Gender

Ann Constantinople, for example, questioned the assumption that masculinity was the opposite of femininity and suggested that the identification of masculine traits might be independent from rather than opposite to the identification of feminine traits. As new scales for masculinity and femininity were developed by researchers, they found wide variation in gender traits among individuals of the same biological sex, but interestingly they also found an almost compulsive pressure to conform put on those who varied too far from the norm. This was particularly noted to be the case in feminine boys. The wide spectrum of behaviors led to a greater emphasis on biological answers.

One theory developed by Bonnie Bullough (in a work coauthored with Vern Bullough) for the formation of gender identities and sexual preference held that there were at least three steps:

1. A genetic predisposition for a gender or cross-gender or cross-sexual identity, including high or low levels of activity and aggression.
2. Prenatal hormonal stimulation supported or countered the genetic predisposition, perhaps indelibly marking the neural pathways so the pattern that produced variant gender behavior continued after birth.
3. The socialization pattern shaped the specific manifestation of the predisposition.

It was not only social and natural scientists who entered the debate about the differences in gender behavior but scholars from the humanities and arts as well. One of the best known was Marjorie Garber, who attempted to escape the bipolar notions of male and female by advocating a third category, a way of describing alternative possibilities. Bipolar approaches, she held, create a "category crisis," a failure of definitional distinction, resulting in a border that becomes permeable and permits border crossing.

Research on homosexual men, for example, has found that a significant number were identified as feminine boys during their youth. Richard Green's longitudinal study of extremely effeminate boys, most of whom wished they had been born girls, found that 75 percent of his sample identified themselves as homosexual as adults although almost all of them had become less feminine in their behavior during their teens. The fact that not all of them came to identify as homosexual as adults emphasized the complexity of development although it was possible that some of them might at a later stage still identify as homosexual. Masculine-identified girls, or tomboys, have a lower proportion identifying as lesbians as adults perhaps because the pressure on them to conform was also less. Unfortunately, much less research has been done on tomboys than on feminine boys.