Most gender scholars today agree that gender is a socially constructed category of identity. This means that gender is something that is created by discourse, roles, and norms that are agreed upon by a given society. In lay conversation, gender is often conflated with the term sex, which is said to be biological and based on a person's chromosomal makeup, DNA, and genitalia. The most common categories of sex are male, female, and intersex (individuals), but there are myriad other “sexes” out there, existing in liminal spaces and identity formations. Gender, which is not necessarily correlated to biological sex, is judged on a continuum of how a person identifies [themself] on a spectrum of masculine-androgynous-feminine.
Gender has been included as a question on the U.S. Census since its inception, making demographic data broken down by gender relatively easy to find. However, it should be noted that to this day, the only options provided are “male” and “female,” which is not an accurate representation of the gender spectrum. This question's binary phrasing forces nonbinary people to choose between either misgendering themselves or not being counted in the Census at all.
In July 2021, the U.S. Census Bureau did begin asking about sexual orientation and gender identity, which they refer to as SOGI, on their Household Pulse Survey (HPS), an experimental survey designed to measure the impact of COVID-19 on American households (source). This marks the first time that the U.S. Census Bureau has ever officially collected data on Americans in a way that allows for nuanced gender identities; however, the small and experimental nature of the HPS limits the impact of its findings.
Please see the "U.S. Census & Data Collection" section on the LGBTQ+ page for more details on this topic.
The following terms were commonly used in the past, and may still be found in classification systems and/or medical terminology. However, they are generally now considered to be offensive, and often reflect inaccurate and outdated understandings of gender, sex, and sexual orientation. Use with extreme caution.
Click on the terms below to see related keywords.
Theories of gender grew out of the efforts of feminist scholars in the 1970s to explain and determine the origins of women's oppression. These writers understood “gender” to refer to the socially and culturally imposed images of and roles for women, differentiating it from “sex,” a biological category that locked women into particular roles and relationships by virtue of their reproductive capacity.
A system of ideas that takes gender as its central focus and attempts to explain differences and inequalities. Until the late twentieth century such differences and inequalities centred predominantly on the relative positions of women and men, but from the 1980s onwards questions of otherness enmeshed with inequality, for instance on the basis of race or sexual orientation, became equally prominent within feminist theory. There are many different kinds of feminist theory, dependent on their specific focus.
This guide is inspired by the LibGuides Open Review Discussion Sessions (LORDS) Project and University of Minnesota Libraries' Conducting Research Through an Anti-Racism Lens LibGuide.
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