According to Nichols (2005) transgendered individuals are those individuals ôwhose gender identity or gender expression contrast with traditional social norms and expectations for their sexö (p. 1). General confusion about these categories among the public and different perspectives or definitions of these categories by the medical, legal, and psychiatric communities often lead to greater misperception. Such misperceptions often increase prejudice or hatred toward those who are different, reactions that are based on ignorance and fear in many cases.
Individuals who are intersexed and people who are transsexual confound the notion of there being only two sexes, male and female. Likewise, gender is expressed in countless ways across a range of signals from dress and body language to conversational style and hairstyles. Quite often the either/or conception of sex and gender stems from long-established social norms that construct either a ômaleö or ôfemaleö notion of sex and gender. This is true even though women more often than males are permitted more ôgender transgressionö in society than males who more often follow a narrower range of gender expression (Nangeroni, 2006, p. 1). A girl who wears a ball cap, no makeup, and slacks would barely be noticed in contemporary society compared to a boy who wore makeup and dressed in a skirt. Such rigid categories of gender expression often make those who express differently than the norm feel they are somehow ôinadequateö when they are being themselves, primarily due to the disapproval of others toward those who express beyond the ônormalö boundaries of gender.
In many cases, rigid social constructions of sexual orientation, sexual identity, and gender expression have a deleterious impact on individual expression. These concepts are viewed as being somehow inextricably interrelated when such is not the case. All too often, such constructions are rigidly defined and ...