi's ASA Presidential Address reviews recent work on fathering and mothering, and argues that sociological explanations of such gender differences need supplementation by concepts from evolutionary theory and the neurosciences. Three essays deal with gender and economy: one shows how gender stratification took hold in the early stages of industrialization in France, another demonstrates the persistence of gender stratification in modern economies, the third focuses on ideology in relation to gender and political power.Part III examines various aspects of the aged in contemporary society, including an argument for an jnterpretive social science that uses diverse methods to improve our ability to describe and interpret many facets of the lives of elderly men and women; a review of the methodology used to study changes in the aged population over time; and an overview of existing data sets that permit further cohort and longitudinal analyses of the aged. The final essays review social policies as they affect the elderly, with particular attention to the fact that most very old people are women, and the impact of the greatly expanded life course for family and kin relations.Gender and the Life Course is a state-of-the-art assessment of the best work currently being done' on gender and age a's maturational factors and is essential reading for anyone interested in adult development and gender roles.

II
Gender Differentiation and Social Institutions

• Gender and Individual Development
  Chapters 5, 6
• Gender, Age, and Deviance
  Chapter 7
• Gender and the Family
  Chapters 8, 9
• Gender and the Economy
  Chapters 10, 11, 12
• Gender and the State
  Chapters 13, 14

5
The Psychobiology of Gender

ANKE A. EHRHARDT
College of Physicians and Surgeons Columbia University

Introduction

Two changes have recently occurred in our thinking about human development. One is a change in focus from childhood and adolescence to the study of the entire life course. The other is the inclusion of biological aspects in the analysis of behavior and the exploration of the interplay between various factors—biological, sociological, psychological, and historical. To take such an interdisciplinary approach has not been popular in the past. Every discipline has perfected its argument to justify field-specific blinders. Sociologists and psychologists often shy away from biological variables out of fear of misuse: Once you consider biological aspects in the study of human behavior, the ghost of “biology is destiny” looms large. On the other hand, endocrinologists, biochemists, and geneticists are reticent to consider psychological and sociological aspects that they may consider to be imprecise and speculative. However, if progress is to be made in the comprehensive analysis of behavior, we cannot responsibly continue to hone in on the evidence presented by one discipline alone and thus neglect important new knowledge from other fields.

Models of Development

This chapter focuses on gender-related behavior, a field in which evidence of various prenatal and postnatal influences is rapidly accumulating. One of the roadblocks to progress lies in the interpretation of the data regarding the relative contribution of constitutional vs. environmental or innate vs. learned factors.

The difficulties begin with terminology. The dichotomies of nature vs. nurture, constitutional vs. acquired, and heredity vs. environment reflect outdated thinking of a bipolarity that does not exist. As John Money (1982, 504) succinctly puts it:⁴ To polarize biology against social learning puts the latter unscientifically on a par with the occult.” Money is referring to the fact that both kinds of influences exist in the brain, irrespective of how they gained entry— whether internally by way of genetics or externally by way of stimuli transmitted through the senses from the environment. He argues that learning and memory are just as much biology as the process of DNA replication. The bipolarity of these issues is thus a false one because social influences are not taking place outside the central nervous system.

This is important because the distinction is often drawn in order to divide the different classes of influences into immutable (i.e., biologic) and modifiable (i.e., learned) categories. This presents another false dichotomy, since all effects are more or less modifiable. A particular chain of events can modify conception itself. The range of hormonal variations from the mother and the fetus may also affect the development of the central nervous system which, in turn, may receive totally different stimuli postnatally during early parent-child bonding and later in sibling and peer relations, with different social reinforcers for specific behaviors.

Even without the false bipolarity of biology vs. environment, different models that help integrate all the information, prenatal or postnatal, must be considered. Three models come to mind that apply to both gender behavior and developmental disorders in general (discussed in detail in Samaroff & Chandler, 1975).

Main-Effect Model

The model most often applied is the main-effect model, which postulates that one factor determines or predominantly influences a particular behavioral outcome. A defect in the constitution, such as an abnormality in the prenatal or postnatal hormonal makeup of a person, produces a specific gender identity or gender disorder, irrespective of the social environment the individual grows up in. Conversely, a pathogenic environment will produce a disorder in gender behavior, no matter what the individual’s genes, hormones, and sex organs are. This model has the advantage of being simple, practical for the researcher, and conclusive. Researchers typically hone in on one event that is taken to be the most important determinant of the behavior, and they are often ready to discard all knowledge of other relevant factors. The problem with the main-effect model is that many cases do not fit such a one-factor model. Therefore, we are particularly vulnerable to going from one new discovery to the next in the hope of finding a better explanation of the behavior under study.

