gender assignment examples

• A-Z Publications

Annual Review of Linguistics

Volume 6, 2020, review article, grammatical gender: a close look at gender assignment across languages.

• Ruth Kramer 1
• View Affiliations Hide Affiliations Affiliations: Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057, USA; email: [email protected]
• Vol. 6:45-66 (Volume publication date January 2020) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011718-012450
• Copyright © 2020 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved

This review takes a broad perspective on one of the most fundamental issues for gender research in linguistics: gender assignment (i.e., how different nouns are sorted into different genders). I first build on previous typological research to draw together the main generalizations about gender assignment. I then compare lexical and structural approaches to gender assignment in linguistic theory and argue that a structural approach is likely more successful at explaining gender assignment cross-linguistically.

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Pride Month

A guide to gender identity terms.

Laurel Wamsley

"Pronouns are basically how we identify ourselves apart from our name. It's how someone refers to you in conversation," says Mary Emily O'Hara, a communications officer at GLAAD. "And when you're speaking to people, it's a really simple way to affirm their identity." Kaz Fantone for NPR hide caption

"Pronouns are basically how we identify ourselves apart from our name. It's how someone refers to you in conversation," says Mary Emily O'Hara, a communications officer at GLAAD. "And when you're speaking to people, it's a really simple way to affirm their identity."

Issues of equality and acceptance of transgender and nonbinary people — along with challenges to their rights — have become a major topic in the headlines. These issues can involve words and ideas and identities that are new to some.

That's why we've put together a glossary of terms relating to gender identity. Our goal is to help people communicate accurately and respectfully with one another.

Proper use of gender identity terms, including pronouns, is a crucial way to signal courtesy and acceptance. Alex Schmider , associate director of transgender representation at GLAAD, compares using someone's correct pronouns to pronouncing their name correctly – "a way of respecting them and referring to them in a way that's consistent and true to who they are."

Glossary of gender identity terms

This guide was created with help from GLAAD . We also referenced resources from the National Center for Transgender Equality , the Trans Journalists Association , NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists , Human Rights Campaign , InterAct and the American Psychological Association . This guide is not exhaustive, and is Western and U.S.-centric. Other cultures may use different labels and have other conceptions of gender.

One thing to note: Language changes. Some of the terms now in common usage are different from those used in the past to describe similar ideas, identities and experiences. Some people may continue to use terms that are less commonly used now to describe themselves, and some people may use different terms entirely. What's important is recognizing and respecting people as individuals.

Jump to a term: Sex, gender , gender identity , gender expression , cisgender , transgender , nonbinary , agender , gender-expansive , gender transition , gender dysphoria , sexual orientation , intersex

Jump to Pronouns : questions and answers

Sex refers to a person's biological status and is typically assigned at birth, usually on the basis of external anatomy. Sex is typically categorized as male, female or intersex.

Gender is often defined as a social construct of norms, behaviors and roles that varies between societies and over time. Gender is often categorized as male, female or nonbinary.

Gender identity is one's own internal sense of self and their gender, whether that is man, woman, neither or both. Unlike gender expression, gender identity is not outwardly visible to others.

For most people, gender identity aligns with the sex assigned at birth, the American Psychological Association notes. For transgender people, gender identity differs in varying degrees from the sex assigned at birth.

Gender expression is how a person presents gender outwardly, through behavior, clothing, voice or other perceived characteristics. Society identifies these cues as masculine or feminine, although what is considered masculine or feminine changes over time and varies by culture.

Cisgender, or simply cis , is an adjective that describes a person whose gender identity aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth.

Transgender, or simply trans, is an adjective used to describe someone whose gender identity differs from the sex assigned at birth. A transgender man, for example, is someone who was listed as female at birth but whose gender identity is male.

Cisgender and transgender have their origins in Latin-derived prefixes of "cis" and "trans" — cis, meaning "on this side of" and trans, meaning "across from" or "on the other side of." Both adjectives are used to describe experiences of someone's gender identity.

Nonbinary is a term that can be used by people who do not describe themselves or their genders as fitting into the categories of man or woman. A range of terms are used to refer to these experiences; nonbinary and genderqueer are among the terms that are sometimes used.

Agender is an adjective that can describe a person who does not identify as any gender.

Gender-expansive is an adjective that can describe someone with a more flexible gender identity than might be associated with a typical gender binary.

Gender transition is a process a person may take to bring themselves and/or their bodies into alignment with their gender identity. It's not just one step. Transitioning can include any, none or all of the following: telling one's friends, family and co-workers; changing one's name and pronouns; updating legal documents; medical interventions such as hormone therapy; or surgical intervention, often called gender confirmation surgery.

Gender dysphoria refers to psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one's sex assigned at birth and one's gender identity. Not all trans people experience dysphoria, and those who do may experience it at varying levels of intensity.

Gender dysphoria is a diagnosis listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Some argue that such a diagnosis inappropriately pathologizes gender incongruence, while others contend that a diagnosis makes it easier for transgender people to access necessary medical treatment.

Sexual orientation refers to the enduring physical, romantic and/or emotional attraction to members of the same and/or other genders, including lesbian, gay, bisexual and straight orientations.

People don't need to have had specific sexual experiences to know their own sexual orientation. They need not have had any sexual experience at all. They need not be in a relationship, dating or partnered with anyone for their sexual orientation to be validated. For example, if a bisexual woman is partnered with a man, that does not mean she is not still bisexual.

Sexual orientation is separate from gender identity. As GLAAD notes , "Transgender people may be straight, lesbian, gay, bisexual or queer. For example, a person who transitions from male to female and is attracted solely to men would typically identify as a straight woman. A person who transitions from female to male and is attracted solely to men would typically identify as a gay man."

Intersex is an umbrella term used to describe people with differences in reproductive anatomy, chromosomes or hormones that don't fit typical definitions of male and female.

Intersex can refer to a number of natural variations, some of them laid out by InterAct . Being intersex is not the same as being nonbinary or transgender, which are terms typically related to gender identity.

The Picture Show

Nonbinary photographer documents gender dysphoria through a queer lens, pronouns: questions and answers.

What is the role of pronouns in acknowledging someone's gender identity?

Everyone has pronouns that are used when referring to them – and getting those pronouns right is not exclusively a transgender issue.

"Pronouns are basically how we identify ourselves apart from our name. It's how someone refers to you in conversation," says Mary Emily O'Hara , a communications officer at GLAAD. "And when you're speaking to people, it's a really simple way to affirm their identity."

"So, for example, using the correct pronouns for trans and nonbinary youth is a way to let them know that you see them, you affirm them, you accept them and to let them know that they're loved during a time when they're really being targeted by so many discriminatory anti-trans state laws and policies," O'Hara says.

"It's really just about letting someone know that you accept their identity. And it's as simple as that."

Getting the words right is about respect and accuracy, says Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, deputy executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. Kaz Fantone for NPR hide caption

Getting the words right is about respect and accuracy, says Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, deputy executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality.

What's the right way to find out a person's pronouns?

Start by giving your own – for example, "My pronouns are she/her."

"If I was introducing myself to someone, I would say, 'I'm Rodrigo. I use him pronouns. What about you?' " says Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen , deputy executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality.

O'Hara says, "It may feel awkward at first, but eventually it just becomes another one of those get-to-know-you questions."

Should people be asking everyone their pronouns? Or does it depend on the setting?

Knowing each other's pronouns helps you be sure you have accurate information about another person.

How a person appears in terms of gender expression "doesn't indicate anything about what their gender identity is," GLAAD's Schmider says. By sharing pronouns, "you're going to get to know someone a little better."

And while it can be awkward at first, it can quickly become routine.

Heng-Lehtinen notes that the practice of stating one's pronouns at the bottom of an email or during introductions at a meeting can also relieve some headaches for people whose first names are less common or gender ambiguous.

"Sometimes Americans look at a name and are like, 'I have no idea if I'm supposed to say he or she for this name' — not because the person's trans, but just because the name is of a culture that you don't recognize and you genuinely do not know. So having the pronouns listed saves everyone the headache," Heng-Lehtinen says. "It can be really, really quick once you make a habit of it. And I think it saves a lot of embarrassment for everybody."

Might some people be uncomfortable sharing their pronouns in a public setting?

Schmider says for cisgender people, sharing their pronouns is generally pretty easy – so long as they recognize that they have pronouns and know what they are. For others, it could be more difficult to share their pronouns in places where they don't know people.

But there are still benefits in sharing pronouns, he says. "It's an indication that they understand that gender expression does not equal gender identity, that you're not judging people just based on the way they look and making assumptions about their gender beyond what you actually know about them."

How is "they" used as a singular pronoun?

"They" is already commonly used as a singular pronoun when we are talking about someone, and we don't know who they are, O'Hara notes. Using they/them pronouns for someone you do know simply represents "just a little bit of a switch."

"You're just asking someone to not act as if they don't know you, but to remove gendered language from their vocabulary when they're talking about you," O'Hara says.

"I identify as nonbinary myself and I appear feminine. People often assume that my pronouns are she/her. So they will use those. And I'll just gently correct them and say, hey, you know what, my pronouns are they/them just FYI, for future reference or something like that," they say.

O'Hara says their family and friends still struggle with getting the pronouns right — and sometimes O'Hara struggles to remember others' pronouns, too.

"In my community, in the queer community, with a lot of trans and nonbinary people, we all frequently remind each other or remind ourselves. It's a sort of constant mindfulness where you are always catching up a little bit," they say.

"You might know someone for 10 years, and then they let you know their pronouns have changed. It's going to take you a little while to adjust, and that's fine. It's OK to make those mistakes and correct yourself, and it's OK to gently correct someone else."

What if I make a mistake and misgender someone, or use the wrong words?

Simply apologize and move on.

"I think it's perfectly natural to not know the right words to use at first. We're only human. It takes any of us some time to get to know a new concept," Heng-Lehtinen says. "The important thing is to just be interested in continuing to learn. So if you mess up some language, you just say, 'Oh, I'm so sorry,' correct yourself and move forward. No need to make it any more complicated than that. Doing that really simple gesture of apologizing quickly and moving on shows the other person that you care. And that makes a really big difference."

Why are pronouns typically given in the format "she/her" or "they/them" rather than just "she" or "they"?

The different iterations reflect that pronouns change based on how they're used in a sentence. And the "he/him" format is actually shorter than the previously common "he/him/his" format.

"People used to say all three and then it got down to two," Heng-Lehtinen laughs. He says staff at his organization was recently wondering if the custom will eventually shorten to just one pronoun. "There's no real rule about it. It's absolutely just been habit," he says.

Amid Wave Of Anti-Trans Bills, Trans Reporters Say 'Telling Our Own Stories' Is Vital

But he notes a benefit of using he/him and she/her: He and she rhyme. "If somebody just says he or she, I could very easily mishear that and then still get it wrong."

What does it mean if a person uses the pronouns "he/they" or "she/they"?

"That means that the person uses both pronouns, and you can alternate between those when referring to them. So either pronoun would be fine — and ideally mix it up, use both. It just means that they use both pronouns that they're listing," Heng-Lehtinen says.

Schmider says it depends on the person: "For some people, they don't mind those pronouns being interchanged for them. And for some people, they are using one specific pronoun in one context and another set of pronouns in another, dependent on maybe safety or comfortability."

The best approach, Schmider says, is to listen to how people refer to themselves.

Why might someone's name be different than what's listed on their ID?

Heng-Lehtinen notes that there's a perception when a person comes out as transgender, they change their name and that's that. But the reality is a lot more complicated and expensive when it comes to updating your name on government documents.

"It is not the same process as changing your last name when you get married. There is bizarrely a separate set of rules for when you are changing your name in marriage versus changing your name for any other reason. And it's more difficult in the latter," he says.

"When you're transgender, you might not be able to update all of your government IDs, even though you want to," he says. "I've been out for over a decade. I still have not been able to update all of my documents because the policies are so onerous. I've been able to update my driver's license, Social Security card and passport, but I cannot update my birth certificate."

"Just because a transgender person doesn't have their authentic name on their ID doesn't mean it's not the name that they really use every day," he advises. "So just be mindful to refer to people by the name they really use regardless of their driver's license."

NPR's Danielle Nett contributed to this report.

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Article contents

• Jenny Audring Jenny Audring Leiden University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.43
• Published online: 07 July 2016

Gender is a grammatical feature, in a family with person, number, and case. In the languages that have grammatical gender—according to a representative typological sample, almost half of the languages in the world—it is a property that separates nouns into classes. These classes are often meaningful and often linked to biological sex, which is why many languages are said to have a “masculine” and a “feminine” gender. A typical example is Italian, which has masculine words for male persons ( il bambino “the. m little boy”) and feminine words for female persons ( la bambina “the. f little girl”). However, gender systems may be based on other semantic distinctions or may reflect formal properties of the noun. In all cases, the defining property is agreement: the behavior of associated words. In Italian, the masculine gender of the noun bambino matches its meaning as well as its form—the noun ends in – o and inflects like a regular –o class noun—but the true indicator of gender is the form of the article. This can be seen in words like la mano “the. f hand,” which is feminine despite its final - o , and il soprano “the. m soprano,” which is masculine, although it usually refers to a woman. For the same reasons, we speak of grammatical gender only if the distinction is reflected in syntax; a language that has words for male and female persons or animals does not necessarily have a gender system.

Across the languages of the world, gender systems vary widely. They differ in the number of classes, in the underlying assignment rules, and in how and where gender is marked. Since agreement is a definitional property, gender is generally absent in isolating languages as well as in young languages with little bound morphology, including sign languages. Therefore, gender is considered a mature phenomenon in language.

Gender interacts in various ways with other grammatical features. For example, it may be limited to the singular number or the third person, and it may be crosscut by case distinctions. These and other interrelations can complicate the task of figuring out a gender system in first or second language acquisition. Yet, children master gender early, making use of a broad variety of cues. By contrast, gender is famously difficult for second-language learners. This is especially true for adults and for learners whose first language does not have a gender system. Nevertheless, tests show that even for this group, native-like competence is possible to attain.

• morphosyntax
• classification

1. What is Grammatical Gender?

In everyday speech, the word “gender” is associated with the biological and social differences between women and men. In addition, people might know that languages can have masculine and feminine words . So at first blush, it may seem that grammatical gender is a reflection of natural gender in grammar.

1.1 Kinds and Concepts

The view that grammatical gender mirrors natural gender has been widespread since antiquity and is still evident in the terms “masculine,” “feminine,” and “neuter” (historically meaning “neither”), which are used to label individual gender distinctions, especially in Indo-European languages. Indeed, many languages show a match between natural and grammatical gender. Clear examples from across the world are Tamil in India, Dizi in Ethiopia, Diyari in Southern Australia (now extinct), and Bagvalal in the Caucasus (Corbett, 1991 ; Kibort & Corbett, 2008 ). In these and many other languages, nouns denoting male persons are masculine, and nouns denoting female persons are feminine. Other nouns are treated in varied ways: they may be added to the masculine or the feminine gender or may occupy one or several genders of their own.

However, not all languages function like this. First, many languages—slightly more than half of the languages in a representative sample (Corbett, 2013a )—do not have grammatical gender at all. Of those that do, some disregard the difference between male and female and assign all words for humans or for living beings to the same class. Yet other languages have a special “vegetable” gender for plants, a gender for foodstuffs, a gender for large or important things, a gender for liquids or abstracts, and many more. Such patterns remind us that the word gender (Greek: γένος ‎) originally meant “kind” rather than “sex.” While the split into male and female is the most common semantic base of gender systems (Corbett, 2013b ), it is by no means the only option.

Relaxing the expectation that grammatical gender is always related to biological sex also opens up the possibility that a language may have more than two or three genders. Indeed, systems can be far richer, with a maximum of around 20 different genders found in Fula, a language of the Niger-Congo family spoken in Nigeria. In descriptions of such large systems, it is common practice to label the various classes with numbers rather than names. This is not only more practical, it also reflects the fact that not all of these classes are meaningful. In fact, most classes in Fula do not have a clear semantic content (Breedveld, 1995 , p. 297).

The observation that gender does not always perfectly align with meaning holds for almost half of the relevant languages (47% of the 112 gender languages in Corbett, 2013c ). This may mean either that one or two classes are meaningful while the others are not, or that all classes contain words for semantic as well as non-semantic reasons. The first situation can be seen in the Nakh-Daghestanian language Tsez (Comrie, 1999 , example 1 ), the second in the Indo-European language Latvian (example 2 ).

(1) Tsez (Nakh-Daghestanian): Open in new tab Gender I – male persons Gender II – female persons + various other Gender III – various Gender IV – various Open in new tab

(2) Latvian (IE, Baltic, Heiko Marten p.c.): Open in new tab vecā māte ‘old mother’ – feminine for semantic reasons vecā māja ‘old house’ – feminine for formal reasons vecais tēvs ‘old father’ – masculine for semantic reasons vecais koks ‘old tree’ – masculine for formal reasons Open in new tab

The imperfect match between gender and meaning has inspired two diverging lines of thinking, both dating back to the early Greek scholars (see Kilarski, 2013 for an overview of the scientific history). The first sought to restore the match with the help of hidden layers of meaning attributed to metaphorical extension, personification, or culture-specific classification often inaccessible to the outside observer (notable advocates of this view were Grimm, 1831 and von Humboldt, 1822 ), but the idea also appears in Lakoff ( 1987 ). The second acknowledges that gender is, to a large extent, a matter of grammar—a classification of nouns rather than of kinds and concepts.

1.2 Classifying Nouns

Gender is one of the systems of noun classification, alongside classifiers on one end (3) and inflectional classes on the other (4).

(3) Classifiers in Jacaltec (Kanjobalan Mayan: Craig, 1992 , p. 284; adapted from Aikhenvald, 2000 , p. 82). Open in new tab xil naj xuwan no7 lab’a saw CL:MAN John CL:ANIMAL snake ‘(man) John saw the (animal) snake’ Open in new tab

(4) Inflectional classes in Latin (from Haspelmath & Sims, 2010 , p. 159) Open in new tab o-class u-class Nominative singular hort-us grad-us Genitive singular hort-ī grad-ūs Open in new tab

In (3), the classifiers naj “man” and no7 “animal” indicate that John is a person, while the snake is an animal. In (4), the nouns hortus “garden” and gradus “step” have the same ending in the nominative singular, but different endings in other cases. The different forms used to express the same feature, here genitive singular, show that the two nouns belong to different inflection classes or “declensions.” While both classifiers and declensions are means to classify nouns, they differ in many respects. Among other things, classifiers are meaningful, while most inflectional class systems have at best weak links with semantics.

Gender seems to have affinities with both systems. We find historical evidence that gender may develop out of classifier systems (see section 3.1, The Birth of Gender Systems). On the other hand, genders often partially match inflectional classes when a language has both, leading linguists to think that the systems strive to cooperate or—arguably—that one determines the other (Doleschal, 2000 ; Faarlund, Lie, & Vannebo, 1997 ; Bittner, 2000 ; Kürschner & Nübling, 2011 ; see Enger, 2004 and Thornton, 2001 for critical discussion, and Aronoff, 1994 on the general relation between inflectional class and gender).

Gender also has links with derivational morphology. Many languages have morphological means of deriving words for male and female persons and animals, with morphemes that resemble the gender markers found elsewhere in the language. For example, the South-American language Mosetén has pairs of nouns as in (5), whose endings, – si’ (feminine) and – tyi’ (masculine), also appear as agreement markers on adjectives, relative clause markers, numerals, and other words (Sakel, 2004 , pp. 86–88, translations adjusted).

(5) nanasi’ ‘girl’ nanatyi’ ‘boy’ minsi’ ‘female person’ mintyi’ ‘male person’

The argument for analyzing nominal – si’ and – tyi’ in (5) as derivational morphemes rather than as gender markers is that the language does not usually express gender overtly on the noun (Sakel, 2004 , p. 86).

