Gender identity.

Abstract

Traditionally human sex differences has constituted the base upon to articulate some differences between men and women that go beyond the contents biophysiologicals and so to determine in some degree their existence. Such differentiation is an effect from a double construction, sociocultural and psychological, whose contents define that which at present is understood by gender. The sociocultural component is the responsible of the reality’s categorisation upon a duality of opposites, masculinity vs. femininity, nourished by stereotypes and articulated in roles than on is transmitted lengthways the socialisation process since the individual’s birth. The psychological component refers to the active construction that everyone perform about this sociocultural message, learning what means to be woman or men and how to behave consequently. This process defines individual’s gender identity, at core of self: how each person has understood their sex and how attribute him some characteristics and some contents. That do him to identified, at last, with a masculinity and/or femininity unique with respect the others humans beings, but simultaneously in congruence with social expectancies. In this paper on detail too the importance of socialisation’s agents in the transmission of gender identity.