Sexual identity
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Illustration: Toulouse-Lautrec wearing Jane Avril's Feathered Hat and Boa (ca. 1892), photo Maurice Guibert.
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Sexual identity is a term that, like sex, has two distinctively different meanings. One describes an identity roughly based on sexual orientation, the other an identity based on sexual characteristics, a concept related to, but different from, gender identity.
Criticism of "sexual identity" as based on sexual characteristics
It is unclear how this concept is different from gender identity, or how it relates to it. The usage of gender instead of sex when speaking about social or psychological characteristics dates back to 1955 when John Money first used the term gender role:
- "The term gender role is used to signify all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively. It includes, but is not restricted to, sexuality in the sense of eroticism." ("Hermaphroditism, gender and precocity in hyperadrenocorticism: psychologic findings" (Money, 1955))
From there, gender identity was coined analogously. Gender identity is usually seen as independent from sexual characteristics; while it matches them in most cases, it does not do so in both many intersexual and all transgender people. However, when it does not match, there usually is no "sexual identity" different from "gender identity"; the whole point of the concept of gender identity as independent from sexual characteristics being that the former is not (necessarily) related to the latter.
See also