In addition, derivational suffixes are typically associated with a fixed gender value. For example, French nouns ending in - elle are feminine: ruelle “alleyway,” dentelle “lace.” Such regularities may even override semantic motivations in favor of another gender value. A classic example is the French noun sentinelle “guard,” which often denotes a male person but is feminine nonetheless.

1.3 Agreement Classes

The property that sets gender apart from other types of noun classification is agreement, the morphological expression on words other than the noun. While languages can mark gender on the noun itself—such systems are called overt gender systems—this is not a necessary characteristic. Marking on associated words, however, is required: without agreement, we have no evidence for gender (Corbett, 1991 ; Hockett, 1958 , p. 231; see Audring ( 2011 ) for a number of key references from the extensive literature on gender agreement). Common places where gender agreement shows up are adjectives, verbs, and pronouns, and many languages also mark gender on articles, numerals, and question words (see example 6 from Russian).

(6) Russian, gender agreement on numerals, adjectives, and verbs (Stephan Audring, p.c.) Open in new tab odn-a pust-aja butylka upal-a one- f.sg empty- f.sg bottle( f)sg fall.over. pst - f.sg ‘one empty bottle fell over’ Open in new tab

More rarely, gender agreement can be found on adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and even words for “yes” and “no”—see example ( 7 ) from a variety of Dutch spoken in Belgium.

(7) Wambeek Dutch, gender marked on “yes” (Van Craenenbroeck, 2010 , p. 211) Open in new tab Kom Marie mergen? – Jui-s. come. prs.3sg Mary tomorrow – yes- f.sg ‘Is Mary coming tomorrow? – Yes, she is.’ Open in new tab

Agreement is what makes gender a morphosyntactic feature, together with number and person, and distinguishes it from inflectional class and from classes of derived words. Examples ( 8 ) and ( 9 ) illustrate the difference.

(8) Gender vs. inflectional class (Italian; Thornton, 2001 , p. 485) Open in new tab Gender Class 1 Class 2 Class 3 Class 4 Class 5 Class 6 sg. – o , sg. – a , sg. – e , sg. – a , sg. – o , invariable pl. - i pl. - e pl. - i pl. - i pl. - a Masculine libro – padre papa uovo bar ‘book’ ‘father’ ‘pope’ ‘egg’ ‘coffee shop’ Feminine mano casa madre ala uova star ‘hand’ ‘house’ ‘mother’ ‘wing’ ‘eggs’ ‘famous person’ Open in new tab

Table ( 8 ) shows that the relation between gender and inflectional class in Italian is not 1 to 1—every inflectional class except class 2 contains nouns of both genders, although there are large statistical tendencies (e.g., class 1 nouns are typically masculine). For gender, agreement is decisive; although mano inflects like a masculine noun, it takes feminine agreements, while papa looks like it should be feminine but takes masculine agreements.

(9) Gender vs. classes of derived words (German) Open in new tab Suffix Example Gender - heit die Freiheit ‘the freedom’ feminine - ung die Ordnung ‘the order’ feminine - (i)tät die Kontinuität ‘the continuity’ feminine - nis die Finsternis ‘the darkness’ feminine das Gedächtnis ‘the memory’ neuter - tum der Reichtum ‘the wealth’ masculine das Wachstum ‘the growth’ neuter Open in new tab

In Table ( 9 ), we see that gender and suffix classes are not equivalent; the suffixes - heit, -ung , and -(i)tät take the same gender agreement in German, while the suffix - nis is found in both feminine and neuter nouns, and the suffix - tum is associated with masculine or neuter gender. Again, agreement is what is decisive for gender, not the noun’s own morphology.

Summing up, gender can be viewed from three basic angles. First, it can be seen as a classification system for concepts, based on properties such as sex or animacy, or shape and size. Second, it can be taken as a system for classifying nouns, which highlights its affinities with inflectional and derivational morphology as well as with classifiers. Third, gender can be viewed as a system of agreement classes, defined via the behavior of associated words. The last view, which takes a syntactic rather than a semantic criterion as foundational, is prevalent in the current linguistic literature.

1.4 Gender and Other Grammatical Features

Gender interacts in various ways with other grammatical features, especially person, number, and case, but also tense. These interactions often manifest themselves in the form of conditions; gender marking may be restricted to a part of the paradigm. A well-known condition has been formulated as one of Greenberg’s universals: “A language never has more gender categories in nonsingular numbers than in the singular” (Greenberg, 1963 , p. 112; Universal 37). While a number of counterexamples have been found (Plank & Schellinger, 1997 ), it appears to be generally true that many languages mark fewer genders in the plural than in the singular, or that they neutralize gender completely in non-singular environments. Similar conditions can be found between other features. Another proposed universal is that “[i]f a language has gender distinctions in the first person, it always has gender distinctions in the second or third person, or in both” (Greenberg, 1963 , p. 96; Universal 44). This means that gender marking in pronominal paradigms is often present in the second and/or third person, but absent in the first. In other cases, conditions apply between gender and tense. In Russian, for example, verbs agree in gender (example 6 ), but only in the past tense.

A further complexity in many languages is the interaction between gender and case. Especially when the same morphological markers express both features at once, children may have a harder time figuring out the forms and functions of the two systems (see section 4.1 below).

1.5 A Canonical Gender System

Languages across the world vary widely and interestingly. In some instances, there may be doubts whether a language has grammatical gender or not. Therefore, it is useful to look at a few basic properties expected in a gender system, and some common divergences (for more on canonical agreement, canonical features, and canonical gender, see Corbett, 2006 , Corbett, 2012 , and Corbett & Fedden, 2015 ).

First, we expect that if a language has grammatical gender, then every noun in that language should belong to exactly one gender. This means that the system accommodates all nouns (rather than just a subset) and that, in principle, each noun has only one fixed gender value. Divergences from this ideal can be sporadic or systematic. In sporadic cases, we find individual nouns varying in the agreements they trigger. For example in Hebrew, a few nouns are reported to have either feminine or masculine gender, for instance, dereh “road, way” (Aikhenvald, 2000 , p. 44). This is an example of a double-gender noun (Corbett, 1991 , pp. 181–182). A different case is hybrid nouns (Corbett, 1991 , pp. 183–184) such as the Dutch diminutive zusje “(little) sister,” which belongs to the neuter gender but often takes feminine pronouns.

Especially interesting are more systematic cases of variation, where the gender of nouns can be manipulated by the speaker. For example, in languages that associate certain genders with size, high value, or importance, it may be possible to upgrade or downgrade a person or object by placing it into another gender. Example ( 10 ) comes from the Nigerian Bantu language Herero (also known as Otjiherero). The noun for “knife” belongs to class 11, as indicated by the prefix (o)ru - (10a), but it can be used with the class 7 prefix (o)tji - to mean “big knife” (10b). The new class prefix is added before the existing one. Note how the class change is reflected in the agreement on the possessive pronoun.

(10) Herero (Kavari & Marten, 2009 ; glosses simplified) a. oru-vyó rw-ándje 11-knife 11-my ‘my knife’ b. otji-ru-vyó tjá-ndje 7-11-knife 7-my ‘my big knife’

In systems such as this, gender may be difficult to distinguish from (or indeed be intertwined with) diminution and/or augmentation, as well as lexical derivation. Similar difficulties may arise when there is overlap between gender and number (see Corbett & Hayward, 1987 , for a famous case, the Cushitic language Bayso, whose plural is sometimes analyzed as a gender).

A second expected property of a gender system is that it has a semantic core (Corbett, 1991 , p. 63). This means that even when many or most nouns are assigned to a gender on the basis of their form (see section 2.2 below), some alignment between gender and semantics is expected. Even in languages for which the gender of nouns has been regarded as arbitrary (famously French and German, but see again 2.2), the system is semantically motivated to some degree, especially for persons and higher animals (11).

(11) Semantically motivated feminine/masculine noun pairs in French and German Open in new tab German (F/M) French (F/M) Translation die Frau/der Mann la femme/l’homme ‘the woman/the man’ die Nichte/der Neffe la nièce/le neveu ‘the niece/the nephew’ die Stute/der Hengst la jument/l’étalon ‘the mare/the stallion’ die Kuh/der Stier la vache/le taureau ‘the cow/the bull’ Open in new tab

On the other hand, when gender systems are perfectly semantic, researchers sometimes separate them from grammatical gender and speak of “semantic gender,” “natural gender,” “agreement in sex” or “animacy agreement,” which may be unhelpful, as it introduces artificial splits between otherwise equivalent systems.

A third canonical property is that gender agreement should occur in the form of affixes or (more rarely) clitics, and in more than one lexical category or more than one syntactic domain. This means that we expect languages to show gender on several words in the utterance, for instance on adjectives, verbs, and pronouns. The Bantu language Chichewa, for example, is highly canonical in this respect: in addition to marking gender on the noun itself, it clocks up the following list of agreement targets (Bentley & Kulemeka, 2001 ; Mchombo, 2004 ,):

Finite verbs (subject and object agreement).

Adjectives.

Demonstrative pronouns.

Relative pronouns.

Possessive pronouns.

Indefinite/quantitative pronouns.

Question words.

Associative markers (comparable to prepositions).

In general, more agreement results in an easier to recognize gender system. If agreement in a particular language is restricted to a single category, like pronouns, then the existence of grammatical gender in that language might be debatable. The most famous case is English, which only shows evidence for gender on personal and possessive pronouns, leading researchers (and laypersons) to argue about whether English has a gender system or not.

By looking at just three of the many ways in which gender systems can meet or defy expectations, the usefulness of typological knowledge about cross-linguistic variation becomes evident—an indispensable tool in analysis and theory.

2. Gender in the Languages of the World

In a sample of 257 languages from different geographical areas and linguistic families, 112 are shown to have a gender system (Corbett, 2013a ). Their distribution across the world is heterogeneous. Gender systems are common in Europe, in Africa, and in Australia, but they are comparatively rare in the Americas and practically absent in large parts of Asia and in the Pacific (Aikhenvald, 2000 , p. 78; Corbett, 2013a ). In the linguistic literature, the best-represented and most widely researched gender systems are those of the Indo-European and the Niger Congo languages, in particular from the Bantu genus. Aside from these, individual fame is enjoyed by languages such as Arapesh (Fortune, 1942 ; but especially thanks to Aronoff, 1994 ; see also Dobrin, 2012 ), Bayso (Corbett & Hayward, 1987 ), Dyirbal (Dixon, 1972 ; popularly known through Lakoff, 1987 ; but see also Plaster & Polinsky, 2010 ), Miraña (Seifart, 2004 ), Ngan’gityemmeri (Reid, 1997 ), Russian (Corbett, 1991 ), Yimas (Foley, 1991 ), and Zande (Aikhenvald, 2000 ; Claudi, 1985 ). These languages have gender systems that are seen as especially informative or challenging for various reasons, such as their many genders (Arapesh, Ngan’gityemmeri), their complex or unusual assignment systems (Arapesh, Dyirbal, Yimas), their history (Ngan’gityemmeri, Zande), or their interaction between gender and other features (Bayso, Miraña, Ngan’gityemmeri, Russian).

Gender systems come in a broad variety of shapes and sizes. Generally speaking, we can distinguish three parameters of variation:

The number of gender values.

The type of assignment rules.

The amount and place of agreement marking.

Let us briefly look at each in turn.

2.1 How Many Gender Values?

The smallest possible number of gender values is two, and two-gender-systems are the most common worldwide (Corbett, 2013a ). On the upper end, languages with more than a dozen classes have been identified, for instance, Arapesh, spoken on Papua New Guinea, with 13 genders (Aronoff, 1992 , 1994 ; Fortune, 1942 ), Ngan’gityemerri, a Daly language spoken in Australia, with 15 genders (Reid, 1997 ), and Nigerian Fula with more than 20 genders depending on dialect and analysis (Arnott, 1970 ; Breedveld, 1995 ).

Establishing how many genders a language has is not always simple and straightforward. Since the indicators for gender are agreeing words, any inconsistencies or mismatches within or among these words can complicate the analysis. For example, there are languages in which not all agreeing words mark the same array of genders. A case in point is Dutch, where gender is marked on definite articles, attributive adjectives, and relative and demonstrative pronouns. All of these distinguish two gender values: common and neuter. Furthermore, gender is marked on personal and possessive pronouns, and here we find three values: masculine, feminine, and neuter (with syncretism between masculine and neuter in the possessives). This makes it hard to say how many genders Dutch has—two or three—and this is indeed a matter of debate in the linguistic and pedagogical literature (see Audring, 2009 for discussion). In other languages, the number of genders is difficult to state for other reasons, for example, because markers are syncretic or otherwise ambiguous (e.g., in Romanian, see Corbett, 1991 , pp. 150–152; Corbett, 2014 , pp. 93–94). Moreover, small clusters of nouns may behave exceptionally (see Corbett, 1991 , pp. 170–175 on “inquorate genders”) or the gender system may overlap with other systems, such as location marking, diminution/augmentation, or grammatical number (see, e.g., Di Garbo, 2014 ).

2.2 Types of Assignment Rules

In some languages, gender appears to be more clearly rule-based than in others. Rules for gender assignment have two basic functions: they serve to motivate the gender of existing words, and they can be used productively to select a gender for loanwords and novel coinages. Generally speaking, there are three types of assignment rule: semantic, phonological, and morphological.

Semantic rules—already mentioned in section 1—are often based on general conceptual splits such as male/female, human/non-human, or animate/inanimate. For example, languages might work like Kolami, a Dravidian language spoken in India (Emeneau, 1955 ; discussed in Corbett, 1991 , p. 10), which attributes masculine gender to nouns denoting male persons and feminine gender to all others. However, not all semantic rules are as straightforward. Many languages have genders that combine a rather heterogeneous set of items, some of which belong to smaller semantic classes such as plants, fruits, or body parts. An example is Isangu, a Niger Congo (Bantu) language mentioned in Comrie ( 1999 , p. 463). As is the custom for Bantu languages, genders are notated as singular/plural pairs with a designated number for each member of a pair.

(12) Isangu genders. Open in new tab Gender Noun Agreement Semantic Characterization Sg Pl Sg Pl 1/2 mu- ba- wu- ba- only (but not all) humans 3/4 mu- mi- wu- mi- most plants; also some animals, concrete nouns, abstract nouns 5/6 di- ma- di- ma- most body parts, most fruits; also some humans, plants, concrete nouns, abstract nouns 7/8 ( γ ‎)i- bi- γ ‎i- bi- most artifacts; also some humans, plants, concrete nouns, abstract nouns 9/10 Ø- Ø-/ba- yi- tsi- most animals; also some plants, concrete nouns, abstract nouns Open in new tab

For yet other languages, linguists have proposed gender assignment rules that—rather than describing the semantics of a whole class—only cover individual clusters of nouns. These are regularities like the following, suggested for German (Köpcke & Zubin, 1983 ; Steinmetz & Rice, 1989 ):

Nouns for stones and minerals are masculine.

Nouns for tropical fruit are feminine.

Such rules are small in scope, and if a language employs them, the number of different rules will be large, as each regularity accounts for only a limited subset of the nouns (a critical account of such rules is given in Enger, 2009 ).

While semantic rules seem to be primary in the sense that genders—we believe—are born as semantic classes (see 3.1 below), languages can develop associations between gender and formal properties of nouns. Such associations can make reference to nearly any formal property, be it phonological (word-initial or word-final sounds or sound sequences, mono-syllabicity, but also patterns of word accent) or morphological (inflectional classes as well as derivational patterns, e.g., certain affixes).

Examples of form-based gender assignment are the following:

Phonological: monosyllabic nouns ending in /ʃ/ are masculine (German, Köpcke, 1982 ).

Morphological (inflection): nouns of declensional types II and III are feminine (Russian, Corbett, 1991 ).

Morphological (derivation): nouns with diminutive suffixes are neuter (Dutch).

Again, we can see a difference between “large rules” of broad scope and “small rules” of narrow scope. A famous example for a language with large phonological rules is the Cushitic language Qafar, for which it is claimed that nouns ending in an accented vowel are feminine, while all others are masculine (discussed in Corbett, 1991 ; Parker & Hayward, 1985 ). These rules appear to cover nearly all of the nouns in the language. Of the three formal rules mentioned above, the first is obviously an example of a small rule, while the second and (to a lesser extent) the third account for a wider array of nouns.

Among the languages in the world, mixed systems of semantic and formal rules are in a slight majority (Corbett, 2013c ), though their prevalence can be more pronounced in certain macro-areas (see Di Garbo, 2014 for Africa). For more references on gender assignment, see Audring ( 2011 ).

2.3 Amount and Place of Marking

The third dimension of complexity lies in the formal expression of gender. Typically, the gender of a noun is not visible on the noun itself—though in some languages it is—but is expressed via agreement on other words, such as the adjective, the predicate, and various pronouns. In some languages, agreement is so ubiquitous that nearly every word in the sentence carries a gender marker. The following example is from Chichewa (Bantu, spoken in East-Africa), where 7, 1, and 9 indicate noun classes (Mchombo, 2004 , p. 87; glosses adapted). Note that Chichewa is one of the languages that mark gender overtly on the noun itself, as well as by agreement.

(13) Ichi ndi chitsílu chi-méné kalulú a-na-chí-lémbélá kálata 7. dem be 7.fool 7- rel 1.hare 1- pst -7-write.to/for 9.letter ‘This is the fool that the hare wrote a letter to/for.’

With the exception of the copula, all words in the sentence express gender: either their own inherent value or the value of the noun they agree with. Also, in Archi, a Nakh-Daghestanian language spoken in the Caucasus, “almost every part of speech can agree in gender” (Chumakina & Corbett, 2015 ; Corbett, 2014 , p. 107; although this does not hold for every item within the parts of speech).

At the other extreme, there are languages with sparse expression of gender. The best-known example is English, where gender is visible only on the personal and possessive pronouns, with not more than seven distinct forms: he/she/it, him/her , and his / its . As mentioned in 1.4 above, languages with frequent marking have gender systems that are easier to spot in fieldwork and easier to defend analytically. Pronominal gender languages like English provide less clear evidence for a gender system. Interestingly, the same considerations appear relevant for the acquisition of gender, which will be discussed in section 4.1.

2.4 Gender in Sign Languages

It makes sense to conclude this brief typological survey with a look at sign languages. Whether there are sign languages that have gender systems is a matter of debate. Many scholars argue that sign languages systematically lack grammatical gender (Pfau, Steinbach, & Woll, 2012 , p. 234), partly because they are generally young languages, while gender (agreement) takes time to develop (see section 3.1). Two exceptions have been proposed. First, many sign languages have classifying handshapes that encode various properties of a referent, for example that it is a person, an animal, or a vehicle, or that its shape is long and thin or broad and flat. What makes such handshapes candidates for gender is that they can be carried over into the verb, which then reflects properties of its subject or object reminiscent of the way gender agreement on the verb reflects properties of nouns. For example, in the Sign Language of the Netherlands (Nederlandse Gebarentaal), the verb meaning “to fall” has a different handshape depending on whether the falling entity is cylindrical, long and thin, or legged (Zwitserlood & Van Gijn, 2006 , which analyzes the phenomenon as gender agreement). However, a more common analysis is that these markers are classifiers rather than genders, since they are clearly semantic, involve a large (and potentially open-ended) variety of classes, and are often optional.

Moreover, there are suggestions that sign languages may mark gender on pronouns. For example, Smith ( 1990 ) and Fischer ( 1996 ) describe masculine and feminine handshapes in personal pronouns in Japanese and Taiwan sign language, respectively. Byun, Zwitserlood, & De Vos ( 2015 ) discuss the same phenomenon for Korean sign language. Still, the evidence is debatable, as the markers are only used for persons and are probably optional. A careful and convincing analysis of such phenomena, however, might provide evidence for pronominal gender systems as—albeit non-canonical—cases of gender in sign language.

3. Rise, Development, and Fall

The issue of “young languages” brings us from typology to diachrony, and the next question to address is how gender systems arise, as well as how they develop and—possibly—decline.

