Gender is dynamic for all people

Abstract

Gender is dynamic across the life-course for all people. This is true for you, me and the collective ‘us’. In this perspective paper, we invite you to reflect on how changes in the experience and expression of gender can be most appropriately viewed as a normal part of human development, diversity, and growth. We can find gender’s dynamism in at least three areas: that the meaning of gender has changed over time; that there are significant cultural differences in the meaning of gender; and that one’s own gender and relationship to it can change, evolve, weaken, and galvanise across a lifetime. From our position as interdisciplinary scientists, artists, and community advocates, each of us informed by distinctive and dynamic lived experiences of gender, we examine how the foundations of psychology may be limiting the capacity for the discipline to accurately reflect dynamic experiences of gender in the real world. We encourage you to ponder how we can address points of resistance to change in thought and practice and embed a more deliberately dynamic understanding of gender within our knowledge systems and structures. Ultimately, we seek to empower you, the reader, to take up the challenge of new ways of thinking and behaving in relation to gender.