Gender

The term gender, proposed by John Money in the 1950s, was immediately seized upon by scholars in a variety of disciplines, perhaps because it avoided the use of the term sex, a term many thought not suitable for public discourse, but the finite definition that Money and other scholars early used was quickly abandoned. Questions seeking to determine an individual's sex, even on government forms, no long asked for sex but for gender. Feminists particularly favored the use of the term and many programs that had started out as women's studies were renamed gender studies. By 2004, almost every American university had a program on gender studies and so did many high schools. Gay and lesbian studies became gay, lesbian and gender studies, or more often just gender studies. Gender studies are ubiquitous and not confined to the social and behavioral sciences, but appear in courses in literature and the humanities, and even in biology.

Gender studies deal with transvestism, transsexualism, bisexuality, as well as intersex, the original source of Money's classification. Vern Bullough, in his study of the history of sex research, predicted that gender would be the dominant theme of research upon sexuality in the first part of the twenty-first century and it certainly seems to be the case.

The advantage of using the term gender studies instead of sexuality studies is that gender in itself implies for a more variable interpretation of what being a woman or a man involves. Whether a person is an XX or an XY, there is much more to being a man or woman than chromosomes. Though males impregnate and females become impregnated, there is much more to gender than that. Some women are more masculine than a significant minority of men and some men are much more feminine than many women. Gender study data showing and explaining these differences and similarities have been growing as more and more disciplines enter the field. One of the interesting sequella of this is the increasing number of individuals who are calling themselves transgendered. Gender studies, in effect, have resulted in basic challenges on what a man or woman should be or could be.

In spite of the vast increase of publications on gender, there is still much that is not known. For example, the experiences of "Bruce" as told in John Colapinto's book As Nature Made Him and other similar stories have brought greater attention to biological components of variation as opposed to simply focusing on the effects of social settings or nurturing experiences on gender. The more we learn the more complicated the whole question of gender becomes. This seems to imply that gender studies will continue to increase since it offers such a rich field for research and perhaps even more radical changes in public behavior.