3.1 The Birth of Gender Systems

Gender systems do not arise overnight. Since the central characteristic is agreement, the growth of a gender system requires the development of (bound) gender morphology, either from scratch or by repurposing existing morphological material, such as derivational morphemes, case or number affixes, or locative markers (Aikhenvald, 2000 ). For this reason, gender is counted among the “mature elements of language,” involving long chains of evolutionary events (Dahl, 2004 , p. 112). The same reason accounts for why gender is allegedly absent in pidgin and creole languages (McWhorter, 2001 , p. 163). However, the APiCS database (Maurer, 2013 ) lists at least one example, the Canadian mixed language Michif (Bakker, 1997 ), which shows an agreement system described as “truly weird” by Corbett ( 2006 , p. 269), since it involves not only one gender system but actually two, from both lexifier languages, French and Plains Cree. Applying a broader definition and including sporadic agreement as well as pronominal genders might yield more young languages with grammatical gender (Maurer, 2013 ).

If agreement is developed “from scratch,” several possible pathways have been proposed. Figure 1 summarizes them graphically. In most cases, the original sources are nouns, in particular nouns with classifying potential, such as “man,” “animal,” or “thing.” Such words can develop into classifiers that are used with other nouns to indicate their class membership (see example 3 in section 1.2). From here on, developments can proceed in two directions. Classifiers can be used for derivational purposes, as in constructions like man child “son”; this may then cause them to merge with their nouns and resemble derivational affixes or noun class markers. This development does not result in agreement, but in overt marking of gender on nouns. However, classifiers can be repeated within the noun phrase or beyond, and as such, give rise to agreement, via intermediate stages such as pronouns or articles (Corbett, 1991 , pp. 310–312 for examples and details; see also Givón, 1976 ; Greenberg, 1978 ,).

Figure 1. Developmental pathways of gender agreement.

We have assumed that gender agreement involves bound morphology. This is the canonical situation. Due to this criterion, gender systems are not generally found in isolating languages. However, there may be intermediate cases. The Austroasiatic language Khasi, for example, has gender-sensitive particles that function as articles and personal pronouns. What is interesting is that these particles can be repeated before adjectives and verbs:

(14) Open in new tab a. Ka kynthei ka baihbha prt.f woman prt.f handsome ‘a handsome woman’ (Pryse, 1855 , p. 22) Open in new tab Open in new tab b. U briw u Thoh prt.m man prt.m write ‘The man writes’ (Pryse, 1855 , p. 36) Open in new tab

This situation resembles an agreement system, except that the use of the gender particles is optional. However, stronger bonds with neighboring words can arise. For example, the relative pronouns are given as fused forms ( uba “who/that, m ”) and kaba “who/that, f ”), and some sources also list question words as fused: uei “who?/which ( m )?,” kaei “who?/which ( f )?” (Roberts, 1891 [1995] , p. 47). While Khasi gender is not canonical and violates expectations in several ways, the language can be argued to have a nascent gender system, despite the nearly complete absence of bound morphology.

3.2 Change and Loss of Gender

Once a language has a gender system, it appears to be a relatively stable feature in diachronic terms (Dahl, 2004 , p. 199). Yet, feature systems develop and change in various ways.

With regard to assignment rules, gender can become more form-based or more semantic over time. In the first scenario, a particular gender value becomes associated with a specific formal characteristic of a number of nouns. Since it is believed that all gender systems start out as semantics-based, this process must have occurred in all languages with a mixed assignment system. The opposite tendency is (re)semanticization, a development in which semantic rules are strengthened or (re)introduced. Again, this can be triggered by a cluster of nouns, but also by a flagship instance (Corbett, 1991 , p. 314 uses the term “Trojan horse”) defecting to another gender, pulling other nouns along and changing the semantic profile of their new class.

Note that changes in assignment rules do not in themselves lead to the loss of gender—they merely restructure the system. More consequential are changes in the agreement system.

In agreement systems, the following types of change are commonly found:

The birth of new agreement targets by grammaticalization.

The strengthening of gender markers on the noun or in agreement.

The rise of new gender values by reconfiguration and reanalysis of existing morphological markers.

The loss of individual gender values by syncretism or loss of the markers.

An instance of the first change can be seen in West Flemish, where the agreement targets have recently been expanded to include conjunctions and the words meaning “yes” and “no” (as we saw for Wambeek Dutch in example 7 above) (Bennis & Haegeman, 1984 ; De Vogelaer & Van der Auwera, 2010 ). The pronominal source of the agreements is still transparently visible. The second type of development can be seen in the history of English: in late Old English, the feminine pronoun had the form heo and was near-syncretic with the masculine pronoun in various dialects. The introduction of the new feminine pronoun she increased the formal distinctiveness of the genders (Curzan, 2003 , p. 45). For a wider sample of similar cross-linguistic cases, consult Corbett ( 1991 , p. 312).

The third type of change constitutes a reiteration of the steps outlined in the previous section: by repurposing or redistributing case or number markers, but also locative markers, new gender values can arise. Again, Corbett ( 1991 , p. 313–314) supplies illustrative examples and discussion.

The fourth type of change is the most familiar: gender markers can be caught up in processes of losing inflectional morphology, which may make them indistinguishable by syncretism or cause them to erode altogether. As a consequence, distinctions between individual genders may be blurred and eventually lost. Deflection processes of this kind have been described for many Indo-European languages—they are evident in all languages in which the three genders characteristic of the family have been reduced to two. Well-known examples are Spanish, Italian, and French (see, e.g., Polinsky & van Everbroek, 2003 , for a model of the changes from Latin to French), but also Scandinavian and Dutch. An interesting observation is that gender reduction or loss proceeds in cross-linguistically predictable ways (Demuth, Faraclas, & Marchese, 1986 ; Marchese, 1988 ; Priestly, 1983 ). Distinctions are typically retained longest on personal pronouns (Corbett, 1991 , p. 143).

Complete erosion of the markers can eventually result in the loss of gender as a grammatical feature. Within Indo-European, this fate has befallen most Iranian and many Indic languages (Corbett, 1991 , p. 318). In other languages, too, we find morphological markers that are recognizable as remnants of former gender systems.

Having considered the nature, the distribution, and the history of gender systems across the languages of the world, the final section will consider gender in the speaker’s mind—in particular, in language acquisition.

4. Acquiring Gender

Gender is a famously difficult property to acquire as an adult learner. This fact has prompted extensive research. However, the feature has also attracted the attention of first language acquisition researchers and psycholinguists in general. The following section sketches a number of interesting issues and findings from the vast literature.

4.1 Gender in First Language Acquisition

The task of acquiring a gender system is complex, as gender involves an intricate mixture of semantics, morphology, and syntax. Children have to figure out the function of the markers, their distribution across words, as well as the underlying syntactic dependencies. Moreover, they have to learn which noun belongs to which gender and—ideally—why.

Despite the complexities in the languages for which the relevant information is available (the overwhelming majority are Indo-European; for notable exceptions see, for instance, Demuth, 2003 ; Deen, 2005 ; Gagliardi & Lidz, 2014 ), gender appears to be acquired early and largely error-free. The average age of mastery appears to be 3 years, though later ages are mentioned for individual languages, like German (Eichler, Jansen, & Müller, 2013 ) and Dutch (Blom, Polišenská, & Weerman; 2008 ; Cornips & Hulk, 2008 ; van Kampen & Wijnen, 2000 ). Unfortunately, accounts are difficult to compare, as the target state of acquisition is not always clearly defined. First, it could be the case that the regularities of agreement may be in place early, while children may take longer to figure out the gender of individual nouns (Blom, Polišenská, & Weerman, 2006 ; Orgassa & Weerman, 2008 ). Second, the use of articles and other adnominal targets may be mastered earlier than the use of pronouns (Mills, 1986 , p. 86). This pattern can be explained by the hypothesis that children start out acquiring determiner-noun pairs as chunks or constructions (MacWhinney, 1978 , p. 60–61; Mills, 1986 , p. 63). Tighter constructions consisting of neighboring words are likely to be easier to entrench in memory.

Generally speaking, there seem to be three factors that influence the speed of acquisition: the complexity of the assignment system, the quality of the cues, and the interrelations with other features. In addition, individual genders may be established later if the language shows a strongly unequal distribution of nouns over genders: Dutch children, for example, are exceptionally late in correctly identifying nouns of neuter gender, as common gender nouns make up about 65%–75% of the noun vocabulary in the language (van Berkum, 1996 , p. 35).

As we saw above, gender assignment rules can be semantic or formal in nature (section 2.2). Children appear to be more responsive to formal than to semantic cues (Karmiloff-Smith, 1979 ; Mills, 1986 ; Müller, 2000 ; Pérez-Pereira, 1991 ; but cf. Mulford, 1985 ). Comrie ( 1999 ) reports that children in the Bantu language Isangu overgeneralize gender both ways: in favor of more regular form patterns as well as more regular semantics.

Aside from their type, an important difference between assignment rules is their reliability. While some rules may be categorical, others have a mere stochastic value. For example, the rule that French nouns ending in -/Ʒ/are masculine is true for 94% of the cases (Tucker, Lambert, & Rigault, 1977 ), while the rule that German monosyllables ending in a nasal followed by a consonant are masculine only holds for 70% of the relevant nouns (Köpcke & Zubin, 1984 , p. 29). Various studies show that more reliable rules are acquired earlier. Further facilitation has been shown to come from cues in child-directed speech, for example the frequent use of diminutives (Kempe, Brooks, Mironova, & Fedorova, 2003 ).

On the other hand, straightforward assignment rules do not necessarily result in an easy-to-acquire gender system. While English has particularly clear assignment rules, English children are comparatively slow in mastering the system (Corbett, 1991 , p. 82; Mills, 1986 ,). One of the reasons is the amount of syntactic evidence available to the child, which is low in a pronominal gender language like English. In German, by contrast, “gender is marked on many parts of speech [so] the German child has more opportunities to learn it” (Corbett, 1991 , p. 85). Hence, clearer and richer agreement systems can be expected to be beneficial for learning (Audring, 2014 ).

A complicating factor in many languages is the crosscutting of gender with other features, mainly number and case. This results in a more complex task for the child, as the various functions need to be figured out simultaneously. Eichler, Jansen, & Müller, 2013 argues that the presence of a case system is the main reason why German gender is acquired more slowly than French, Spanish, and Italian gender. Besides, more dimensions of orthogonal features can make for more complex patterns of syncretism, which lower the validity of each form as a cue to the learner.

In view of the complexity of the task, first language acquisition of gender proceeds remarkably smoothly. This fact stands in stark contrast to the acquisition of gender in adults.

Gender in Second Language Acquisition

As is widely known, gender is notoriously difficult to master in a second language, especially for adult learners (see, e.g. Bartning, 2000 ; Blom, Polišenská, & Unsworth, 2008 ; Bruhn de Garavito & White, 2000 ; Carroll, 1989 ; Dewaele and Véronique, 2001 ; Franceschina, 2005 ; Hawkins, 2001 ; Holmes & Dejean de la Batie, 1999 ; Rogers, 1987 ; Sabourin, 2003 ). This fact has been linked to the critical period hypothesis, which assumes maturational constraints on certain grammatical features. With regard to gender, the hypothesis predicts that, if the feature is not part of the speaker’s L1 (native language), it cannot be properly acquired in the L2 (second language) after childhood (Hawkins & Chan, 1997 ). Several questions follow:

Are younger L2 learners better at acquiring gender?

Does successful L2 acquisition of gender presuppose an L1 that also has a gender system?

Can adult learners ever hope to reach native competence?

Regarding the age of onset, studies report that child L2 learners show the same error patterns as monolingual children, while older children and adult learners make other kinds of error (Andersson, 1992 ; Bartning, 2000 ; Blom, Polišenská, & Weerman, 2008 , Dewaele & Veronique, 2001 ; Franceschina, 2005 ; Granfeldt, 2003 ; Hawkins & Franceschina, 2004 ). This suggests that early—but not late—L2 gender acquisition may be native-like.

The second question addresses the issue of transfer from the first to the second language. Various studies, e.g. Herschensohn ( 2009 ) and Hopp ( 2010 ), take transfer rather than age to be the major cause of delayed or unsuccessful gender acquisition. Broadly speaking, transfer effects can be positive or negative. On the positive side, an L1 that already has a gender system can prepare the ground for gender in the L2. Especially helpful might be a first language that is similar to the second. Various studies, such as Foucart & Frenck-Mestre ( 2011 ); Franceschina ( 2005 ); Sabourin, Stowe, & de Hann ( 2006 ), show such positive transfer effects in gender acquisition. However, the existence of a gender system in the L1 is not a necessary prerequisite for the successful acquisition of gender in the L2; English learners of French were able to acquire gender with great accuracy (White, Valenzuela, Macgregor, Leung, & Ben-Ayed, 2001 ), even showing native-like brain responses to gender violations (Foucart, 2009 ).

On the negative side, transfer can be in the way of successful second-language acquisition if learners attempt to process a second in terms of the first, arriving at the wrong results where the systems differ. Such effects, too, have been reported in the literature (Foucart & Frenck-Mestre, 2011 ; Ganushchak, Verdonschot, & Schiller, 2011 ; Sabourin, Stowe, & de Hann, 2006 ; Sabourin & Stowe, 2008 ; Tokowicz & MacWhinney, 2005 ).

The last question, in turn, inquires about ultimate attainment—can L2 learners learn gender to a native-like degree? In the literature, this question has been approached from two sides: behaviorally and neurolinguistically. Behavioral studies report that even highly proficient second-language learners retain a certain percentage of errors (Alarcón, 2011 ; Franceschina, 2005 ; Grüter, Lew-Williams, & Fernald, 2012 ; Montrul, Foote, & Perpiñán, 2008 ). However, these errors seem to be associated with gender assignment rather than gender agreement, especially under (experimental) time pressure (Hopp, 2013 ). This suggests that the central issue is not the inability to acquire the grammar of gender, but rather the amount of experience with the L2 that allows the learner to find out and store the gender of every noun. Indeed, the acquisition of gender may be “for a large part word-learning” (Unsworth, 2008 , p. 365).

Recently, the behavioral results have been complemented by electrophysiological data. Studies of event-related potentials (ERPs) show that in native speakers, the brain’s response to gender agreement errors is a P600 effect associated with syntactic violations. Do non-native speakers show the same response? Results differ. Meulman, Stowe, Sprenger, Bresser, & Schmid ( 2014 ) report that highly proficient L2 learners of Dutch consistently fail to show the expected P600 pattern, regardless of their age of acquisition, their length of residence in the Netherlands, their proficiency, or their offline knowledge about gender. This matches earlier findings, but contrasts with others (see Meulman et al., 2014 for references). One of the explanations suggested is that native-like electrophysiological responses only appear in the latest stages of proficiency, beyond the point where language tests indicate full mastery.

Across studies, the general outcome is positive: even if grammatical gender is a hard feature to acquire as an adult learner, native-like proficiency can be attained.

5. Critical Analysis of Scholarship: Gender in Linguistic Theory

In the linguistic literature, gender is enjoying considerable fame as “the most puzzling of the grammatical categories” (Corbett, 1991 , p. 1). One of the main reasons is the widespread uncertainty about its function. While number, person and tense have clear semantic correlates, gender information seems to contribute little to the semantics of an utterance. Indeed, scholars have famously claimed that gender is little more than “an accident of linguistic history” (Ibrahim, 1973 , p. 50). Defenders of functionality have stressed the fact that gender can help to keep track of referents across a stretch of discourse (Heath, 1975 ; Lyons, 1977 , p. 288; but see Contini-Morava & Kilarski, 2013 for wider considerations). On a critical note, this effect is often overrated in languages that only have two or three genders—the disambiguating power of gender will only be convincing in languages with a larger number of gender values.

Another major issue has been the regularity of gender. With a research tradition focusing on Indo-European, especially French and German, some of the 20th century literature pessimistically claims that gender assignment is arbitrary. In reaction, a variety of studies have appeared attempting to prove that gender assignment is actually regular and predictable. Famous accounts are Köpcke, 1982 ; as well as Köpcke & Zubin, 1984 ; or Zubin & Köpcke, 1986 for German, and Tucker, Lambert, & Rigault, 1977 for French. Since then, the issue has come to appear in a different light by the availability of a broader range of cross-linguistic data (mainly thanks to Corbett, 1991 ). Once the biasing focus on Indo-European is overcome, it turns out that many languages have gender assignment systems that are in fact quite regular.

A related issue is the way gender is transferred or assigned in borrowing and contact; an extensive literature is available, especially on English loanwords (see Corbett, 1991 , pp. 70–82 for an overview, and Audring, 2011 for more references; useful studies are Baetens-Beardsmore, 1971 ; Carstensen, 1980 ; Kilarski, 2001 ; and Poplack, Pousada, & Sankoff, 1982 ). While the focus on English makes good sense—first, because English loans are copious in many languages; second, because a genderless source language helps to control the number of factors to consider—it is doubtful how deeply we understand the mechanisms, especially since many of the borrowing languages investigated have highly complex assignment systems.

Gender is also a much-discussed subject in psycholinguistics, though predominantly in language acquisition research (see section 4). Recently, however, research efforts have turned to gender in processing and production, particularly in relation to models of the mental lexicon, the principles of lexical access, and the processing of grammatical information. Major issues are gender priming (see Bates, Devescovi, Hernandez, & Pizzamiglio, 1996 ; Friederici & Jacobsen, 1999 ), gender in speech errors (Berg, 1992 ), gender in tip-of-the-tongue states (Vigliocco, Antonini, & Garrett, 1997 ), as well as the brain’s reaction to gender violations (an early influential study is Hagoort & Brown, 1999 ; see section 4.2 for more references). A disadvantage is the scarcity of links between experimental and typological studies, though attempts are made to bridge the gap (e.g., Tsegaye, Mous, & Schiller, 2014 ).

Finally, a new line of typological research is currently emerging that investigates the interaction of gender with classifier systems in languages that have both (see the project page of the Surrey Morphology Group, Guildford, U.K.).

Links to Digital Materials

Audring, J. ( 2011 ). Gender . In Oxford Bibliographies: Linguistics. This is an annotated online bibliography of the literature on gender.

Surrey Morphology Group, project Combining Gender and Classifiers in Natural Language , University of Surrey, Surrey, U.K.

World Atlas of Language Structures Online is the best online resource; gender is covered in topics 30 , 31 , and 32 , as well as 44 .

