Where Did Gender Identity Come From?

Gender Identity: The Career of a Category, by Rogers Brubaker (Polity, 224 pp., $21.95)

A new book by UCLA sociologist Rogers Brubaker, Gender Identity: The Career of a Category, tries to make sense of how this concept became so embedded in our lives and why it has become such a cultural flashpoint. As Brubaker clarifies at the outset, he is not interested in “the philosophical question of what gender identity really is” but rather in “how the category works” in the social world. He offers a sophisticated analysis.

Advocates claim that transgender people have always existed, but the notion that humans have a “gender identity” and that this identity is both real and worthy of social validation is quite new. So is the pseudoscientific idea that sex is “assigned at birth” and that there are more than two sexes. Gender identity originates in 1960s niche psychology, where, Brubaker reminds us, it was “relevant only in rare and expressly pathological cases [i.e., disorders of sex developments and transsexualism]. Nobody then imagined that gender identity would become a universally applicable and bitterly contested category.”

As MIT philosopher Alex Byrne has explained, Robert Stoller and Ralph Greenson, both psychologists at UCLA, coined the term “gender identity” in 1963. They defined it as “the sense of knowing to which sex one belongs, that is, the awareness ‘I am a male’ or ‘I am a female.’” On this understanding, everyone has a gender identity, which emerges in early childhood and accords with one’s sex. In rare cases, children develop feelings of belonging to the other sex, and the question becomes how to understand this and how to help them.

The most notorious use of gender identity in the clinical setting was that of John Money, a sexologist at Johns Hopkins University from the early 1950s until his death in 2006. Money argued that a child’s gender identity is socially acquired and that, if conditions are right, children can be successfully reared into the opposite sex. Money tested his theory on David Reimer, whose penis had been burnt off as an infant in a botched circumcision. The experiment ended in failure, with Reimer unable to live as a woman and later committing suicide.

Despite Money’s failure with Reimer, the notion that humans have a gender identity that, through social validation, can functionally override their sex “escaped the clinic.” A concept initially used by clinical “gatekeepers” to screen patients and decide who is eligible for medical interventions was soon “deployed and controlled by patients themselves . . . [I]t became a category deployed against gatekeepers and gate keeping,” writes Brubaker. “This new understanding of gender identity as a patient-controlled, patient-empowering category was codified in the paradigm of ‘gender-affirming care.’”

Making gender identity independent of sex means that options don’t have to be limited to just two. Viewing the condition as a normal variation rather than a form of pathology means that society should trust individuals, including children, to know their gender identity. And making it a universal human experience gave rise, in our therapeutic culture, to what Brubaker calls a new “identity imperative,” meaning a “social and cultural obligation to think and talk about one’s identity through the prism of the deep-seated cultural idea of authenticity and of an inner ‘true self.’” Such an ideal “requires young people to ‘have’ a gender identity, to reflect on that identity, and to know and name that identity.” By this logic, the “cisgendered,” those who take their “assigned sex” at face value, fall short relative to their transgendered peers in realizing their full humanity.

Gender identity, Brubaker notes, also confers social status. For some young people, “asserting a nonbinary gender identity may even be a claim for distinction or social recognition as an interesting, unconventional person who’s not a ‘normie.’” Gender identity thus becomes a plausible site for adolescent projection of normal angst about puberty and about who one is, especially relative to one’s peers.

But how did this understanding of gender identity come to be institutionalized across American society? Brubaker believes, as do I, that the answer lies in what University of California–San Diego sociologist John Skrentny has called the “minority rights revolution.” Unlike the black civil rights and women’s rights movements, transgender movement advocates did not have to build popular support for their cause and create external sources of pressure on government to enact their favored policies. Instead, through complicated court-agency maneuverings, sophisticated policy entrepreneurs inside government and in interest groups worked collaboratively to reinterpret existing statutes and administrative guidelines, file strategic lawsuits, and subtly infuse old words with new meanings.

This “quiet revolution,” to use Brubaker’s appropriate term, turned out to be a double-edged sword. The weak public support for transgender-movement priorities suggests that the establishment of gender identity as a potent social, medical, legal, administrative, and cultural category may have been achieved too easily. The lack of controversy over the institutionalization of gender identity until about a decade ago encouraged advocates to press maximal demands, confident that history was on their side.

I’ve argued that many institutional leaders, liberal intellectuals, and Democratic politicians signed on to the new “civil rights” cause, naively believing it to be merely an extension of gay rights, with a fundamentally libertarian, live-and-let-live character. It soon became apparent that trans issues were fundamentally different. As Brubaker notes, because “progressive gender identity discourse [had been] cut off . . . even from mainstream liberal opinion,” it was deprived of a critical source of self-corrective feedback. Gender identity is now a major electoral liability for Democrats.

