Explain why In the United States, the 1950s were a time when homosexuals were denied jobs and were imprisoned for criminal behavior. It also was a time when Christine Jorgensen, an ., went to Denmark to have a sex-change operation and the world began to hear of individuals of one sex who wanted to change their bodies and adapt the gender of the other sex [2 (Links to an external site.)]. Also, intersexed individuals began to be better known to the medical community [3 (Links to an external site.)]. In the 1960s and 1970s, clinicians and theorists increasingly attended to sex-gender relationships, mostly to look at differencesrather than similaritiesbetween men and women [4-6 (Links to an external site.)]. These challenging situations brought new ways of thinking about behavior. Among these ways were discussions of identity and roles. Stoller [7 (Links to an external site.)] coined the term core gender identity to reflect a persons fundamental sense of belonging to one sex [an awareness of being male or female and] an over-all sense of identity. He attributed this to a combination of infantparent relationships, the childs perception of its external genitalia, and by a biologic force that springs from the biologic variables of sex [7 (Links to an external site.),8 (Links to an external site.)] Money and colleagues [9 (Links to an external site.)] coined the term gender role to mean all those things [behaviors] that a person says or does to disclose him or herself having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively [9 (Links to an external site.)]. Money and Ehrhardt [10 (Links to an external site.)] defined gender identity as the sameness, unity, and persistence of ones individuality as male, female, or ambivalent…the private experience of gender role. This, they said, basically was derived from rearing experiences. Gagnon and Simon [11 (Links to an external site.)] introduced the term sexual identity to indicate the awareness of an individual as a sexual-erotic agent within a larger social identity that was an appreciation of how a person fit into society. They also introduced the concept of sexual scripts that are socially imbued ways of acting in different circumstances. The basic ideas are that sex, genes, and hormones establish ones body and physiology, but ones gender is a product of learning, experience, and indoctrination. These ideas did not go unchallenged. Several animal experiments revealed the power of genetics and endocrines to structure males to show reproductive sex-typical female behaviors and to induce females to display as males [12 (Links to an external site.),13 (Links to an external site.)]. For animals, the term sex-typical behavior was comparable to gender-appropriate behaviors. Reports on humans also showed that individuals who rejected their sex of rearing and experience were not rare [14 (Links to an external site.),15 (Links to an external site.)]. From these studies, a distinction was made between organizing forcesusually prenatalthat dictate the direction of future behaviors and activating events or forces usually postnatalthat precipitate behaviors [12 (Links to an external site.),16 (Links to an external site.)]. Debate on theoretic grounds also existed [4 (Links to an external site.),17-19 (Links to an external site.)] and there were calls for a middle ground where organizing and activating forcesbuilt-in and learnedwould interact to mold behavior [18 (Links to an external site.)]. An ongoing dispute appeared among psychotherapists, biologists, educators, and others about the forces that are involved in the development of gender and how those forces are influenced by the environment. In contrast, a seemingly unified medical understanding emerged. This medical consensus harkened back to the ideas that sex-atypical gender behaviors were the product of social and environmental forces. Most physicians believed that homosexual, cross-dressing, and transsexual activities were deviant; the treatment for the atypical behaviors seemed to be clear.