Interactional Model

The second model is the interactional model. This model considers a variety of constitutional and social environmental factors to explain and, more importantly, to predict an individual’s behavior. Basically two-dimensional, the interactional model predicts the individual’s behavior outcome from any combination of two factors. As Samaroff and Chandler state, children with constitutional problems (e.g., with genetic or hormonal problems) raised in a deviant environment would be predicted to have poor outcome. Children with hormonal abnormalities with the good fortune to be raised in supportive environments and children without problems raised in deviant environments would have better outcomes. The best outcome, of course, is found among children with no hormonal or genetic problems who were raised in supportive environments. Certainly, this interactive model substantially increases the general efficiency of the main-effect model because it takes more influences into consideration. The major disadvantage of the model in this narrow version is that it presupposes the constancy of social environment and constitutional factors. The characteristics of children and their environment change, however, and, more importantly, they can modify each other at any point during development. The child can alter the response of the environment and is in turn altered by this changed world.

It is crucial then to move from a static interactional model to a more dynamic concept of development which posits a continual and progressive interplay between the organism and its environment.

Transactional Model

Such a dynamic model may be called a transactional model, which assumes that a variety of influences may have their source at different points in development, either in the constitution or in the outside world, exerting influence on the central nervous system. All these factors actively participate and interact with each other and are, therefore, plastic modifiers. The constants in development are not a set of genetic or hormonal traits, on the one hand, and the environmental reaction to these traits, on the other, but rather the processes by which these traits are maintained in the transactions between organism and environment. A deviant development, according to the transactional model, is not to be seen as an inborn inability to respond appropriately to a specific environment but rather a continuous malfunction in the organism-environment transaction across time that prevents the child from organizing his or her self-image and behavior adaptively. The deviant environment is not one traumatic event but rather continuous environmental responses to the child with a vulnerability that must operate throughout development. The transactional model does not assume directionality in development, that is, a greater etiological importance of one particular factor. Rather, the model stresses that the intensity of a deviant factor, be it social-environmental or constitutional, may have a relatively greater effect.

The outcome of development in a transactional model may consist of many different options, but regarding one aspect of psychosexual differentiation— gender identity development—there are surprisingly few possibilities. Gender identity may be unambiguously female, male, or ambiguous with no fixed anchor point in one or the other. Since the outcome is usually in accordance with expectations at birth, it appears that the human organism may produce normal developmental outcomes under seemingly all but the most adverse conditions.

Gender Identity

The definitions of gender identity vary; most of them infer a person’s sense of belonging to one sex or the other, male or female. Until about 30 years ago, scientists and clinicians did not use the term gender but spoke of sex. Sex was determined by biology, and at that time biology meant the structure of the gonads, testicular or ovarian. If a person’s sex was in doubt, as in babies with ambiguous genitalia, an exploratory laporotomy and a histologic examination of the gonads determined the sex of rearing. The underlying assumption was that the gonads represented the true sex and also determined a person’s feelings of identity. Several examples exist of people with tragic lives of obscurity because they could not identify with their declared gonadal sex. Many were not allowed to get a valid birth certificate or to get married because no physician would verify their gender identity if it differed from their gonadal sex. In particular, this applied to genetic males with an extreme degree of microphallus who identified as females or to genetic females totally virilized during pre- and postnatal development who identified as males.

In 1945, Albert Ellis published a review article based on 84 cases of hermaphrodites, stating that the sex role in such cases “accords primarily not with his or her internal or external somatic characteristics, but rather with his or her masculine or feminine upbringing (p. 120).” The breakthrough, however, came in 1955 when John Money, in co-authorship with John and Joan Hampson (1955a, b) formulated a new theory of the determinants of sex, using for the first time the terms gender role and gender identity. The introduction of gender role and gender identity as new terms was critical because it meant having a term not bound to biologic sex that included other than sexual behaviors related to masculinity and femininity. The most important scientific advance of the proposed theory, though, was that sex was determined by a number of variables rather than one, including psychologic and social sex. Not until 1981 did the twenty-sixth edition of Borland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary include “social sex” as one of the defining aspects under the entry on “sex.”

