The Future of Sex and Gender in Psychology: Five Challenges to the Gender Binary

By Janet S. Hyde, R. Bigler, Daphna Joel, C. Tate, Sari M. van Anders. American Psychologist, 2019

813 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The view that humans comprise only two types of beings, women and men, a framework that is sometimes referred to as the “gender binary,” played a profound role in shaping the history of psychological science. In recent years, serious challenges to the gender binary have arisen from both academic research and social activism. This review describes 5 sets of empirical findings, spanning multiple disciplines, that fundamentally undermine the gender binary. These sources of evidence include neuroscience findings that refute sexual dimorphism of the human brain; behavioral neuroendocrinology findings that challenge the notion of genetically fixed, nonoverlapping, sexually dimorphic hormonal systems; psychological findings that highlight the similarities between men and women; psychological research on transgender and nonbinary individuals’ identities and experiences; and developmental research suggesting that the tendency to view gender/sex as a meaningful, binary category is culturally determined and malleable. Costs associated with reliance on the gender binary and recommendations for future research, as well as clinical practice, are outlined.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Gender Studies, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ed0684c86058e9983a0e71f07d38333fae66096b

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Gender Studies

In Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

Citations in the corpus

What is gender, anyway: a review of the options for operationalising gender (2020, background): “Cisgenderism is also related to the performance of a binary gender system with two discrete genders that are biologically determined (Hyde et al., 2019).”
Gender Gap in Natural Language Processing Research: Disparities in Authorship and Citations (2020, background): “However, those views have been discredited (Hyde et al., 2019; Richards et al., 2017; Darwin, 2017; Lindsey, 2015; Kessler and McKenna, 1978).”
Defending the Sex/Gender Binary: The Role of Gender Identification and Need for Closure (2020, background): “The gender/sex binary refers to the belief that sex is binary and directly determines gender (Hyde et al., 2019).”
Gender Fluidity and Nonbinary Gender Identities Among Children and Adolescents (2020, background): “All these cognitive developments occur in a social context that has a fundamentally binary perspective on gender, which is reﬂected across a range of social and linguistic practices (reviewed in Hyde, Bigler, Joel, Tate, & van Anders, 2019).”