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The assumption that, among psychologically healthy individuals, gender is established once and for all as masculine or feminine in early life no longer seems tenable in light of recent investigations that have boldly challenged traditional psychoanalytic perspectives (Person and Ovesey, 1983; Benjamin, 1988; Butler, 1989; Dimen, 1991; Goldner, 1991; Harris, 1991; Burch, 1993; Aron, 1995; Crawford, 1996). Moreover, as several of these writers suggest, viewing gender as if it were a naturally occurring binary system perpetuates a pathogenic situation. For Crawford (1996) the ascription of radically dichotomized qualities to males and females leads to nothing less than the traumatic severing of self-experience.
While arguing against a reification of gender as a cohesive essence, some theorists have pointed out that gender may include experiences of both cohesion and “multiplicity” (e.g., Aron, 1995). As Harris (1991) observes, “Gender can be as core and coherent an experience as any structure of self and subjectivity,” but it can also “mutate, dissolve, and prove irrelevant and insubstantial” (p. 197).
It is probably no coincidence that concurrent with these new ideas about the “paradoxical indeterminancy” of gender (Goldner, 1991) and