Where Did Gender Identity Come From?: A new book offers a concise and compelling history. (Leor Sapir, Aug 07 2026, City Journal)
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.