Further Reading

• Aikhenvald, A. Y. (2000). Classifiers . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. A typological textbook that focuses on classifiers but also discusses gender.
• Blom, E. , Polišenská, D. , & Unsworth, S. (Eds.). (2008). The acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch [Special issue]. Second Language Research , 24 (3). On the acquisition of gender (mainly about Dutch, but of broader interest).
• Corbett, G. G. (1991). Gender . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. The best source on grammatical gender—both a fascinating and readable introduction and an encyclopedic resource for advanced researchers.
• Corbett, G. G. (2007). Gender and noun classes. In: T. Shopen (Ed.), Language typology and syntactic description (2d ed.), (pp. 241–279). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. For readers looking for a shorter account than the 1991 monograph.
• Corbett, G. G. (2014). The Expression of Gender . Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. A recent collection of articles on gender, from various perspectives.
• Craig, C. G . (Ed.) (1986). Noun classes and categorization: Proceedings of a symposium on categorization and noun classification, Eugene, Oregon, October 1983 . Philadelphia: John Benjamins. A compilation of presentations of a symposium on Categorization and Noun Classification, held at the University of Oregon in October 1984.
• Enger, H. O. , Nesset, T. , & Rice, C. (Eds.). (2006). The grammar of gender [Special issue]. Lingua , 116 (9). A special issue devoted to theoretical issues (mainly work by Scandinavian linguists).
• Friederici, A. D. , Garrett, M. F. , & Jacobsen, T. (Eds.). (1999). Processing of grammatical gender [Special issue]. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research , 28 (5–6). On gender in language processing.
• Senft, G . (Ed.) (2000). Systems of nominal classification . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Unterbeck, B. , & Rissanen, M . (Eds.). (1999). Gender in grammar and cognition . Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. This is a useful two-part volume of papers addressing gender theoretically as well as descriptively.
• Aikhenvald, A. Y. (2000). Classifiers . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Alarcón I. V. (2011). Spanish gender agreement under complete and incomplete acquisition: Early and late bilinguals’ linguistic behavior within the noun phrase. Bilingualism: Language and cognition , 14 , 332–350.
• Andersson, A.-B. (1992). Second language learners’ acquisition of grammatical gender in Swedish . (Doctoral dissertation). University of Göteborg, Göteborg, Sweden.
• Arnott, D. W. (1970). The nominal and verbal systems of Fula . Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Aronoff, M. (1992). Noun classes in Arapesh, In: G. Booij , & J. van Marle (Eds.), Yearbook of morphology 1991 (pp. 21–32). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer.
• Aronoff, M. (1994). Morphology by itself: Stems and inflectional classes . Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.
• Audring, J. (2009). Reinventing pronoun gender . Utrecht, The Netherlands: LOT Dissertations.
• Audring, J. (2011). Gender . In Oxford Bibliographies: Linguistics .
• Audring, J. (2014). Gender as a complex feature. Language Sciences , 43 , 5–17.
• Baetens Beardsmore, H. (1971). A gender problem in a language contact situation. Lingua , 27 , 141–159.
• Bakker, P. (1997) A Language of our own: The genesis of Michif, the mixed Cree- French language of the Canadian Métis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Bartning, I. (2000). Gender agreement in L2 French: Pre-advanced vs. advanced learners. Studia Linguistica , 54 , 225–237.
• Bates, E. , Devescovi, A. , Hernandez, A. , & Pizzamiglio, L. (1996). Gender priming in Italian. Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics , 58 (7), 992–1004.
• Bennis, H. J. , & Haegeman, L. (1984). On the status of agreement and relative clauses in West-Flemish. In: W. de Geest & Y. Putseys (Eds.), Sentential Complementation. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Foris.
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• Blom, E. , Polišenská, D. , & Unsworth, S. (2008). The acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch. Second Language Research , 24 (3), 259–265.
• Blom, E. , Polišenská, D. , & Weerman, F. (2006). Effects of age on the acquisition of agreement inflection. Morphology , 16 , 313–36.
• Blom, E. , Polišenská, D. , & Weerman, F. (2008). Articles, adjectives, and age of onset: The acquisition of Dutch grammatical gender. Second Language Research , 24 (3), 297–331.
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• Chumakina, M. , & Corbett, G. G. (2015). Gender-number marking in Archi: Small is complex, In: M. Baerman , D. Brown , & G. G. Corbett (Eds.), Understanding and measuring morphological complexity (pp. 93–117). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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• Corbett, G. G. (1991). Gender . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Corbett, G. G. (2006). Agreement . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Corbett, G. G. (2007). Gender and noun classes. In: T. Shopen (Ed.), Language typology and syntactic description (2d ed.), (pp. 241–279). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Corbett, G. G. (2012). Features . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
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• Demuth, K. , Faraclas, N. , & Marchese, L. (1986). Niger-Congo noun class and agreement systems in language acquisition and historical change. In: C.G. Craig (Ed.), Noun Classes and Categorization (pp. 453–471). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Dewaele, J.-M. , & Véronique, D. (2001). Gender assignment and gender agreement in advanced French interlanguage: A cross-sectional study. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , 4 , 275–297.
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• Eichler, N. , Jansen, V. , & Müller, N. (2013). Gender acquisition in bilingual children: French-German, Italian-German, Spanish-German, and Italian-French. International Journal of Bilingualism , 17 (5), 550–572.
• Emeneau, M. (1955). Kolami: A Dravidian Language . Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Can sex or gender be ‘assigned’?

• Post author By Pat and Stewart
• Post date September 18, 2020

Q: The terms “gender assignment” and “sex assignment” give me pause. The use of the verb “assign” and noun “assignment” in this sense strikes me as off-pitch. Assigning is what the Sorting Hat does in sending a Hogwarts student to one of the school’s four Houses. Is there an interesting story here?

A: The use of the terms “sex assignment” and “gender assignment” for designating the sex of a newborn child is relatively rare, though an etymological case could be made for this sense of “assignment.”

We’ve found only 42 examples of “sex assignment” and 100 of “gender assignment” in recent searches of the News on the Web Corpus, a database of newspaper and magazine articles from 2010 to the present.

None of the 10 standard dictionaries that we regularly consult have entries for “gender assignment” and only one includes “sex assignment.” Dictionary.com , based on the old Random House Unabridged , defines it as “the determination or assignment of a baby’s sex, based on the appearance of external reproductive organs, and, sometimes, chromosomal testing.”

The Oxford English Dictionary , an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, doesn’t include either term, though it has examples dating back to the 14th century of the verb “assign” used to mean determine, designate, specify, classify, categorize, and so on. Here are a few examples:

“And til seynt Iames be souȝte þere, I shal assigne / That no man go to Galis” (“And till Saint James be sought there, I shall assign [specify] that no man go to Galicia” ( Piers Plowman , 1377, by William Langland). We’ve expanded the OED citation.

“Folke whom I neyther assigne bi name, nor as yet knowe not who they be” ( The Debellacyon of Salem and Bizance , 1533, by Thomas More).

“Who all assign its Altitude to be but about 27 inches” ( Experimental Philosophy , 1664, by Henry Power).

And here are a few examples from contemporary standard dictionaries:

“assigned the new species to an existing genus” ( American Heritage ).

“However, further investigations are needed before assigning these Mexican specimens to a new status” ( Lexico , the former Oxford Dictionaries Online ).

“Though assigned male at birth, she appears most comfortable and in her element wearing a skirt and high-heeled sandals when riding a big-wheel or playing with a tea set” ( Merriam-Webster ). The dictionary includes this among examples in which “assign” means to “fix or specify.”

The use of “sex assignment” or “gender assignment” for determining the sex of a newborn is relatively new. And the subject can be controversial, especially when the evidence is ambiguous, as in the earliest example we’ve found. This passage was published in the 1950s in a medical paper on intersexuality, having both male and female sexual organs or characteristics:

“Equally clearly the medical practitioner and the paediatrician need to be helped to form a correct opinion in the first place on the sex assignment and rearing of the intersexed infant.” From “Psychosexual Identification (Psychogender) in the Intersexed,” by Daniel Cappon, Calvin Ezrin, and Patrick Lynes, in the Canadian Psychiatric Journal, April 1959.

The first example we’ve seen for “gender assignment” uses the phrase in the linguistic sense—that is, in reference to languages that use gender to classify nouns, pronouns, and related words:

“Of course there may be dialect differences in the gender assignment of nouns” (from Plains Cree: A Grammatical Study , by the linguist H. Christoph Wolfart, published in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, November 1973).

And here’s the earliest example we’ve seen of “gender assignment” used in the sense you’re asking about: “Gender assignment is based on the existing anatomy and a full understanding of the pathologic and endocrinologic reasons for the ambiguity” ( Practical Gynecology , 1994, by Allan J. Jacobs and ‎Michael J. Gast).

By the way, all but one of the standard dictionaries we consult have entries for “sex reassignment” or “gender reassignment,” commonly known as “sex change.” Some add the word “therapy” or “surgery” to the term.

The OED defines “gender reassignment” as “the process or an instance of a person adopting the physical characteristics of the opposite sex by means of medical procedures such as surgery or hormone treatment.”

The earliest Oxford example is from the late 1960s: “After gender reassignment surgery, some previously rejecting fathers become very affectionate” (“The Formation of Gender Identity,” by Natalie Shainess, Journal of Sex Research, May 1969).

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• Sex and Gender Identity
• What's intersex?
• What are gender roles and stereotypes?

There’s a lot more to being male, female, or any gender than the sex assigned at birth. Your biological or assigned sex does not always tell your complete story.

What are the differences between sex, gender, and gender identity?

It’s common for people to confuse sex, gender, and gender identity.  But they’re actually all different things.

Sex is a label — male or female — that you’re assigned by a doctor at birth based on the genitals you’re born with and the chromosomes you have. It goes on your birth certificate.

Gender is much more complex: It’s a social and legal status, and set of expectations from society, about behaviors, characteristics, and thoughts. Each culture has standards about the way that people should behave based on their gender. This is also generally male or female. But instead of being about body parts, it’s more about how you’re expected to act, because of your sex.

Gender identity is how you feel inside and how you express your gender through clothing, behavior, and personal appearance. It’s a feeling that begins very early in life.

What’s assigned sex (aka “biological sex”)?

Assigned sex is a label that you’re given at birth based on medical factors, including your hormones, chromosomes, and genitals. Most people are assigned male or female, and this is what’s put on their birth certificates.

When someone’s sexual and reproductive anatomy doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male, they may be described as intersex .

Some people call the sex we’re assigned at birth “biological sex.” But this term doesn’t fully capture the complex biological, anatomical, and chromosomal variations that can occur. Having only two options (biological male or biological female) might not describe what’s going on inside a person’s body.

Instead of saying “biological sex,” some people use the phrase “assigned male at birth” or “assigned female at birth.” This acknowledges that someone (often a doctor) is making a decision for someone else. The assignment of a biological sex may or may not align with what’s going on with a person’s body, how they feel, or how they identify.  

The factors that determine our assigned sex begin as early as fertilization .

Each sperm has either an X or a Y chromosome in it. All eggs have an X chromosome.

When sperm fertilizes an egg, its X or Y chromosome combines with the X chromosome of the egg.

A person with XX chromosomes usually has female sex and reproductive organs, and is therefore usually assigned biologically female.

A person with XY chromosomes usually has male sex and reproductive organs, and is therefore usually assigned biologically male.

Other arrangements of chromosomes, hormones, and body parts can happen, which results in someone being intersex .

What’s gender?

Gender is much bigger and more complicated than assigned sex. Gender includes gender roles , which are expectations society and people have about behaviors, thoughts, and characteristics that go along with a person’s assigned sex.

For example, ideas about how men and women are expected to behave, dress, and communicate all contribute to gender. Gender is also a social and legal status as girls and boys, men, and women.

It’s easy to confuse sex and gender. Just remember that biological or assigned sex is about biology, anatomy, and chromosomes. Gender is society’s set of expectations, standards, and characteristics about how men and women are supposed to act.

What’s gender identity?

Your gender identity is how you feel inside and how you express those feelings.  Clothing, appearance, and behaviors can all be ways to express your gender identity.

Most people feel that they’re either male or female.  Some people feel like a masculine female, or a feminine male. Some people feel neither male nor female. These people may choose labels such as “genderqueer,” “gender variant,” or “gender fluid.”  Your feelings about your gender identity begin as early as age 2 or 3.

Some people’s assigned sex and gender identity are pretty much the same, or in line with each other. These people are called cisgender. Other people feel that their assigned sex is of the other gender from their gender identity (i.e., assigned sex is female, but gender identity is male). These people are called transgender or trans. Not all transgender people share the same exact identity.

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When you are writing, you need to follow general principles to ensure that your language is free of bias. Here we provide guidelines for talking about gender with inclusivity and respect.

Gender offers an added layer of specificity when interpreting patterns or phenomena of human behavior. However, the terms related to gender and sex are often conflated, making precision essential to writing about gender and/or sex without bias. The language related to gender identity and sexual orientation has also evolved rapidly, and it is important to use the terms people use to describe themselves (Singh, 2017; for how to determine appropriate terms, see General Principles for Reducing Bias ; for a list of terms and definitions, see APA, n.d.).

Gender is covered in the seventh edition APA Style manuals in the Publication Manual Section 5.5 and the Concise Guide Section 3.5

Gender versus sex

Gender refers to the attitudes, feelings, and behaviors that a given culture associates with a person’s biological sex (APA, 2012). Gender is a social construct and a social identity. Use the term “gender” when referring to people as social groups. For example, when reporting the genders of participants in the Method section, write something like this: “Approximately 60% of participants identified as cisgender women, 35% as cisgender men, 3% as transgender women, 1% as transgender men, and 1% as nonbinary.” Sex refers to biological sex assignment; use the term “sex” when the biological distinction of sex assignment (e.g., sex assigned at birth) is predominant. Using “gender” instead of “sex” also avoids ambiguity over whether “sex” means “sexual behavior.” In some cases, there may not be a clear distinction between biological and acculturative factors, so a discussion of both sex and gender would be appropriate. For example, in the study of sexual orientation , researchers continue to examine the extent to which sexuality or sexual orientation—attraction to sex, gender, or some combination of both—is a biological and/or acculturative phenomenon.

Gender identity

Gender identity is a component of gender that describes a person’s psychological sense of their gender. Many people describe gender identity as a deeply felt, inherent sense of being a boy, a man, or male; a girl, a woman, or female; or a nonbinary gender (e.g., genderqueer, gender-nonconforming, gender-neutral, agender, gender-fluid) that may or may not correspond to a person’s sex assigned at birth, presumed gender based on sex assignment, or primary or secondary sex characteristics (APA, 2015a). Gender identity applies to all individuals and is not a characteristic only of transgender or gender-nonconforming individuals. Gender identity is distinct from sexual orientation ; thus, the two must not be conflated (e.g., a gay transgender man has a masculine gender identity and a gay sexual orientation, a straight cisgender woman has a feminine gender identity and a straight sexual orientation).

Reporting of gender

Authors are strongly encouraged to explicitly designate information about the gender identities of the participants making up their samples (e.g., whether participants are transgender, cisgender, or other gender identities) rather than assuming cisgender identities. Cisgender refers to individuals whose sex assigned at birth aligns with their gender identity (APA, 2015). Cisgenderism or cissexism refers to the belief that being cisgender is normative, as indicated by the assumption that individuals are cisgender unless otherwise specified (both terms are in use). Genderism refers to the belief that there are only two genders and that gender is automatically linked to an individual’s sex assigned at birth (American Psychological Association of Graduate Students, 2015).

Transgender and gender-nonconforming people

Transgender is used as an adjective to refer to persons whose gender identity, expression, and/or role does not conform to what is culturally associated with their sex assigned at birth. Some transgender people hold a binary gender, such as man or woman, but others have a gender outside of this binary, such as gender-fluid or nonbinary. Individuals whose gender varies from presumptions based on their sex assigned at birth may use terms other than “transgender” to describe their gender, including “gender-nonconforming,” “genderqueer,” “gender-nonbinary,” “gender-creative,” “agender,” or “two-spirit,” to name a few. (Note that “two-spirit” is a term specific to Indigenous and Native American communities.) Transprejudice and transnegativity denote discriminatory attitudes toward individuals who are transgender. Diverse identity terms are used by transgender and gender-nonconforming (TGNC) people, and “TGNC” is a generally agreed-upon umbrella term. These terms are generally used in an identity-first way (e.g., “transgender people,” “TGNC people”). However, there is some variation in the field; for example, clinicians often refer to individuals according to identity (self-identified) or describe gender variance , gender expansiveness , or gender diversity rather than gender nonconformity or nonbinary gender . Be sure to use identity labels that are in accordance with the stated identities of the people you are describing, and clearly define how you are using such identity labels within your writing.

Sex assignment

The terms “birth sex,” “natal sex,” “tranny,” and “transvestite” are considered disparaging by scholars in TGNC psychological research; by many individuals identifying as transgender, gender-nonconforming, or nonbinary; and by people exhibiting gender diversity. Thus, these disparaging terms should be avoided. Additionally, “birth sex” and “natal sex” imply that sex is an immutable characteristic without sociocultural influence. It is more appropriate to use “assigned sex” or “sex assigned at birth,” as this functionally describes the assignment of a sex term (frequently binary male or female; however, intersex is an accurate assignment for some) predicated on observation of genitalia and/or determination of chromosomes and anatomical structures of the body at birth, which necessarily is interpreted within a sociocultural context. The term “transsexual” is largely outdated, but some people identify with it; this term should be used only for an individual who specifically claims it.

Gender and noun usage

Refer to all people, including transgender people, by the name they use to refer to themselves, which may be different from their legal name or the name on their birth certificate, keeping in mind provisions for respecting confidentiality. Likewise, to reduce the possibility of stereotypic bias and avoid ambiguity, use specific nouns to identify people or groups of people (e.g., women, men, transgender men, trans men, transgender women, trans women, cisgender women, cisgender men, gender-fluid people). Use “male” and “female” as adjectives (e.g., a male participant, a female experimenter) when appropriate and relevant. Use “male” and “female” as nouns only when the age range is broad or ambiguous or to identify a transgender person’s sex assignment at birth (e.g., “person assigned female at birth” is correct, not “person assigned girl at birth”). Otherwise, avoid using “male” and “female” as nouns and instead use the specific nouns for people of different ages (e.g., women).

To refer to all human beings, use terms like “individuals,” “people,” or “persons” rather than “man” or “mankind” to be accurate and inclusive. Avoid gendered endings such as “man” in occupational titles (e.g., use “police officer” instead of “policeman”), as these can be ambiguous and may imply incorrectly that all persons in the group self-identify as one gender. Instead, use a nongendered term if possible (e.g., “homemaker” instead of “housewife”). If you use sources that include the generic “man,” generic “he,” or dated occupational titles, clarify the historical context in which these terms were used.

Gender and pronoun usage

Pronoun usage requires specificity and care on the author’s part. Do not refer to the pronouns that transgender and gender-nonconforming people use as “preferred pronouns” because this implies a choice about one’s gender. Use the terms “identified pronouns,” “self-identified pronouns,” or “pronouns” instead. When writing about a known individual, use that person’s identified pronouns. Some individuals use “they” as a singular pronoun; some use alternative pronouns such as “ze,” “xe,” “hir,” “per,” “ve,” “ey,” and “hen” (Swedish gender-neutral pronoun), among others. Some individuals may alternate between “he” and “she” or between “he and/or she” and “they,” whereas others use no pronouns at all and use their name in place of pronouns. Refer to a transgender person using language appropriate to the person’s gender, regardless of sex assigned at birth—for example, use the pronouns “he,” “him,” and “his” in reference to a transgender man who indicates use of these pronouns.

When referring to individuals whose identified pronouns are not known or when the gender of a generic or hypothetical person is irrelevant within the context, use the singular “they” to avoid making assumptions about an individual’s gender. Use the forms “they,” “them,” “theirs,” and so forth. Sexist bias can occur when pronouns are used carelessly, as when the pronoun “he” is used to refer to all people, when a gendered pronoun is used exclusively to define roles by sex (e.g., “the nurse . . . she”), or when “he” and “she” are alternated as though these terms are generic. Pronouns associated with a specific gender have been found to induce readers to think of individuals of that gender even when the pronoun use is intended to be generic (Gastil, 1990; Moulton et al., 1978). In addition, exposure to gender-specific language in a professional context has been linked with a lower sense of belonging, reduced motivation, and professional disidentification for individuals who do not identify with that gender (Stout & Dasgupta, 2011). When writers use the singular “they,” it reduces bias in the way that readers perceive the individuals referred to in the text and thereby helps ensure that readers do not feel ostracized by that text.

Avoid using combinations such as “he or she,” “she or he,” “he/she,” and “(s) he” as alternatives to the singular “they” because such constructions imply an exclusively binary nature of gender and exclude individuals who do not use these pronouns. These forms can also appear awkward and distracting, especially with repetition. However, the combinations “he or she” or “she or he” (but not the combinations with slashes or parentheses) can be used sparingly if all people being referred to by the pronouns use these terms.