The theory of John Money and his colleagues that the determination of sex depends on a number of variables, like links in a chain, was pioneering and may be considered a major contribution to our knowledge of psychosexual differentiation. It led to a major change in the traditional policy regarding the sex of rearing of intersex babies. Money and the Hampsons added a new criterion for sex assignment, namely, the prognosis of sexual functioning of the individual. They justified this by formulating a new theory of gender development based on their unique and rich clinical case material. Their theory stated that the best “prognosticator” of a satisfactory gender identity is the sex of assignment and rearing, and they added a critical time dimension to their model, that is, that aspects of gender identity are typically formed by two-and-a-half years of age. Money and the Hampsons had observed gender change at a later point in development but warned there was increased risk of psychopathology for the individual in such cases. Ambiguity of gender identity had been observed by them and was identified as a sequela of ambiguity in rearing. Clinicians were advised, therefore, to minimize such ambiguities by rapid decision making, counseling the parents, and surgically correcting the appearance of the external genitalia to accord with the assigned sex. Under Money and his medical collaborators and with the support of a prestigious institution such as the Johns Hopkins Hospital, sex of assignment on the basis of future social and sexual functioning became an adopted policy on a worldwide basis.

The model of gender identity development continued to be useful even when prenatal sex hormones and their effects on gender-related behavior came under study. Based on their findings, researchers generally agreed that variations of prenatal sex hormones may predispose and affect temperament in the direction of a certain pattern of sex dimorphic behavior, but they do not appear to have a major influence on the acquisition of gender identity unless coupled with a highly deviant environment (Money & Ehrhardt, 1972).

For a while, the theory that gender is determined by a number of variables interacting with each other seemed to be on solid ground. It came as a surprise, then, that the model was newly questioned and debated because of a radically different position espoused by Imperato-McGinley and co-workers beginning in 1974 based on their study of a newly diagnosed syndrome:

It appears that the extent of androgen (i.e., testosterone) exposure of the brain in utero, during the early postnatal period and at puberty has more effect in determining male-gender identity than does sex of rearing. This experiment of nature emphasizes the importance of androgens, which act as inducers (in utero and neonatally) and as activators (at puberty) in the evolution of male-gender identity. (1979, p. 1236)

The theory has resulted in controversy, the debate is still ongoing and has had grave consequences because of its impact on clinical management of many patients with intersexuality. There is nothing wrong with a proposed new theory if it is based on new knowledge. What is startling, however, is that the Imperato-McGinley theory caused this controversy in the first place, considering the poor quality of its observational basis and what had already been learned from prior research.

The Imperato-McGinley observations are based on a group of people in the Dominican Republic who were genetic male pseudohermaphrodites due to an enzyme deficiency of 5α-reductase which decreases prenatal production of di-hydrotestosterone. This results in severe ambiguity in the external genitalia in the male fetus. At birth, the subjects have a bifid scrotum which appears labia-like and a very small phallus. There is a urogenital sinus with a blind-ending vaginal pouch. The testes are in the abdomen, inguinal canal, or scrotum. In the past, these individuals were raised as girls. At puberty, under the influence of their own testosterone, these individuals undergo definite virilization with deepening of the voice, phallic growth, and masculine development. Their testes descend if they had not done so earlier. Of the original 18 subjects on which interview data exist, 17 are said to have changed their gender identity and 16 their gender role at puberty from female to male. Of the two exceptions, one kept the female gender identity and gender role, the other switched to a male gender identity but continued to dress as a female.

Most of the individuals who show this syndrome in the Dominican Republic appeared to change their gender identity during adolescence to that of a man. Before one concludes that this is due to testosterone, one needs to ask whether they really had a female gender identity in childhood and whether the rearing experience was unambiguously female. Unfortunately, the information on rearing and the concept of the parents regarding the sex of their child is very scanty in the existing publications. Some critical questions must be raised, similar to those in publications by Rubin, Reinisch, and Haskett (1981), and by Meyer-Bahlburg (1982). Perhaps the villagers and the parents of these individuals recognized some ambiguity in the children’s genitalia from birth which may have given these children a special status. Imperato-McGinley suggests that after the initial observation of the pubertal change, the children became known as “penis at 12,” making it likely that they were not unambiguously raised as girls. It is also likely that long before puberty, the a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• List of Contributors
• I Gender and the Life Course in Historical Perspective
• II Gender Differentiation and Social Institutions
• III Gender and the Life Course in Aging Societies
• Author Index
• Subject Index