ABSTRACT
The child’s awareness—“I am a male” or “I am a female”—is visible to an observer in the first year or so of life. This aspect of one’s over-all sense of identity can be conceptualized as a core gender identity, produced by the infant-parents relationship, by the child’s perception of its external genitalia, and by a biologic force that springs from the biologic variables of sex. It is rarely questioned that there are only two biologic sexes, male and female, with two resultant genders, masculine and feminine. The evidence for biologic or psychologic bisexuality does not contradict this division, but only demonstrates that within the two sexes there are degrees of maleness and femaleness and of masculinity and femininity. The clinical data illustrate that there are people who almost from the beginning of awareness of their own existence do not feel themselves to be members of either one of only two possible sexes.
