Gender Role, Gender Identity, Core Gender Identity: Usage and Definition of Terms

An examination of the history of terms, like their etymology, elucidates their meaning, and helps to bring unanimity in their use. Gender role, and its counterpart, gender identity, have become newly popular terms in the psychology and psychiatry of sex, but those who use them do so without unanimity as to their definition. I shall tell what I know of the history of these terms.

So far as I have been able to ascertain, I was the first person to use the term, gender role, in print, and certainly the first person to define it in print (Money, Hampson, and Hampson 1955^a) as:

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. Gender role is appraised in relation to the following: general mannerisms, deportment and demeanor; spontaneous topics of talk in unprompted conversation and casual comment; content of dreams, daydreams and fantasies; replies to oblique inquiries and projective tests; evidence of erotic practices and, finally, the person's own replies to direct inquiry.

The need for this definition dated from a seminar in 1949 conducted by George Gardner at Harvard in which he presented a case of hermaphroditism.* This case led me to narrow a proposed