Terms that imply binaries

Avoid referring to one sex or gender as the “opposite sex” or “opposite gender”; appropriate wording may be “another sex” or “another gender.” The word “opposite” implies strong differences between two sexes or genders; however, there are more similarities than differences among people of different genders or sexes (see, e.g., Zell et al., 2015). As noted previously, some individuals do not identify with either binary gender, and these phrases ignore the existence of individuals who have disorders or differences of sex development or who are intersex (for more information, see Accord Alliance, n.d.; APA, 2015; Blackless et al., 2000; Intersex Society of North America, n.d.). To describe members of a relationship (e.g., romantic couples, people in polyamorous relationships), use the phrases “mixed gender” or “mixed sex” when the partners have different genders or sexes, rather than “opposite gender” or “opposite sex”; use the phrases “same gender” or “same sex” when the partners have the same gender or sex.

Examples of bias-free language

The following are examples of bias-free language for gender. Both problematic and preferred examples are presented with explanatory comments.

1. Differentiation of gender from sex

Problematic: It was participants’ sex (whether they were women, men, or nonbinary), not their sexual orientation, that affected number of friendships.

Preferred: It was participants’ gender (whether they were women, men, or nonbinary), not their sexual orientation, that affected number of friendships.

Comment: Avoid confusing sex with gender.

2. Discussion of humans in general

Problematic: man, mankind man a project man–machine interface manpower man’s search for knowledge

Preferred: people, humanity, human beings, humankind, human species staff a project, hire personnel, employ staff user–system interface, person–system interface, human–computer interface workforce, personnel, workers, human resources the search for knowledge

Comment: Do not use “man” to refer to all human beings. Use more inclusive terms instead.

3. Use of “males” and “females” as nouns

Problematic: males, females

Preferred: men, women, boys, girls cisgender men, cis men, cisgender women, cis women, cis people, cis allies transgender men, trans men, transgender women, trans women, transgender people, trans people gender-fluid people, gender-nonconforming people, gender-expansive people, gender-creative people, agender people, bigender people, genderqueer people individuals, adults, children, adolescents, people, humans

Comment: Specific nouns reduce the possibility of stereotypic bias and often clarify discussion. Use “male” and “female” as adjectives where appropriate and relevant. “Male” and “female” may be appropriate as nouns when the age range is quite broad or ambiguous and everyone in the group identifies as male or female or when used to identify a transgender person (e.g., “assigned female at birth” is correct, not “assigned girl at birth”). Otherwise, to refer to all people, use terms like “people” or “humans” (see also Example 10). Avoid unparallel usage such as “10 men and 16 females.” Avoid automatically placing socially dominant groups first (e.g., men then women).

4. Discussion of a generic person

Problematic: The client is usually the best judge of the value of his counseling. The client is usually the best judge of the value of his or her counseling.

Preferred: The client is usually the best judge of the value of counseling. The client is usually the best judge of the value of their counseling. Clients are usually the best judges of the value of the counseling they receive. The best judge of counseling is usually the client.

Comment: Do not use the generic “he” or “he or she” to refer to a generic person; instead, rewrite the sentence or use the singular “they.” When writing about a known individual, use that person’s identified pronouns.

5. Respect for pronouns

Problematic: preferred pronouns

Preferred: identified pronouns self-identified pronouns pronouns

Comment: Do not refer to the pronouns that transgender and gender-variant people use as “preferred pronouns,” as this implies a choice about one’s gender.

6. Specifying gender when it is not relevant

Problematic: female doctor, female physician male nurse

Preferred: doctor, physician nurse

Comment: Specify gender only if it is a variable or necessary to the discussion (e.g., “13 doctors were women and 22 were men”).

7. Use of gendered terminology

Problematic: mothering

Preferred: parenting nurturing [or specify exact behavior]

Comment: Do not imply that only mothers care for children. Use gender-neutral terminology when available and appropriate.

Problematic: research scientists often neglect their wives and children

Preferred: research scientists often neglect their spouses and children

Comment: People of any gender or sexual orientation can be research scientists.

8. Use of gendered occupational titles

Problematic: foreman housewife mailman salesmanship stewardess waitress

Preferred: supervisor or superintendent postal worker or letter carrier homemaker selling ability flight attendant server

Comment: Avoid gendered occupational titles; instead, use a gender-neutral term to avoid implying that all people in that role are of a particular gender.

Problematic: chairman (of an academic department)

Preferred: chairperson chair

Comment: “Department head” may be appropriate; however, the term is not synonymous with “chair” and “chairperson” at all institutions. Use “chairman” only if it is known that the institution has established that form as an official title.

Problematic: chairman (presiding office of a committee or meeting)

Preferred: chairperson chair moderator discussion leader

Comment: In parliamentary usage, “chairman” is the official term and should not be changed. Alternatives are acceptable in most writing.

10. Use of adjectives in a gendered context

Problematic: cautious men and timid women

Preferred: cautious men and women, cautious people timid men and women, timid people

Comment: Some adjectives, depending on whether the person described is a woman or a man, connote bias. The examples illustrate some common usages that may not always convey exact meaning, especially when paired. “Men” and “women” should only be used if these are the known genders of individuals.

11. Parallel description of participants

Problematic: girls and men

Preferred: women and men

Comment: Use parallel terms; “girls” is correct if the identified population being described pertains to adolescent or younger self-identified females.

12. Comparison of sexes and genders or descriptions of couples

Problematic: opposite sex opposite-gender couples

Preferred: another sex mixed-gender couples

Comment: Use of “opposite sex” and “opposite gender” implies a sexual binary and overemphasizes differences.

Accord Alliance. (n.d.). Learn about DSD . http://www.accordalliance.org/learn-about-dsd/

American Psychological Association. (n.d.). Definitions related to sexual orientation and gender diversity in APA documents . https://www.apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/sexuality-definitions.pdf

American Psychological Association. (2012). Guidelines for psychological practice with lesbian, gay, and bisexual clients. American Psychologist , 67 (1), 10–42. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024659

American Psychological Association. (2015). Guidelines for psychological practice with transgender and gender nonconforming people. American Psychologist , 70 (9), 832–864. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0039906

American Psychological Association of Graduate Students. (2015). Proud and prepared: A guide for LGBT students navigating graduate training . American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/apags/resources/lgbt-guide.aspx

Blackless, M., Charuvastra, A., Derryck, A., Fausto-Sterling, A., Lauzanne, K., & Lee, E. (2000). How sexually dimorphic are we? Review and synthesis. American Journal of Human Biology , 12 (2), 151–166. http://doi.org/bttkh4

Gastil, J. (1990). Generic pronouns and sexist language: The oxymoronic character of masculine generics. Sex Roles , 23 (11–12), 629–643. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00289252

Intersex Society of North America. (n.d.). How common is intersex? http://www.isna.org/faq/frequency

Moulton, J., Robinson, G. M., & Elias, C. (1978). Sex bias in language use: “Neutral” pronouns that aren’t . American Psychologist , 33 (11), 1032–1036. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003066X.33.11.1032

Singh, A. A. (2017). Understanding trauma and supporting resilience with LGBT people of color. In K. L. Eckstrand & J. Potter (Eds.), Trauma, resilience, and health promotion in LGBT patients: What every healthcare provider should know (pp. 113–119). Springer.

Stout, J. G., & Dasgupta, N. (2011). When he doesn’t mean you: Gender-exclusive language as ostracism. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin , 37 (6), 757–769. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167211406434

Zell, E., Krizan, Z., & Teeter, S. R. (2015). Evaluating gender similarities and differences using metasynthesis. American Psychologist , 70 (1), 10–20. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038208

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Book contents

• Frontmatter
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of abbreviations
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 GENDER ASSIGNMENT I: SEMANTIC SYSTEMS
• 3 GENDER ASSIGNMENT II: FORMAL SYSTEMS
• 4 THE PSYCHOLINGUISTIC STATUS OF GENDER ASSIGNMENT
• 5 GENDER AGREEMENT
• 6 ESTABLISHING THE NUMBER OF GENDERS
• 7 TARGET GENDERS: SYNCRETISM AND ENFORCED GENDER FORMS
• 8 HYBRID NOUNS AND THE AGREEMENT HIERARCHY
• 9 GENDER RESOLUTION RULES
• 10 GENERALIZATIONS AND PROSPECTS
• Author index
• Language index
• Subject index

5 - GENDER AGREEMENT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Up to this point we have assumed that nouns can be divided into genders and we have analysed the composition of these genders, considering whether they are based solely on semantic criteria, or whether formal factors also have a role. We now turn to gender agreement. This is important for two reasons: first, it is the way in which gender is realized in language use; and second, as a consequence, gender agreement provides the basis for defining gender and for establishing the number of genders in a given language. In this chapter we concentrate on the variety of ways in which gender is exemplified in the languages of the world, leaving to chapter 6 the procedures for determining the number of genders in a given language. While there is a broad consensus on the core cases of agreement, there is no generally accepted definition; there is a problem as to the outer limit of phenomena properly described as agreement, as we shall see when the personal pronoun is discussed in section 5.1. A working definition is provided by Steele (1978: 610):

The term agreement commonly refers to some systematic covariance between a semantic or formal property of one element and a formal property of another. For example, adjectives may take some formal indication of the number and gender of the noun they modify.

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• GENDER AGREEMENT
• Greville G. Corbett
• Book: Gender
• Online publication: 05 June 2012
• Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139166119.006

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Glossary of Must-Know Gender Identity Terms

Verywell / Alex Dos Diaz

A Through E

F through l, m through r, s through z.

Gender identity terms are words that are used to help convey meaning related to how people identify with particular genders regardless of their sex assignment at birth. While it may seem arbitrary to some people, the words that we use are extremely important as they can be used to either exclude or empower. Choosing words carefully when we speak can help to affirm someone’s identity and challenge discrimination against them.

On the other hand, choosing not to use the words someone prefers can be disempowering and demeaning. To help you recognize the words that are best in each situation and be an ally , it helps to familiarize yourself with common terms. Given that terms are also constantly changing, it can be helpful to ask someone how they self-identify to make sure that you are using the language that they prefer and that feels affirming to them.

You may feel awkward or uncomfortable asking someone their pronouns , for example, but rest assured that people are generally happy to educate to ensure they are identified correctly.

In addition, terms may not be standard across cultures, languages, and different groups of people. In particular, if you grew up as part of Gen X or an older generation, chances are that all of these terms feel somewhat new to you. While you may feel that you are at a disadvantage in terms of knowing what to say, there’s no need to worry that you are going to say the wrong thing if you are willing to learn.

While in the past people were accustomed to speaking in binary language (male vs. female gender matching assigned sex only), this terminology ignored people who experience a sense of gender that doesn’t fit into societal norms. This also reflected a limited understanding of gender that doesn’t account for the variations of identities that we know to exist today.

Below is a glossary of terms to help you familiarize yourself with the different words and meanings that you may encounter. Remember that these terms are constantly changing and it's important to stay up-to-date by asking people about their preferred terms.

AFAB: Acronym with the meaning “assigned female at birth.”

AMAB: Acronym with the meaning “assigned male at birth.”

Agender: Referring to a person who does not identify with any gender identities, most people who use agender don't feel that they have a gender at all.

Ally: Ally is a term to describe anyone who actively and fully supports the LGBTQIA+ community.

Androgynous: Referring to a person with a gender identity or presentation that is neutral or has both masculine and feminine parts. Synonyms include null-gender, androgyne, genderless, and neutrosis.

Assigned Sex at Birth: A medical assignment given at birth based on physical characteristics of the body. This can refer to male, female, or also intersex.

Bigender : Referring to a person who identifies with two different genders at the same time.

Body Dysphoria: Discomfort about the body that is related to gender identity and misalignment with physical characteristics such as anatomy, secondary sex characteristics, reproductive organs, etc.

Cisgender or Cisnormativity: A person whose gender identity or subconscious sex aligns with the sex that they were assigned at birth. For example, a person assigned the sex of a male at birth who identifies as male gender would be considered cisgender. Similarly, a person assigned the sex of female at birth and who identifies as female gender would be cisgender .

Most people are cisgender and so this is considered the “norm,” which can lead to systemic and unintentional prejudice against trans people in society. However, cisgender individuals can also be gender non-conforming . The Latin prefix “cis” means “on the same side.”

Cisgender Privilege : Referring to the experience of never having one’s natural sexual identity be questioned by society. This leads to the behavior of taking for granted that everyone has the same life experience and a lack of struggle with their gender identity.

Coming out: The ongoing process of disclosing one's gender identity to oneself and others (e.g., with friends, at work, with family).

Cross-Dresser: A person who wears clothing that is not typical for their gender. Usually, the term is used for men who prefer to dress in women’s clothing. This may be done for self-expression or other reasons. Synonyms include transvestite or drag queen. Being a cross-dresser does not automatically equal being transgender, some people may just do this to express themselves.

Deadname: Name assigned at birth that the individual does not identify with. Deadnames reflect the idea that the name is no longer how the person identifies, hence the word “dead.” Being deadnamed can cause trans people to experience dysphoria.

Demigender/Demiboy/Demigirl: The prefix “demi” indicates a person who has the experience of partially identifying with a particular gender and includes those who may be nonbinary. Other related terms include demienby and demitrans.

Family of choice: The circle of friends, partners, etc. that people who are LGBTQIA+ choose to associate with because they provide validation, support, and a feeling of belonging that they may be missing in their biological family.

Female-to-male (FTM): Referring to people who were assigned female at birth but who identify as male. This may or may not involve changing the body through medical procedures or surgeries.

Feminine-of-center: Referring to a person who identifies with a feminine gender expression regardless of whether they consider themself a woman or were assigned the sex of female at birth.

Feminine-presenting: Referring to a person with an outward gender expression that appears feminine. For example, this could be shown through style, mannerisms, body language, etc.

Femme: Referring to a person with a gender identity or expression that leans toward being feminine in general. A person who is femme does not necessarily identify as a woman and is not necessarily assigned the female sex at birth by a doctor.

Gender Affirmation Surgery: Surgery to affirm an individual’s gender identity that involves changing primary or secondary sex characteristics. This can be necessary to alleviate gender dysphoria.

Gender Apathetic: Referring to a person who does not care about their gender nor how they appear to others in terms of their gender. In other words, they do not identify with any particular gender.

Gender Binary: A binary division of gender into only two types (man or woman) which is expected to match the sex assigned at birth (male, female, or intersex). This system does not allow for people who identify with a gender that does not fit the binary system or people who feel their gender is fluid rather than fixed.

Gender Conforming: Referring to a person who follows the rules of society about how genders should act, behave, and appear to others.

Gender Dysphoria: A medical diagnosis and term to reflect the distress experienced by individuals who have a misalignment between their sex assigned at birth and the gender that they identify with internally. This means that a person doesn’t feel right about their body parts, physical characteristics, or societal interactions in terms of their internal experience of gender.

Gender Expansive: Referring to people who work to make culture more inclusive in terms of gender expression, gender roles, and gender norms in society.

Gender Expression: The way that a person publicly expresses their gender as masculine, feminine, androgynous, etc. For example, gender can be expressed through their clothing, hair and makeup, body language, chosen name, pronouns, mannerisms, interests, etc.

For trans people, they may also physically alter their body through medical interventions to match their internal gender identity such as hormone therapy or surgery. Also known as gender presentation.

Gender Bender: Referring to an attack on stereotypes about gender that questions norms and expectations in society. May also be referred to as a genderf***.

Genderfluid: Referring to a person who shifts between genders or who feels as though their gender changes over time either rapidly or gradually.

Gender Identity: A core sense of the self as being a woman, man, or neither. This does not always align with the sex assigned at birth and can develop and change over time. It also cannot be assumed based on outward physical characteristics.

Gender-Inclusive Pronouns: Pronouns that are neutral and can be used by both transgender and cisgender people. For example, the words they, them, and theirs when used to refer to a single person are gender-neutral pronouns.

Gender Minority: Referring to people who are transgender or gender non-conforming and are in the minority in relation to society as a whole in terms of the binary view of gender.

Gender Non-conforming (gender variant, genderqueer): People whose gender expression does not follow the gender norms or societal expectations for the sex they were given at birth or their perceived sex. This includes people who are androgynous , feminine men, masculine women, etc. This can include trans people but not all people who are gender non-conforming identify as trans. People of any gender can be gender nonconforming (e.g., cis, nonbinary, trans).

Gender Norms: The cultural and social norms assigned to women and men regarding clothing, appearance, roles, and behavior. For example, women are expected to behave more passively than men, while men are expected to be more dominant than women. People who do not fit gender norms may be singled out (e.g., an overly feminine man or a dominant woman).

Gender Queer: Referring to a person who does not align with the gender binary of man vs. woman.

Gender Questioning: Referring to a person who is questioning aspects of their gender such as their gender identity or gender expression.

Gender Roles: Societal norms about what it means to belong to a certain gender. These can change over time and refer to behaviors, interests, etc. They may also differ across cultures.

Gender Outlaw: A person who does not follow the rules of society as far as being defined in a binary way (male vs. female).

Graygender: Referring to a person who does not experience a strong pull toward any particular gender identity or expression.

Intergender: Referring to a person who does not experience one gender, but rather falls between male and female gender identities.

Internalized Transphobia: Feeling uncomfortable with oneself because of having transgender feelings or a gender identity that does not match one’s assigned sex at birth or the gender roles of society.

Intersex: A person born with characteristics that are not easily categorized as male or female (e.g., reproductive organs, chromosomes, hormones). For example, a man could be born with ovaries instead of testes or a woman could be born with XY chromosomes. Intersex occurs at a rate of about one in 1500 births but most people are assigned either male or female sex at birth regardless of being intersex. Intersex people may identify with their assigned sex, identify with the opposite sex, or identify as intersex. They do not usually identify as trans (transgender or transsexual).

LGBTTTIQ: An acronym representing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, two-spirit, intersex, and queer.

LGBT: An acronym representing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender.

LGBTQIA+: An acronym representing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, asexual/ally, etc.

LGBTQ+ : An acronym representing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, etc. This acronym is internationally recognized.

LGBTQ2: An acronym representing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, and two-spirit.

LGBTI: An acronym representing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex.

“Lived” Gender Identity: The combination of an internal gender identity and how it is publicly expressed (gender expression) in daily life such as when shopping, at work, when in the community, etc.

Male-to-female (MTF): Referring to people who were assigned male at birth but who identify as female. This may or may not involve changing the body through medical procedures.

Masculine-of-Center: People who identify as masculine. These individuals may or may not identify as a man. Being masculine-of-center does not indicate a person’s assigned sex at birth.

Masculine-presenting: People with a gender expression that they consider to be masculine. This includes outward expression through such things as body language, mannerisms, physical characteristics, and style.  This term does not indicate anything about assigned sex at birth.

Maverique: A person who experiences their gender identity to be separate from current categories and descriptions.

Misgender: Calling someone by the wrong pronoun or using language that is not inclusive to their gender identity.

Multi-gender: People who identify with more than one gender. This includes people who identify as bigender, trigender, pangender, polygender, and in some cases, genderfluid.

Neutrois: People who have a gender that is neither male nor female. This includes nonbinary, genderless, genderfluid, and agender identities.

Nonbinary: Nonbinary (sometimes called enby or nb) is an umbrella term for anyone who falls outside the gender binary of male or female. Some people simply identify as non-binary and some identify as a specific type of nonbinary identity. Examples include genderqueer, genderfluid, agender, bigender, etc.

Novigender: A gender identity used to describe the experience of people who don’t feel that their gender can be described using existing categories due to its complexity.

Out or Out of the Closet: Being open about one’s gender identity with others.

Outing Someone: Outing someone means telling a person about someone else's gender identity or sexuality when they may not be out yet. Ex. My friend Stacy told her parents I'm trans when I didn't want them to know yet. Outing someone can be very harmful as they might not be in a safe environment to come out on their own.

Omnigender: A person who identifies with all gender identities.

Pangender: A gender identity that involves experiencing many different gender identities simultaneously.

Passing: The experience of “passing” for one’s gender identity. For example, a transgender individual may be accepted by strangers as being the gender that they identify with even when this is different from their assigned sex at birth. This typically involves cues originating from physical characteristics, behaviors, and mannerisms.

Polygender and Pangender: The experience of displaying different parts from multiple gender identities.

