Mini-essay on cross-cultural LGBT identity.

I produced this mini-essay for the sex and gender chapter in my first-year psychology class, and I have replicated it here for future reading:

In Western culture, we actually tend to associate whether someone is masculine or feminine with their biology more than Eastern cultures do. In the East, its often more about sexual and social behavior. In many East Asian cultures, feminine homosexual men are considered to be women in male bodies.

This has a remarkable impact on how LGBT identity is presented and embodied cross-culturally. Egalitarian homosexuality (two masculine men or two feminine women in gay relationships) is almost exclusively a Western construction in individualist nations (Rosenmann & Safir, 2008). Eastern homosexuality tends to be expressed in a transgender way (feminine gay men living in a third-gender role or getting sex reassignment surgery to become heterosexual women), and heterosexual transsexuality (heterosexual men receiving sex reassignment surgery to become lesbian women) does not occur or rarely occurs in collectivist countries (Lawrence, 2010). Even in the west, heterosexual gender-dysphoric men often repress their gender identity issues for many years and present themselves as typical heterosexual men, they are usually less evidently feminine than homosexual gender-dysphoric men (Blanchard, Clemmensen, & Steiner, 1987).

These factors all make clear how sex and gender are conceived very differently in individualist vs collectivist cultures.

Sources:

Rosenmann A, Safir MP. Sex, sexuality, and gender dichotomized: transgender homosexuality in Israel. Arch Sex Behav. 2008 Jun;37(3):489-90; discussion 505-10. doi: 10.1007/s10508-008-9330-4. PMID: 18431628.

Lawrence AA. Societal individualism predicts prevalence of nonhomosexual orientation in male-to-female transsexualism. Arch Sex Behav. 2010 Apr;39(2):573-83. doi: 10.1007/s10508-008-9420-3. Epub 2008 Dec 9. PMID: 19067152.

Blanchard R, Clemmensen LH, Steiner BW. Heterosexual and homosexual gender dysphoria. Arch Sex Behav. 1987 Apr;16(2):139-52. doi: 10.1007/BF01542067. PMID: 3592961.