Among the more illuminating parts of Brubaker’s book is its comparison of the resistance to gender identity in the United States and the United Kingdom. In the U.S., opposition has been polarized along partisan lines, though Brubaker helpfully stresses that liberal voters and advocacy groups have objected as well. Brubaker may be underestimating the role of liberals. The Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, to take just one example, has been the indisputable scientific leader in scrutinizing the research behind pediatric gender medicine. Its analyses and academic publications have guided health authorities in Europe in reexamining the evidence and deprioritizing medical interventions. SEGM’s network is made up almost entirely of liberal (or very liberal) clinicians and academic researchers.

The red-versus-blue framing was not an entirely organic development; transgender activists recognized the value of positioning the conflict in this way, especially in the era of Trump and tribalism. Nevertheless, Brubaker is right that from the perspective of policymaking, gender identity is polarized along party lines.

Things are different in the U.K., where liberals and feminists have played the lead role in pushing back against the institutionalization of gender identity. Brubaker attributes this largely to the fact that the U.K. is a more centralized political system, ensuring that controversy tends to focus on a small number of widely consequential legislative acts.

The 2004 Gender Recognition Act allows people to change their legal sex marker if they meet certain requirements: a gender dysphoria diagnosis, two years of living as the desired gender, and a formal declaration of intending to live as that gender. But even males who go through the process are not eligible, according to the Act’s provisions, to be treated as female in all respects.

The Equality Act of 2010 “established separate legal foundations for protection from discrimination on the grounds of sex and on the grounds of gender reassignment,” ensuring, in theory, that women’s spaces and activities would remain based on sex. However, the Act also defines “gender reassignment” more expansively, to include those who have not gone and do not intend to go through medical “reassignment,” with no Gender Recognition Certificate required. In effect, the law was interpreted to allow gender self-ID. As a result, the sex-based spaces and activities for women would now also be available to men. This reinterpretation of the laws, Brubaker notes, came “from the Conservative governments of David Cameron and Theresa May.” (In 2025, the U.K. Supreme Court foreclosed this interpretation when it held that “sex” in the Equality Act does not mean “gender identity.”)

Though the story is obviously more complicated, the key point is that a highly focused and publicized series of actions at the national level in the U.K. brought about “the discursive counterposition of women’s rights and trans rights” in a way that did not happen in the U.S. I’ve often wondered why British feminists have been much better organized and much more outspoken than their American counterparts (some American feminists have been very outspoken, but academic feminism, an arguably much more potent force, has been a key ally of the transgender movement). Brubaker’s answer—that government actions and institutions can shape social movements and not just be shaped by them—seems eminently plausible.

Brubaker begins the book with a promise that he will “bracket the philosophical question of what gender identity really is,” but he concludes it with some useful reflections on that question. (An earlier book he published on the same topic offers some rich insights on the tensions and complexities of “trans.”) The essence of the matter is that identity, properly understood, is something to be negotiated socially, with the needs and concerns of others coming into play. Yet as the concept is used today, gender identity is radically individualistic and socially unaccountable. “No other socially and legally recognized identity rests entirely on self-identification,” Brubaker writes. “When rights, opportunities, or resources are at stake, identity claims cannot generally be administered on the basis of self-identification alone; they require some form of external validation.” Gender identity “is suitable for a fictive world of monads but cannot make sense of the actual social world of interdependent individuals.”

Brubaker stresses that these are the descriptive observations of a sociologist, not normative prescriptions. Like it or not, a concept that organizes society in the ways that gender identity has done is bound to generate intense and potentially endless social strife.

Gender Identity is not entirely without flaws. Brubaker’s view of conservatives, their motives, and their actions is at times two-dimensional and trades in caricature. For example, he describes a “wave of anti-LGBT legislation” by Republicans beginning in 2021, but of course virtually all these laws were about children’s exposure to inappropriate images or ideas in public schools, preserving single-sex spaces and women’s sports, or restrictions on pediatric gender medicine. Brubaker seems to describe the attitude of conservatives as largely cynical: they see gender identity as an exploitable cause. This is simply unfair. While there are certainly some conservative politicians and intellectuals who operate in that way, most do not.

Still, Brubaker has managed to pull off something quite extraordinary, offering a compelling analysis of gender identity’s career. That he manages to do it in such a short book is a testament to his ability to grasp the bigger picture. To be sure, it means that key aspects of the story have been left out, but the tradeoff is worth it. Even readers with substantial knowledge on the topic will find Gender Identity an enlightening and engaging book.