Queer: Previously used as a derogatory term for transgender and transsexual individuals, which has since been reclaimed by the community to display their identities with pride .

Questioning: People who are in the process of questioning their gender identity and wish to explore different options.

Sex: A classification system assigned at birth based on a person’s physical characteristics, reproductive systems, chromosomes, hormones, and secondary sex characteristics. Sex is generally classified at birth as male, female, or intersex based on the appearance of the external genitalia. If these are ambiguous, sex is assigned based on internal genitalia, hormones, and chromosomes. Sex is generally recorded on the birth certificate but can sometimes be changed on this document as well as on other legal documents such as a driver’s license.

Sex Assigned at Birth: The sex assigned to a person at birth based on the existing classification system.

Social Dysphoria: A type of gender dysphoria that arises from distress about how other people label, interact with or perceive an individual. It can also be a result of one’s own behavior that is at odds with their gender identity.

Third Gender: The term third gender comes from native and non-Western cultures. It refers to a gender category that does not divide simply into male or female.

Trans Man/Trans Woman: A trans man is someone who was assigned the sex of “female” at birth but who identifies as a man (also known as female-to-male or FTM). A trans woman is someone who was assigned the sex of “male” at birth but who identifies as a woman (also known as male-to-female or MTF).

Transfeminine: Having a feminine gender identity but being assigned a different sex at birth.

Transgender/Trans: Transgender is as an umbrella term for anyone who identifies as a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth. This includes trans men or women and non-binary identities such as genderfluid, genderqueer, and agender.

Transitioning: Activities engaged in by trans individuals to affirm their gender identity such as changing their name, clothing, pronouns, sex designation, etc. This can include medical treatments such as hormone therapy, sex reassignment surgery, etc. This process is different for every person and the time it takes and activities that are engaged in are not universal.

Transmasculine: Having a masculine gender identity but being assigned a different sex at birth.

Transpositive: This term refers to the opposite of transphobia. This type of attitude is validating and accepting of transsexual and transgender individuals and celebrates their rights.

Transsexual: A person whose gender identity is different from the sex that they were assigned at birth. Transsexual generally means the individual has had gender-affirming surgeries and has fully gone through with their transition.

Transphobia: Intolerance, fear, aversion, prejudice, harassment, discrimination, violence, or hatred aimed at trans individuals and trans communities based on stereotypes and misconceptions.

Trigender: The experience of having three gender identities at the same time.

Two-Spirit: Two-Spirit is an important term in many indigenous cultures. It has no set definition but is mainly used to describe a spiritual view of gender or sexuality. It can be used to describe sexual orientation, gender identity, or spiritual identity. It is a term specific to Indigenous cultures and using it as a non-indigenous person would be cultural appropriation.

A Word From Verywell

Remember that terms are constantly changing and that it is important to keep current and ask people what terms they prefer when you are unsure. Although it may feel confusing, using the terms that affirm a person’s gender identity is no different than letting someone know that you care enough to understand things from their perspective.

Those who are cisgender may experience a type of privilege in that they do not understand what it is like to live with a gender identity that is outside the norm. Rather than trying to understand things through your own set of life experiences and views, it’s important to acknowledge that you can’t possibly understand what it might be like to live as a transgender person or someone with a gender identity that goes against the norm.

In these cases, it is best to defer to someone else’s personal experience of what it is like to live their life and what would help them the most. If someone shares their preferred pronouns with you, keep them in mind the same way that you would if they had told you their first name.

Government of Canada. Gender and Sexual Diversity Glossary .

Persad I. Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Glossary .

Ontario Human Rights Commission. Appendix B. Glossary for Understanding Gender Identity and Expression .

Government of Canada. LGBTQ2 Terminology. Glossary and Common Acronyms .

By Arlin Cuncic, MA Arlin Cuncic, MA, is the author of The Anxiety Workbook and founder of the website About Social Anxiety. She has a Master's degree in clinical psychology.

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Assigned Gender

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Assigned Gender , also called Assigned Gender at Birth (AGAB) , Gender Assigned at Birth (GAAB) , Designated Gender at Birth (DGAB) or Assigned Sex at Birth (ASAB) , is a gender or sex assigned to infants, usually based on genitalia alone and reported on the infant's birth certificate. [1] [2] [3] [4]

There are various definitions and versions of AGAB and its overall concept. These include:

• AGAB (Assigned Gender at Birth): Referring to one's assigned sex. An example of this is AMAB (Assigned Male at Birth). Despite the terminological difference between sex and gender, sex assignment is commonly referred to as an assigned gender; [5]
• AGAB (Assigned Gender at Birth): A less common use of the term - referring to the intangible decision made by the parent(s)/guardian(s) to treat the infant as a certain gender identity, which usually follows on throughout childhood and teenagehood. An example of this is AMAB (Assigned Male / Man /Boy at Birth); [6]
• AGAA (Assigned Gender at Age): Referring to the intangible decision made by the parent(s)/guardian(s) to treat the infant, child, or teenager as a certain gender identity. An example of this is AMAC (Assigned Boy At Childhood); citation needed
• CAGAB (Coercively Assigned Gender at Birth) / FAGAB (Forcefully Assigned Gender at Birth): Referring to one's coercive/forced sex assignment, usually in cases where an infant's body is medically altered to reflect either male or female genitalia. An example of this is CAMAB (Coercively Assigned Male at Birth); [7] [8]
• IAGAB ( Intersex /Incorrectly Assigned Gender at Birth): Referring to an intersex infant's sex assignment, usually male or female especially in countries where intersex is not legally recognized or is unable to be assigned in one's birth certificate. May also refer to an incorrect assignment, especially in cases where the infant's intersex traits are not externally visible; [9]
• ASAB (Assigned Sex at Birth): Referring to one's assigned sex, based on the infant's birth certificate. This is usually used over AGAB as to affirm the differences between sex and gender identity. An example of this is AMAB (Assigned Male at Birth). [2]
• 1 Terminology and Usage
• 3 Recognition of Intersex or Other
• 4 Assigned Sexes
• 5 Resources

Terminology and Usage

Due to the definition of gender identity being a social/psychological aspect rather than a physical one (body sex), AGAB can be a potentially confusing concept. Historically, AGAB was designed with gender's secondary definition in mind - where gender is a synonym of body sex. [10] Whilst the definition of gender has changed over the years, AGAB as a concept has remained primarily the same. Despite the linguistic conflict, it is officially understood to refer to one's body sex, as that is how one's AGAB is determined. [1] Many English birth certificates use the term body sex for one's gender assignment, however whilst ASAB may be more linguistically correct in terms of definition, AGAB is still far more commonly used.

Individuals whose gender identity matches their birth assignment are referred to as cisgender , while individuals who have a gender identity that differs from their assigned gender may identify as transgender . [11] The difference or relationship between one's gender identity and assigned birth is referred to as one's gender modality .

Gender assignment as a clinical definition was historically referred to as natal male/female. This terminology was changed with the publishing of the the DSM-5-TR (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5 Text Revision) in 2022, instead opting to use "individual assigned sex/gender at birth". [12] However, AGAB has existed earlier than 2022 and widely used amongst queer communities before its official presence in the DSM. [11]

Originally it was referred to as Sex/Gender Assigned At Birth (SAAB), and its usage traces back to the early 2000s. [13] Its variations also appeared in a similar timeframe, including CAGAB. [14] [15] [16]

The first appearances of AGAB are unknown, but it's been allegedly reported as appropriated from the intersex community. [17] Intersex individuals would use AGAB specifically in cases where an intersex individual is assigned a sex/gender other than intersex. This is reasoned with the notion that the definition of assigned refers to the medical reassignment often prescribed to intersex infants, which differs to the literary recording of one's sex. In a letter to the editor of Times-Call, Susana wrote:

Such people are often, unfortunately, “assigned” a sex (sometimes incorrectly) by doctors who perform a sex assignment surgery on the unconsenting child, to make their genitalia more closely resemble standard female or male genitals. This does not happen to non-intersex people, and it is not accurate to describe women or men as having been “assigned” a sex, when in actuality, their biological sex was simply observed and written down at birth. [17]

However this exclusivity has mostly been lost throughout the years, most likely due to the vague definition of assignment , that being "to designate or set (something) aside for a specific purpose"; as per linguistic manner, a recording of the birth sex (regardless of medical intervention) still meets the definition of an assignment. [18]

Recognition of Intersex or Other

Many countries do not legally recognize intersex or indeterminate as a valid record, and do not allow their documentation on birth certificates, passports, or other forms of identification. However some countries do allow the record and identification of intersex, including the correction of certificates for those that later discovered they were intersex. The amount of regions that have begun to recognize intersex classification have been steadily growing over the past few decades.

In 2016, Sara Kelly Keenan was the first US citizen to receive a birth certificate marking one's assigned sex as intersex. [19] [20] Most Australians have been able to correct their birth certificates since 2009, or in some cases remove the sex field from their birth certificate entirely. [21] In 2013, German began to allow an indeterminate sex option on birth certificates. [22] In 2018, Alex Juergen became the first Austrian to receive an intersex marked birth certificate. [23] In 2016, Canadian transgender parent Kori Doty opted to not record their newborn's sex at all. [24]

Some activists have taken to the idea of removing the sex on birth certificates altogether. [25]

Dr Fiona Kelly, a law school professor, and Hannah Robert, a lecturer in law, wrote of the benefits of removing the assigned sex from one's birth certificate:

Having a gender identity that does not match the sex designation on a birth certificate can create confusion and potentially expose people to discrimination when an identity document is requested, such as when they register at a school or university or apply for a passport. ... Removing sex from birth certificates would also eliminate the need for the parents of an intersex child to choose a sex for their baby to be publicly recorded. This can be a highly difficult and emotional decision for parents and, in some instances, will not reflect the child’s understanding of their gender later on. Leaving the birth certificate blank allows the child to make that decision once they have the knowledge and maturity to confirm their gender identity. " [25]

Assigned Sexes

• ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Birth Assignment". translanguageprimer, https://translanguageprimer.com/birth-assignment/ . Accessed on 19 Jun, 2023.
• ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Glossary". Digital Transgender Archive, https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/learn/glossary . Accessed on 21 Jun, 2023.
• ↑ "Birth certificate (Australian)". Unique Student Identifier, 14 Jun, 2023, https://www.usi.gov.au/students/identification/australian-birth-certificate .
• ↑ Raveenthiran V. Neonatal Sex Assignment in Disorders of Sex Development: A Philosophical Introspection. J Neonatal Surg. 2017 Aug 10;6(3):58. doi: 10.21699/jns.v6i3.604. PMID: 28920018; PMCID: PMC5593477.
• ↑ "Glossary of Terms: Transgender". GLAAD, https://glaad.org/reference/trans-terms/ . Accessed on 19 Jun, 2023.
• ↑ "LGBTQ+ Terminology / Vocabulary Primer". NewYork-Presbyterian, https://www.nyp.org/documents/pps/cultural-competency/Understanding%20Disparities%20-%20LGBTQ%20Terminology.pdf . Accessed on 21 Jun, 2023.
• ↑ "CAGAB". The Trans Language Primer, https://translanguageprimer.com/cagab/ . Accessed on 21 Jun, 2023.
• ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 coded-reality. "October 26: Intersex Awareness Day". Tumblr, 2020, https://coded-reality.tumblr.com/post/188611961035/october-26-intersex-awareness-day .
• ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 nonbinary-support. "Hey! I'm intersex.". Tumblr, 2016, https://nonbinary-support.tumblr.com/post/131461402043/hey-im-intersex-do-i-need-to-use-agab-language .
• ↑ Zhu, Handwiki. "Gender." Encyclopedia . Web. 07 November, 2022.
• ↑ 11.0 11.1 "Understanding Gender Identities". The Trevor Project, 23 Aug, 2021, https://www.thetrevorproject.org/resources/article/understanding-gender-identities/ .
• ↑ First MB, Yousif LH, Clarke DE, Wang PS, Gogtay N, Appelbaum PS. DSM-5-TR: overview of what's new and what's changed. World Psychiatry. 2022 Jun;21(2):218-219. doi: 10.1002/wps.20989. PMID: 35524596; PMCID: PMC9077590.
• ↑ "Intro to Understanding Sex, Gender and the Spectrum". kyberia, 21 Apr, 2007, https://kyberia.sk/id/3069259 .
• ↑ Bazant, Micah. "Trans Etiquette/Respect/Support 101". Transtorah, 2011, http://www.transtorah.org/PDFs/Trans_Etiquette_101.pdf .
• ↑ destroyedforcomfort. "AMAB/AFAB vs . CAMAB/CAFAB". Tumblr, 2013, https://destroyedforcomfort.tumblr.com/post/32011963208/amabafab-vs-camabcafab .
• ↑ "Transsexual". TVTropes, https://archive.md/dZncK#selection-4277.1-4401.19 . Archived on 30 Aug, 2017.
• ↑ 17.0 17.1 Santamaria, Susana. "‘Assigned at birth’ appropriated from the intersex community". Times-Call, 6 Feb, 2021, https://www.timescall.com/2021/02/06/letters-sexual-assignment/?fbclid=IwAR18338gF1mWlnVucksTF6R3MulLMQzltg4IT0JFNfla0STJOr6J7eUfNsI .
• ↑ "assign - transcription, translation and pronunciation online". myefe, https://myefe.com/transcription-pronunciation/assign#:~:text=designate%20or%20set%20(something)%20aside%20for%20a%20specific%20purpose .. Accessed on 22 Jun, 2023.
• ↑ 19.0 19.1 O'Hara, Mary Emily. "Nation's First Known Intersex Birth Certificate Issued in NYC". NBC News, 30 Dec, 2016, https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/nation-s-first-known-intersex-birth-certificate-issued-nyc-n701186 .
• ↑ Segal, Corinne. "Nation’s first known ‘intersex’ birth certificate issued in New York City". PBS News Hour, 5 Jan, 2017, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/new-york-city-issues-nations-first-birth-certificate-marked-intersex#:~:text=Meanwhile%2C%20Keenan%20reached%20out%20to%20the%20New%20York%20City%20Health%20Department%2C%20who%20issues%20birth%20certificates%2C%20to%20request%20a%20change%20to%20the%20sex%20listed%20on%20her%20birth%20certificate ..
• ↑ Carpenter, Morgan. "On intersex birth registrations". Intersex Human Rights Australia, 13 Nov, 2009, https://ihra.org.au/4856/on-birth-registrations/ .
• ↑ Muller, Natalie. "Third sex". DW, 1 Nov, 2013, https://www.dw.com/en/third-sex-option-on-birth-certificates/a-17193869 .
• ↑ Savage, Rachael. Anarte, Enrique. "Austria issues first intersex birth certificate after four-year battle". Reuters, 17 Jul, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-austria-lgbt-rights-trfn-idUSKCN24H33M .
• ↑ 24.0 24.1 Koenig, Ronnie. "Transgender parent explains why they are raising baby without an assigned gender". Today, 18 Jul, 2017, https://www.today.com/parents/transgender-parent-leaves-their-baby-s-gender-unassigned-t113796 .
• ↑ 25.0 25.1 Dr Kelly, Fiona. "Removing sex from birth certificates". La Trobe University, Robert, Hannah, 29 Oct, 2018, https://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/articles/2018/opinion/removing-sex-from-birth-certificates .
• ↑ "AFAB". Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/AFAB . Accessed on 19 Jun, 2023.
• ↑ beyond-mogai-pride-flags. "DFAB Flag". Tumblr, 15 Oct, 2020, https://archive.md/2022.02.12-070010/https://beyond-mogai-pride-flags.tumblr.com/post/632047659950194688/dfab-flag . Archived on 12 Feb, 2022.
• ↑ themogaidragon. "AIAB". Tumblr, 17 Sep, 2021, https://themogaidragon.tumblr.com/post/662581001970728960/aiab .
• ↑ "AMAB". Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/AMAB . Accessed on 19 Jun, 2023.
• ↑ beyond-mogai-pride-flags. "DMAB Flag". Tumblr, 15 Oct, 2020, https://archive.md/2022.02.12-084755/https://beyond-mogai-pride-flags.tumblr.com/post/632047211246764032/dmab-flag . Archived on 12 Feb, 2022.
• ↑ beyond-mogai-pride-flags. "AXAB Pride Flag". Tumblr, 9 Oct, 2020, https://archive.md/2022.02.12-094909/https://beyond-mogai-pride-flags.tumblr.com/post/631548226993012736/axab-pride-flag . Archived on 12 Feb, 2022.
• ↑ 32.0 32.1 interarchival. "fafab + famab". Tumblr, 27 Dec, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20230107041309/https://interarchival.tumblr.com/post/671776339598196736/fafab-famab . Archived on 7 Jan, 2023.
• ↑ 33.0 33.1 https://interarchival.tumblr.com/post/671769367452778496/iafab-iamab [Dead Link]
• ↑ beyond-mogai-pride-flags. "UAB Pride Flag". Tumblr, 3 Mar, 2019, http://archive.today/2022.04.20-012243/https://beyond-mogai-pride-flags.tumblr.com/post/183189528435/uab-pride-flag . Archived on 20 Apr, 2022.

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Chapter Systems of Gender Assignment

by Greville G. Corbett cite

In Chapters 30 and 31 we have seen how we as linguists analyze gender systems, and establish how many genders there are. The remaining question is how the speaker assigns nouns to those genders. In other words, if a speaker of Russian uses the word kniga   ‘book’ or djadja   ‘uncle’, how does he or she "know" the gender? Clearly speakers must know the gender in order to be able to make the appropriate agreements. A model of the way in which speakers allot nouns to genders is called a gender assignment system.

1. Defining the values

Assignment may depend on two sorts of information about the noun: its meaning and its form. We start with what we shall call strict semantic systems. In some languages the meaning of a noun is sufficient to determine its gender, for all or almost all nouns. This type is found in Dravidian languages like Kannada (Karnataka, southern India ; Sridhar 1990 : 198). In Kannada , nouns denoting male humans are masculine, those denoting female humans are feminine. There are also deities, demons and heavenly bodies in these genders. All remaining nouns, including those denoting infants and animals, are neuter. Thus appa   ‘father’, and candra   ‘moon’ are masculine, amma   ‘mother’ is feminine, and na:yi   ‘dog’ is neuter.

Many languages have semantic assignment rules which do not cover the noun inventory as completely as do the rules of Kannada . We shall call these predominantly semantic assignment systems . An example is found in Bininj Gun-Wok , which was introduced at the beginning of Chapter 31 . The semantic categories found in each gender are given in Table 1.

This table is from Evans et al. (2002) , and full details of gender assignment in Bininj Gun-Wok can be found there; the items in square brackets represent categories which have moved into the vegetable gender from the neuter in the speech of younger speakers. The important points for our typology are that the semantic assignment rules are considerably more complex than those of Kannada , and yet the coverage is less good. For example, lower animates are split between the masculine and feminine genders, and it is hard to be more specific; nouns denoting reptiles, birds, fish are found in both categories. There may well be principles of categorization here of which we are still unaware, but it seems likely that for at least some nouns there is no longer a principle for assignment which is still "live" for current speakers. 

The genders of Bininj Gun-Wok have a semantic core, like those of Kannada . However, the rules of Bininj Gun-Wok are more complex, and still leave more nouns unaccounted for. This typological distinction applies equally well to languages where the dominant semantic principle involves animacy rather than sex. We noted in Chapter 31 how Eastern Ojibwa ( Algonquian ; Ontario, Canada ) assigns nouns to gender according to animacy, but how some nouns do not fall readily under the rule. Thus in languages with semantic assignment systems, the meaning of the noun determines gender. In the strict assignment systems, the rules are obvious and cover (virtually) the entire noun inventory. In the predominantly semantic systems, there is a minority of exceptions; these exceptions have been claimed to be largely only apparent in some languages, once the cultural setting of the language is taken into account. When we ask which are the semantic criteria on which semantic systems can be based, we see recurring patterns and occasional surprises ( Corbett 1991 : 30-32). For the present map we treat strict semantic and predominantly semantic systems together.

In many languages, however, assignment by semantic rules would leave many nouns without an assignment to a gender. In languages like Kannada , the nouns not assigned by the semantic rules (the "remainder" or "semantic residue") all belong to a single gender. In the languages we consider next, these residue nouns are distributed over more than one gender. Here we find additional rules for assigning nouns to genders according to their form. There is a significant asymmetry: languages may base their assignment system on semantic rules, or on semantic and formal rules, but not just on formal rules. Formal assignment rules may in turn access two types of information: phonological and morphological. There may be combinations of such rules. We shall take a clear instance of each, considering languages from the sample.

A good example of assignment depending on phonological information is provided by Qafar ( Eastern Cushitic ; north-eastern Ethiopia and Djibouti ; Parker and Hayward 1985 ). In Qafar the semantic assignment rules are fairly standard, namely, for sex-differentiable nouns, those denoting males are masculine and those denoting females are feminine. It is the nouns which fall outside these semantic rules, the residue, which are of interest. For them there are the following phonological assignment rules: nouns whose citation form ends in an accented vowel are feminine (for example, karmà   ‘autumn’), while all others are masculine (for example, gilàl   ‘winter’, which does not end in a vowel, and tàmu   ‘taste’, which does end in a vowel, but not an accented one). These rules operate with few exceptions. Moreover, nouns denoting males and females typically accord with them too (for example bàqla   ‘husband’ and barrà   ‘woman, wife’). It might seem that we could dispense with semantic rules for Qafar . However, while the phonological rules give the right result in almost all cases, there are some nouns which show the role of the semantic rules. We find abbà   ‘father’, which is masculine, even though it ends in an accented vowel. Conversely, gabbixeèra   ‘slender-waisted female’ is feminine, though the accent is nonfinal. In such cases of conflict, the semantic rules take precedence (as is the normal situation in gender assignment systems). Qafar has remarkably simple phonological assignment rules, which assign semantically heterogeneous nouns to the appropriate gender by reference to their form.

The second type of formal assignment rule accesses morphological information. Here Russian is a good example. Once again for sex-differentiables, nouns denoting males are masculine and those denoting females are feminine. But unlike the situation in languages like Kannada , the residue is shared between the three genders, with the neuter gender not even receiving the majority. We might think that further semantic rules would be sufficient, but this turns out to be at best highly unlikely; see the data in Table 2, where the nouns in each row are semantically similar yet belong to three different genders. 

Thus the nouns of the semantic residue are scattered across the three genders in Russian . This situation is presented in table 3. 

In order to see how the remaining nouns are assigned, rather than looking at their meaning we should look instead at their morphology. There are four main inflectional classes in Russian , each with several thousands of nouns (for justification of this view see Corbett 1982 : 202-211). There are six cases and two numbers (though no paradigm has twelve distinct forms because of various syncretisms). We give just the singular forms in Table 4. 

Given information about the inflectional class of nouns, the assignment rules are straightforward. Nouns in class I are masculine, those in classes II and III are feminine, and those in IV are neuter. (Further rules are required in Russian for indeclinable nouns, like taksi   ‘taxi’, which is indeclinable and neuter; however, indeclinability is itself a morphological property.) In view of the coverage of these rules, we might be tempted to think that we could dispense with the semantic assignment, since mal´čik   ‘boy’ is in class I, while sestra   ‘sister’ is in class II, and mat´   ‘mother’ is in class III. In other words, many of the sex-differentiable nouns would be assigned to the appropriate gender by the morphological assignment rules. But there are also instances where this is not so, for instance, djadja   ‘uncle’, which denotes a male but is in class II, whose nouns are typically feminine. Djadja   ‘uncle’ is masculine. Nouns like this confirm, once again, that we do not find languages where formal assignment rules are sufficient.

Of course, there are languages where the rules are more complex than these, but for languages where careful research has been undertaken, gender is always predictable from a set of assignment rules, for at least 85% of the noun inventory and usually for a substantially larger proportion than that. For more details on these assignment systems see Corbett (1991 : 7-69). For the purposes of the map we shall treat phonological and morphological assignment together. Thus the division will be between languages which have semantic assignment rules on the one hand, and those which have semantic and formal assignment rules on the other. The values are as follows: 

2. Geographical distribution

Of the languages in our sample with gender systems, there is a roughly even split between the two types of assignment system: 53 have semantic assignment while 59 have semantic and formal assignment. The distribution is interesting. Semantic and formal assignment is found mainly in Eurasia and Africa, in the Indo-European , Afro-Asiatic and Niger-Congo families. The convincing accounts of the rise of gender systems provide paths leading to systems with semantic assignment. And there are ways in which such systems may further develop into systems with semantic and formal assignment. Note that there is no necessity for this development to occur: the Dravidian systems have remained as semantic systems for a substantial period. However, one might reasonably expect that if a system is of the semantic and formal assignment type, this is likely to indicate an “old” gender system, since there must have been sufficient time for the system to develop from an earlier semantic assignment system. By contrast, if the system is of the predominantly semantic type we can make no prediction, as such systems can arise at any time. It would follow that “old” gender systems are found in Eurasia and Africa. 

3. Theoretical issues

There are several theoretical issues which arise. Given the typology of assignment systems, it is natural to ask what other features might be correlated with the assignment system. There have been several instances of modelling assignment systems, particularly those of the more difficult types, where it is helpful to be able to demonstrate that the proposed system does indeed account for the vast majority of the nouns in the lexicon (see Fraser and Corbett 1995 on Russian , Fraser and Corbett 1997 on Mountain Arapesh , both discussed in Corbett and Fraser 2000 , and Evans et al. 2002 on Bininj Gun-Wok ). Since it has been shown that gender is always largely predictable, this raises an interesting issue for lexicologists: what is the status of a lexical feature which is predictable? Psycholinguists too are beginning to tackle the issue of the place of gender in lexical entries. There has been some interesting work on how children acquire gender systems, for example, Mills (1986) and Müller (2000) . Such studies may also help us to see how such systems change over time, as shown by the work of Polinsky and Jackson 1999 , on Tsez ; see also Comrie and Polinsky 1998 ; for development of the work on modelling change in assignment systems see Polinsky and van Everbroeck 2003 . There are interestingly different gender systems to investigate, and so it is important that we are careful about definitions, in order to ensure that our comparisons are valid. 

Related map(s)

• Systems of Gender Assignment
• Sridhar 1990
• Evans et al. 2002
• Corbett 1991
• Parker and Hayward 1985
• Corbett 1982
• Fraser and Corbett 1995
• Fraser and Corbett 1997
• Corbett and Fraser 2000
• Muller 2000
• Polinsky and Jackson 1999
• Comrie and Polinsky 1998
• Polinsky and van Everbroeck 2003

Gender Development

Neither sex assignment at birth or social gender norms define gender expression..

Posted February 4, 2020 | Reviewed by Daniel Lyons M.A.

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Research provides evidence that cisgender children (children who identify as a boy or a girl according to their assigned sex at birth) show clear patterns of gender development. By age three, they label their gender based on their sex assignment at birth and prefer children of the same gender as playmates. Throughout early and middle childhood , cisgender children show behaviors that are stereotypically associated with their gender, including preferences for specific toys and clothes.

But what about transgender children (children who live as a gender that differs from their sex assignment at birth)? Transgender children have a completely different gender socialization experience, compared to their cisgender peers. They live a part of their childhood as members of one gender (i.e., the gender associated with their assigned sex at birth) and the other part as members of another gender (i.e., the gender with which they identify). What does their gender development look like? Does it differ from cisgender children’s gender development? Is it influenced by the amount of time in which they have been treated as their current gender?

A recent study published in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences investigated these important questions in a large sample of 317 transgender children aged from three to 12-years-old. To this end, Gülgӧz and colleagues focused on transgender children’s gender identity — i.e., the internal sense of being a boy or a girl - and their gender expression — i.e., the behaviors and preferences that are highly stereotypical of their current gender.

Gender identity was assessed both at the explicit and implicit levels. Implicit gender identity was measured using an Implicit Association Test (IAT) evaluating the association strength between the concepts “Me” and “Not me” and the categories “Girls” and “Boys.” The IAT is a computer-based time-reaction task that is thought to assess automatic mental associations and representations that are encoded in memory and that occur outside of people’s awareness and control. Explicit gender identity was measured by using a self-reported item asking children whether they felt to be a boy or a girl.

Gender expression, instead, was measured only at the explicit level. That is, children were presented with questions about toy, peer, and clothing preferences and asked to verbally say their answers or point out them on a computer or a response sheet. For example, to determine toy preferences, children were asked to indicate the toy that they would like to play with the most among a series of toys ranging from stereotypically “boys” toys to stereotypically “girls” toys.

Results showed that transgender children identified as members of their current gender group than their assigned sex at birth, both at the implicit and explicit level and reported preferences that were stereotypically associated with it. In other words, transgender boys identified as boys and preferred stereotypically masculine toys and clothes as well as being friends with other boys. Similarly, transgender girls identified as girls and favored stereotypically feminine toys and clothes, and playmates of the same gender.

Notably, Gülgӧz and colleagues showed also that transgender children’s gender identity and expression were not related to the amount of time in which they were treated as their current gender, i.e. when they had socially transitioned, and do not differ from gender development of their cisgender peers. That is, both transgender and cisgender children report to identify with their current gender and showed similar stereotypical gender-typed preferences.

Gülgӧz and colleagues claim that these results “provide preliminary evidence that neither sex assignment at birth nor direct or indirect sex-specific socialization and expectations in alignment with early assignment necessary define how a child later identifies or expresses their gender”. In other words, “early sex assignment and parental rearing based on that sex assignment do not always define how a child identifies or expresses gender later.”

Gülgöz, S., Glazier, J.J., Enright, E.A., Alonso, D.J., Durwood, L.J., Fast, A.A., Lowe, R., Ji, C., Heer, J., Martin C.L., & Olson K.R. (2019). Similarity in transgender and cisgender children's gender development. Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences , 116(49):24480-24485.

Maddalena Marini, Ph.D. , is a postdoctoral researcher at Italian Institute of Technology, where she investigates implicit social beliefs.

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Give your feedback to help us improve our website This is the new Equality and Human Rights Commission website

• Gender reassignment discrimination

Published: 22 December 2021

Last updated: 23 February 2023

On this page

What the equality act says about gender reassignment discrimination, different types of gender reassignment discrimination, circumstances when being treated differently due to gender reassignment is lawful, pages in this guide.

• Your rights under the Equality Act 2010
• Age discrimination
• Disability discrimination
• Marriage and civil partnership discrimination
• Pregnancy and maternity discrimination
• Race discrimination
• Religion or belief discrimination
• Sex discrimination
• Sexual orientation discrimination
• Terms used in the Equality Act
• Harassment and victimisation
• Direct and indirect discrimination

What countries does this apply to?

On this page we have used plain English to help explain legal terms. This does not change the meaning of the law.

The Equality Act 2010 uses the term ‘transsexual’ for individuals who have the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. We recognise that some people consider this term outdated, so we have used the term ‘trans’ to refer to a person who has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. However, we note that some people who identify as trans may not fall within the legal definition.

This page is subject to updates due to the evolving nature of some of the issues highlighted. 

This is when you are treated differently because you are trans in one of the  situations covered by the Equality Act . The treatment could be a one-off action or as a result of a rule or policy. It doesn’t have to be intentional to be unlawful.

There are some circumstances when being treated differently due to being trans is lawful. These are explained below.

The Equality Act 2010 says that you must not be discriminated against because of gender reassignment.

In the Equality Act, gender reassignment means proposing to undergo, undergoing or having undergone a process to reassign your sex.

To be protected from gender reassignment discrimination, you do not need to have undergone any medical treatment or surgery to change from your birth sex to your preferred gender.

You can be at any stage in the transition process, from proposing to reassign your sex, undergoing a process of reassignment, or having completed it. It does not matter whether or not you have applied for or obtained a Gender Recognition Certificate, which is the document that confirms the change of a person's legal sex. 

For example, a person who was born female and decides to spend the rest of their life as a man, and a person who was born male and has been living as a woman for some time and obtained a Gender Recognition Certificate, both have the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. 

There are four types of gender reassignment discrimination.

Direct discrimination

Direct discrimination happens when someone treats you worse than another person in a similar situation because you are trans.

You inform your employer that you intend to spend the rest of your life living as the opposite sex. If your employer alters your role against your wishes to avoid you having contact with clients, this would be direct gender reassignment discrimination.

The Equality Act says that you must not be directly discriminated against because:

• you  have  the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. A wide range of people identify as trans. However, you are not protected under the Equality Act unless you have proposed, started or completed a process to change your sex.
• someone  thinks   you   have  the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. For example, because you occasionally cross-dress or do not conform to gender stereotypes (this is known as discrimination by perception).
• you are  connected   to  a person who has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment, or someone wrongly thought to have this protected characteristic (this is known as discrimination by association).

Absences from work

If you are absent from work because of your gender reassignment, your employer cannot treat you worse than you would be treated if you were absent:

• due to an illness or injury.

Example –  

Your employer cannot pay you less than you would have received if you were off sick.

• due to some other reason - however, in this case it is only discrimination if your employer is acting unreasonably.

If your employer would agree to a request for time off for someone to attend their child’s graduation ceremony, then it may be unreasonable to refuse you time off for part of a gender reassignment process. This would include, for example, time off for counselling.

Indirect discrimination

Indirect discrimination happens when an organisation has a particular policy or way of working that puts people with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment at a disadvantage. Sometimes indirect gender reassignment discrimination can be permitted if the organisation or employer is able to show that there is a good reason for the discrimination. This is known as  objective justification .

An employer has a practice of starting induction sessions for new staff with an ice-breaker designed to introduce everyone in the room to each other. Each worker is required to provide a picture of themselves as a toddler. One worker is a trans woman who does not wish her colleagues to know that she was brought up as a boy, so she does not bring her photo and is criticised by the employer in front of the group for not joining in. The same approach is taken for all new staff, but it puts people with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment at a particular disadvantage.  This would be unlawful indirect discrimination unless the employer could show that the practice was justified.

Harassment is when someone makes you feel humiliated, offended or degraded for reasons related to gender reassignment.

A person who has undergone male-to-female gender reassignment is having a drink in a pub with friends and the landlord keeps calling her ‘sir’ or ‘he’ when serving drinks, despite her complaining about it.

Harassment can never be justified. However, if an organisation or employer can show it did everything it could to prevent people who work for it from harassing you, you will not be able to make a claim for harassment against the organisation, only against the harasser.

Victimisation

Victimisation is when you are treated badly because you have made a complaint of gender reassignment discrimination under the Equality Act. It can also occur if you are supporting someone who has made a complaint of gender reassignment discrimination.

A person proposing to undergo gender reassignment is being harassed by a colleague at work. He makes a complaint about the way his colleague is treating him and is sacked.

A difference in treatment may sometimes be lawful. This will be the case where the circumstances fall under one of the exceptions in the Equality Act that allow organisations to provide different treatment or services on the basis of gender reassignment.

Examples –    

The organisers of a women’s triathlon event decide to exclude a trans woman with a Gender Recognition Certificate as they think her strength or stamina gives her an unfair advantage. However, the organisers would need to be able to show that this was necessary to make the event fair or safe for everyone.

A service provider provides single-sex services. The Equality Act allows a lawfully established separate or single-sex service provider to prevent, limit or modify people’s access on the basis of gender reassignment in some circumstances. However, limiting or modifying access to, or excluding a trans person from, the separate or single-sex service of the gender in which they present will be unlawful if you cannot show such action is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. This applies whether or not the person has a Gender Recognition Certificate.

Updated: 23 Feb 2023

• Removed paragraph on language recommendations made by Women and Equalities Committee (WEC) in 2016
• Removed the term ‘transsexual’ as per WEC 2016 recommendations
• Added paragraph explaining use of plain English in the guidance
• Removed a paragraph on intersex people not being explicitly protected from discrimination by the Equality Act

Page updates

22 December 2021

Last updated:

23 February 2023

Advice and support

If you think you might have been treated unfairly and want further advice, you can contact the  Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS) .

The EASS is an independent advice service, not operated by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Phone: 0808 800 0082  

Call the EASS on:

0808 800 0082

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GENDER ASSIGNMENT

the term used for the classification of an infant at birth as either male or female. Children born with ambiguous genitalia are usually assigned a gender by parents or physicians. See gender reassignment .

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Neurobiology of gender identity and sexual orientation

Sexual identity and sexual orientation are independent components of a person’s sexual identity. These dimensions are most often in harmony with each other and with an individual’s genital sex, although not always. The present review discusses the relationship of sexual identity and sexual orientation to prenatal factors that act to shape the development of the brain and the expression of sexual behaviours in animals and humans. One major influence discussed relates to organisational effects that the early hormone environment exerts on both gender identity and sexual orientation. Evidence that gender identity and sexual orientation are masculinised by prenatal exposure to testosterone and feminised in it absence is drawn from basic research in animals, correlations of biometric indices of androgen exposure and studies of clinical conditions associated with disorders in sexual development. There are, however, important exceptions to this theory that have yet to be resolved. Family and twin studies indicate that genes play a role, although no specific candidate genes have been identified. Evidence that relates to the number of older brothers implicates maternal immune responses as a contributing factor for male sexual orientation. It remains speculative how these influences might relate to each other and interact with postnatal socialisation. Nonetheless, despite the many challenges to research in this area, existing empirical evidence makes it clear that there is a significant biological contribution to the development of an individual’s sexual identity and sexual orientation.

1 |. INTRODUCTION

Gender identity and sexual orientation are fundamental independent characteristics of an individual’s sexual identity. 1 Gender identity refers to a person’s innermost concept of self as male, female or something else and can be the same or different from one’s physical sex. 2 Sexual orientation refers to an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic and/or sexual attractions to men, women or both sexes. 3 Both gender identity and sexual orientation are characterised by obvious sex differences. Most genetic females identify as such and are attracted to males (ie, androphilic) and most genetic males identify as males and are attracted to females (ie, gynophilic). The existence of these dramatic sex differences suggest that gonadal hormones, particularly testosterone, might be involved, given that testosterone plays an important role in the development of most, behavioural sex differences in other species. Here, a review is provided of the evidence that testosterone influences human gender identity and sexual orientation. The review begins by summarising the available information on sex hormones and brain development in other species that forms the underpinnings of the hypothesis suggesting that these human behaviours are programmed by the prenatal hormone environment, and it will also consider contributions from genes. This is followed by a critical evaluation of the evidence in humans and relevant animal models that relates sexual identity and sexual orientation to the influences that genes and hormones have over brain development.

2 |. HORMONES, GENES AND SEXUAL DIFFERENTIATION OF THE BRAIN AND BEHAVIOUR

The empirical basis for hypothesising that gonadal hormones influence gender identity and sexual orientation is based on animal experiments involving manipulations of hormones during prenatal and early neonatal development. It is accepted dogma that testes develop from the embryonic gonad under the influence of a cascade of genes that begins with the expression of the sex-determining gene SRY on the Y chromosome. 4 , 5 Before this time, the embryonic gonad is “indifferent”, meaning that it has the potential to develop into either a testis or an ovary. Likewise, the early embryo has 2 systems of ducts associated with urogenital differentiation, Wolffian and Müllerian ducts, which are capable of developing into the male and female tubular reproductive tracts, respectively. Once the testes develop, they begin producing 2 hormones, testosterone and anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH). In rats, this occurs around day 16–17 of gestation, whereas, in humans, it occurs at about 7–8 weeks of gestation. 6 Testosterone and one of its derivatives, dihydrotestosterone, induce the differentiation of other organs in the male reproductive system, whereas AMH causes the degeneration of the Müllerian ducts. Female ovaries develop under the influence of a competing set of genes that are influenced by expression of DAX1 on the X chromosome and act antagonistically to SRY. The female reproductive tract in the embryo develops in the absence of androgens and later matures under the influence hormones produced by the ovary, in particular oestradiol.

Analogous processes occur during early development for sexual differentiation of the mammalian brain and behaviour. According to the classical or organisational theory, 7 , 8 prenatal and neonatal exposure to testosterone causes male-typical development (masculinisation), whereas female-typical development (feminisation) occurs in the relative absence of testosterone. Masculinisation involves permanent neural changes induced by steroid hormones and differs from the more transient activational effects observed after puberty. These effects typically occur during a brief critical period in development when the brain is most sensitive to testosterone or its metabolite oestradiol. In rats, the formation of oestradiol in the brain by aromatisation of circulating testosterone is the most important mechanism for the masculinisation of the brain; 9 however, as shown below, testosterone probably acts directly without conversion to oestradiol to influence human gender identity and sexual orientation. The times when testosterone triggers brain sexual differentiation in different species correspond to periods when testosterone is most elevated in males compared to females. In rodents and other altricial species, this occurs largely during the first 5 days after birth, whereas, in humans, the elevation in testosterone occurs between months 2 and 6 of pregnancy and then again from 1 to 3 months postnatally. 6 During these times, testosterone levels in the circulation are much higher in males than in females. These foetal and neonatal peaks of testosterone, together with functional steroid receptor activity, are considered to program the male brain both phenotypically and neurologically. In animal models, programming or organising actions are linked to direct effects on the various aspects of neural development that influence cell survival, neuronal connectivity and neurochemical specification. 10 Many of these effects occur well after the initial hormone exposure and have recently been linked to epigenetic mechanisms. 11

The regional brain differences that result from the interaction between hormones and developing brain cells are assumed to be the major basis of sex differences in a wide spectrum of adult behaviours, such as sexual behaviour, aggression and cognition, as well as gender identity and sexual orientation. Factors that interfere with the interactions between hormones and the developing brain systems during gestation may permanently influence later behaviour. Studies in sheep and primates have clearly demonstrated that sexual differentiation of the genitals takes places earlier in development and is separate from sexual differentiation of the brain and behaviour. 12 , 13 In humans, the genitals differentiate in the first trimester of pregnancy, whereas brain differentiation is considered to start in the second trimester. Usually, the processes are coordinated and the sex of the genitals and brain correspond. However, it is hypothetically possible that, in rare cases, these events could be influenced independently of each other and result in people who identify with a gender different from their physical sex. A similar reasoning has been invoked to explain the role of prenatal hormones on sexual orientation.

Although the role of gonadal steroids in the sexual differentiation of reproductive brain function and behaviour is undeniable, males and females also carry a different complement of genes encoded on their sex chromosomes that also influence sexual differentiation of the brain. 14 – 16 As will be discussed, family and twin studies suggest that there is a genetic component to gender identity and sexual orientation at least in some individuals. However, the nature of any genetic predisposition is unknown. The genetic component could be coding directly for these traits or, alternatively, could influence hormonal mechanisms by determining levels of hormones, receptors or enzymes. Genetic factors and hormones could also make separate yet complementary or antagonistic contributions. It should be noted that, although the early hormone environment appears to influence gender identity and sexual orientation, hormone levels in adulthood do not. There are no reports indicating that androgen levels differ as a function of gender identity or sexual orientation or that treatment with exogenous hormones alters these traits in either sex.

3 |. GENDER IDENTITY

The establishment of gender identity is a complex phenomenon and the diversity of gender expression argues against a simple or unitary explanation. For this reason, the extent to which it is determined by social vs biological (ie, genes and hormones) factors continues to be debated vigorously. 17 The biological basis of gender identity cannot be modelled in animals and is best studied in people who identify with a gender that is different from the sex of their genitals, in particular transsexual people. Several extensive reviews by Dick Swaab and coworkers elaborate the current evidence for an array of prenatal factors that influence gender identity, including genes and hormones. 18 – 20

3.1 |. Genes

Evidence of a genetic contribution to transsexuality is very limited. 21 There are few reports of family and twin studies of transsexuals but none offer clear support for the involvement of genetic factors. 22 – 24 Polymorphisms in sex hormone-related genes for synthetic enzymes and receptors have been studied based on the assumption that these may be involved in gender identity development. An increased incidence of an A2 allele polymorphism for CYP17A1 (ie, 17ɑ-hydroxylase/17, 20 lyase, the enzyme catalysing testosterone synthesis) was found in female-to-male (FtM) but not in male-to-female (MtF) transsexuals. 25 No associations were found between a 5ɑ-reductase (ie, the enzyme converting testosterone to the more potent dihydrotestosterone) gene polymorphism in either MtF or FtM transsexuals. 26 There are also conflicting reports of associations between polymorphisms in the androgen receptor, oestrogen receptor β and CYP19 (ie, aromatase, the enzymes catalysing oestradiol synthesis). 27 – 29 A recent study using deep sequencing detected three low allele frequency gene mutants (i.e., FBXO38 [chr5:147774428; T>G], SMOC2 [chr6:169051385; A>G] and TDRP [chr8:442616; A>G]) between monozygotic twins discordant for gender dysphoria. 30 Further investigations including functional analysis and epidemiological analysis are needed to confirm the significance of the mutations found in this study. Overall, these genetic studies are inconclusive and a role for genes in gender identity remains unsettled.

3.2 |. Hormones

The evidence that prenatal hormones affect the development of gender identity is stronger but far from proven. One indication that exposure to prenatal testosterone has permanent effects on gender identity comes from the unfortunate case of David Reimer. 31 As an infant, Reimer underwent a faulty circumcision and was surgically reassigned, given hormone treatments and raised as a girl. He was never happy living as a girl and, years later, when he found out what happened to him, he transitioned to living as a man. However, for at least the first 8 months of life, this child was reared as a boy and it is not possible to know what impact rearing had on his dissatisfaction with a female sex assignment. 1 Other clinical studies have reported that male gender identity emerges in some XY children born with poorly formed or ambiguous genitals as a result of cloacal exstrophy, 5ɑ-reductase or 17β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase deficiency and raised as girls from birth. 32 , 33 All of these individuals were exposed to testosterone prenatally emphasising a potential role for androgens in gender development and raising doubts that children are psychosexually neutral at birth. 20 On the other hand, XY individuals born with an androgen receptor mutation causing complete androgen insensitivity are phenotypically female, identify as female and are most often androphilic, indicating that androgens act directly on the brain without the need for aromatisation to oestradiol. 34

3.3 |. Neuroanatomy

Further evidence that the organisational hormone theory applies to development of gender identity comes from observations that structural and functional brain characteristics are more similar between transgender people and control subjects with the same gender identity than between individuals sharing their biological sex. This includes local differences in the number of neurones and volume of subcortical nuclei such as the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, 35 , 36 numbers of kisspeptin and neurokinin B neurones in the infundibulum, 37 , 38 structural differences of gray 39 , 40 and white matter microstructure, 41 – 43 neural responses to sexually-relevant odours 44 , 45 and visuospatial functioning. 46 However, in some cases, the interpretation of these studies is complicated by hormone treatments, small sample sizes and a failure to disentangle correlates of sexual orientation from gender identity. 47 The fact that these differences extend beyond brain areas and circuits classically associated with sexual and endocrine functions raises the possibility that transsexuality is also associated with changes in cerebral networks involved in self-perception.

4 |. SEXUAL ORIENTATION

Research over several decades has demonstrated that sexual orientation ranges along a continuum, from exclusive attraction to the opposite sex to exclusive attraction to the same sex. 48 However, sexual orientation is usually discussed in terms of 3 categories: heterosexual (having emotional, romantic or sexual attractions to members of the other sex), homosexual (having emotional, romantic or sexual attractions to members of one’s own sex) and bisexual (having emotional, romantic or sexual attractions to both men and women). Most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation. There is no scientifically convincing research to show that therapy aimed at changing sexual orientation (ie, reparative or conversion therapy) is safe or effective. 3 The origin of sexual orientation is far from being understood, although there is no proof that it is affected by social factors after birth. On the other hand, a large amount of empirical data suggests that genes and hormones are important regulators of sexual orientation. 49 – 51 Useful animal models and experimental paradigms in animals have helped frame questions and propose hypotheses relevant to human sexual orientation.

4.1 |. Animal studies

Sexual partner preference is one of the most sexually dimorphic behaviours observed in animals and humans. Typically, males choose to mate with females and females choose to mate with males. Sexual partner preferences can be studied in animals by using sexual partner preference tests and recording the amount of time spent alone or interacting with the same or opposite sex stimulus animal. Although imperfect, tests of sexual partner preference or mate choice in animals have been used to model human sexual orientation. As reviewed comprehensively by Adkins-Regan 52 and Henley et al, 53 studies demonstrate that perinatal sex steroids have a large impact on organising mate choice in several species of animals, including birds, mice, rats, hamsters, ferrets and pigs. In particular, perinatal exposure to testosterone or its metabolite oestradiol programs male-typical (ie, gynophilic) partner preferences and neonatal deprivation of testosterone attenuates the preference that adult males show typically. In the absence of high concentrations of sex steroid levels or receptor-mediated activity during development, a female-typical (ie, androphilic) sexual preference for male sex partners develops.

Sexually dimorphic neural groups in the medial preoptic area of rats and ferrets have been associated with sexual partner preferences. In male rats, a positive correlation was demonstrated between the volume of the sexual dimorphic nucleus of the preoptic area (SDN) and the animal’s preference for a receptive female, 54 although this was not replicated in a recent study. 55 Furthermore, in both rats and ferrets, destruction of the SDN caused males to show either neutral or androphilic preferences. 56

Naturally occurring same-sex interactions involving genital arousal have been reported in hundreds of animal species; however, they often appear to be motivated by purposes other than sex and may serve to facilitate other social goals. 57 , 58 Exclusive and enduring same-sex orientation is, however, extremely rare among animals and has only been documented conclusively and studied systematically in certain breeds of domestic sheep. 59 , 60 Approximately 6% to 8% of Western-breed domestic rams choose to exclusively court and mount other rams, but never ewes, when given a choice. No social factors, such as the general practice of rearing in same sex groups or an animal’s dominance rank, were found to affect sexual partner preferences in rams. Consistent with the organisational theory of sexual differentiation, sheep have an ovine sexually dimorphic preoptic nucleus (oSDN) that is larger and contains more neurones in female-oriented (gynophilic) rams than in male-oriented rams (androphilic) and ewes (androphilic). 61 Thus, morphological features of the oSDN correlate with a sheep’s sexual partner preference. The oSDN already exists and is larger in males than in females before sheep are born, suggesting that it could play a causal role in behaviour. 62 The oSDN differentiates under the influence of prenatal testosterone after the male genitals develop, but is unaffected by hormone treatment in adulthood. 63 Appropriately timed experimental exposure of female lamb foetuses to testosterone can alter oSDN size independently of genetic and phenotypic sex. 13 However, males appear to be resistant to suppression of the action of androgen during gestation because the foetal hypothalamic-pituitary-axis is active in the second trimester (term pregnancy approximately 150 days) and mitigates against changes in circulating testosterone that could disrupt brain masculinisation. 64 These data suggest that, in sheep, brain sexual differentiation is initiated during gestation by central mechanisms acting through gonadotrophin-releasing hormone neurones to stimulate and maintain the foetal testicular testosterone synthesis needed to masculinise the oSDN and behaviour. More research is required to understand the parameters of oSDN development and to causally relate its function to sexual partner preferences in sheep. Nonetheless, when considered together, the body of animal research strongly indicates that male-typical partner preferences are controlled at least in part by the neural groups in the preoptic area that differentiate under the influence of pre- and perinatal sex steroids.

4.2 |. Human studies

4.2.1 |. genes.

Evidence from family and twin studies suggests that there is a moderate genetic component to sexual orientation. 50 One recent study estimated that approximately 40% of the variance in sexual orientation in men is controlled by genes, whereas, in women, the estimate is approximately 20%. 65 In 1993, Hamer et al 66 published the first genetic linkage study that suggested a specific stretch of the X chromosome called Xq28 holds a gene or genes that predispose a man to being homosexual. These results were consistent with the observations that, when there is male homosexuality in a family, there is a greater probability of homosexual males on the mother’s side of the family than on the father’s side. The study was criticised for containing only 38 pairs of gay brothers and the original finding was not replicated by an independent group. 67 Larger genome-wide scans support an association with Xq28 and also found associations with chromosome 7 and 8, 68 , 69 although this has also been disputed. 70 Scientists at the personal genomics company 23andme performed the only genome-wide association study of sexual orientation that looked within the general population. 71 The results were presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Human Genetics in 2012, although they have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Although no genetic loci reaching genome-wide significance for homosexuality among men or women, the genetic marker closest to significance was located in the same region of chromosome 8 in men as that implicated in linkage studies. Other molecular genetic evidence suggests that epigenetic factors could influence male sexual orientation, although this has yet to be demonstrated. 72 , 73

4.2.2 |. Hormones

The leading biological theory of sexual orientation in humans, as in animals, draws on the application of the organisational theory of sexual differentiation. However, this theory cannot be directly tested because it is not ethical to experimentally administer hormones to pregnant women and test their effect on the sexual orientation of their children. Naturally occurring and iatrogenic disorders of sex development that involve dramatic alterations in hormone action or exposure lend some support to a role for prenatal hormones, although these cases are extremely rare and often difficult to interpret. 74 Despite these limitations, two clinical conditions are presented briefly that lend some support for the organisational theory. More comprehensive presentations of the clinical evidence on this topic can be found in several excellent reviews. 74 – 76

Women born with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) and exposed to abnormally high levels of androgens in utero show masculinised genitals, play behaviour and aggression. 74 , 77 They also are less likely to be exclusively heterosexual and report more same-sex activity than unaffected women, which suggests that typical female sexual development is disrupted. Although it appears plausible that these behavioural traits are mediated through effects of elevated androgens on the brain, it is also possible that the sexuality of CAH women may have also been impacted by the physical and psychological consequences of living with genital anomalies or more nuanced effects of socialisation. 78 There is also evidence for prenatal androgen effects on sexual orientation in XY individuals born with cloacal exstrophy. It was reported originally that a significant number of these individuals eventually adopt a male gender identity even though they had been surgically reassigned and raised as girls. Follow-up studies found that almost all of them were attracted to females (i.e. gynophilic). 33 , 50 The outcomes reported for both of these conditions are consistent with the idea that prenatal testosterone programs male-typical sexual orientation in adults. However, effects on sexual orientation were not observed across the board in all individuals with these conditions, indicating that hormones cannot be the only factor involved.

4.2.3 |. Neuroanatomy

Additional evidence that supports a prenatal organisational theory of sexual orientation is derived from the study of anatomical and physiological traits that are known to be sexually dimorphic in humans and are shown to be similar between individuals sharing the same sexual attraction. Neuroanatomical differences based on sexual orientation in human males have been found. LeVay 79 reported that the third interstitial nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus (INAH3) in homosexual men is smaller than in heterosexual men and has a similar size in homosexual men and women. Based on its position and cytoarchitecture, INAH3 resembles the sheep oSDN, which has similar differences in volume and cell density correlated with sexual partner preference. This similarity suggests that a relevant neural circuit is conserved between species. A recent review and meta-analysis of neuroimaging data from human subjects with diverse sexual interests during sexual stimulation also support the conclusion that elements of the anterior and preoptic area of the hypothalamus is part of a core neural circuit for sexual preferences. 80

Other neural and somatic biomarkers of prenatal androgen exposure have also been investigated. McFadden 81 reported that functional properties of the inner ear, measured as otoacoustic emissions (OAEs), and of the auditory brain circuits, measured as auditory evoked potentials (AEPs), differ between the sexes and between heterosexual and homosexual individuals. OAEs and AEPs are usually stronger in heterosexual women than in heterosexual men and are masculinised in lesbians, consistent with the prenatal hormone theory. However, OAEs were not different in homosexual males and AEPs appear to be hyper-masculinised. The second digit to fourth digit (2D:4D) ratio, which is the length of the second digit (index finger) relative to that of the fourth digit (ring finger), is another measure that has been used as a proxy for prenatal androgen exposure. The 2D:4D ratio is generally smaller in men than in women, 82 , 83 although the validity of this measure as a marker influenced by only prenatal androgen exposure has been questioned. 84 Nonetheless, numerous studies have reported that the 2D:4D ratio is also on average smaller in lesbians than in hetero-sexual women, a finding that has been extensively replicated 85 and suggests the testosterone plays a role in female sexual orientation. Similar to OAEs, digit ratios do not appear to be feminised in homosexual men and, similar to AEPs, may even be hyper-masculinised. The lack of evidence for reduced androgen exposure in homosexual men (based on OAEs, AEPs and digit ratios) led Breedlove 85 to speculate that there may be as yet undiscovered brain-specific reductions in androgen responses in male foetuses that grow up to be homosexual. No variations in the human androgen receptor or the aromatase gene were found that relate to variations in sexual orientation. 86 , 87 However, Balthazart and Court 88 provided suggestions for other genes located in the Xq28 region of the X-chromosome that should be explored and it remains possible that expression levels of steroid hormone response pathway genes could be regulated epigenetically (11).

4.2.4 |. Maternal immune response

Homosexual men have, on average, a greater number of older brothers than do heterosexual men, a well-known finding that has been called the fraternal birth order (FBO) effect. 89 Accordingly, the incidence of homosexuality increases by approximately 33% with each older brother. 90 The FBO effect has been confirmed many times, including by independent investigators and in non-Western sample populations. The leading hypothesis to explain this phenomenon posits that some mothers develop antibodies against a Y-linked factor important for male brain development, and that the response increases incrementally with each male gestation leading, in turn, to the alteration of brain structures underlying sexual orientation in later-born boys. In support of the immune hypothesis, Bogaert et al 91 demonstrated recently that mothers of homosexual sons, particularly those with older brothers, have higher antibody titers to neurolignin 4 (NLGN4Y), an extracellular protein involved in synaptic functioning and presumed to play a role in foetal brain development.

5 |. CONCLUSIONS

The data summarised in the present review suggest that both gender identity and sexual orientation are significantly influenced by events occurring during the early developmental period when the brain is differentiating under the influence of gonadal steroid hormones, genes and maternal factors. However, our current understanding of these factors is far from complete and the results are not always consistent. Animal studies form both the theoretical underpinnings of the prenatal hormone hypothesis and provide causal evidence for the effect of prenatal hormones on sexual orientation as modelled by tests of sexual partner preferences, although they do not translate to gender identity.

Sexual differentiation of the genitals takes place before sexual differentiation of the brain, making it possible that they are not always congruent. Structural and functional differences of hypothalamic nuclei and other brain areas differ in relation to sexual identity and sexual orientation, indicating that these traits develop independently. This may be a result of differing hormone sensitivities and/or separate critical periods, although this remains to be explored. Most findings are consistent with a predisposing influence of hormones or genes, rather than a determining influence. For example, only some people exposed to atypical hormone environments prenatally show altered gender identity or sexual orientation, whereas many do not. Family and twin studies indicate that genes play a role, but no specific candidate genes have been identified. Evidence that relates to the number of older brothers implicates maternal immune responses as a contributing factor for male sexual orientation. All of these mechanisms rely on correlations and our current understanding suffers from many limitations in the data, such as a reliance on retrospective clinical studies of individuals with rare conditions, small study populations sizes, biases in recruiting subjects, too much reliance on studies of male homosexuals, and the assumption that sexuality is easily categorised and binary. Moreover, none of the biological factors identified so far can explain all of the variances in sexual identity or orientation, nor is it known whether or how these factors may interact. Despite these limitations, the existing empirical evidence makes it clear that there is a significant biological contribution to the development of an individual’s sexual identity and sexual orientation.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank Charles Estill, Robert Shapiro and Fred Stormshak for their thoughtful comments on this review. This work was supported by NIH R01OD011047.

Funding information

This work was supported by NIH R01OD011047 (CER)

CONFLICT OF INTERESTS

The author declares that there are no conflicts of interest.