HookThe boy who was raised as a girl
In 1966 a routine circumcision on an eight-month-old Canadian boy, Bruce Reimer, went catastrophically wrong and destroyed his penis. On the advice of the psychologist John Money — who believed gender was written entirely by upbringing — Bruce was surgically reassigned, renamed Brenda, and raised as a girl, the family sworn to secrecy. For years Money reported the case as proof that nurture stamps gender onto a blank slate. It was not true. 'Brenda' tore off dresses, was relentlessly bullied, never felt like a girl, and at fourteen — on finally being told the truth — reverted to living as a man, David. He died by suicide in 2004.
David Reimer's tragedy is the doorway into everything this topic argues about. Where does a sense of being male or female actually come from — the chromosomes and hormones you are born with, the way a young mind sorts the world into categories, the unconscious dramas of early childhood, or the models and rewards a culture supplies? AQA wants you to hold all four explanations at once and weigh them, because no single one survives a case like David's. The vocabulary that unlocks the whole topic is one distinction: sex is the biological fact, while gender is the psychological and social identity built on top of it — and sometimes against it.
ModelSex, gender and the chemistry underneath
Sex is a biological status fixed at conception by the 23rd chromosome pair: XX produces a female, XY a male. The decisive switch is the SRY gene on the Y chromosome, which triggers the testes to form and flood the developing foetus with androgens. Gender is the psychosocial status — the roles, attitudes and sense of identity a culture attaches to being male or female. Most people are gender-congruent, meaning sex and gender align; where they persistently do not, the term is gender dysphoria.
Three hormones do most of the exam's work. Testosterone, high in males from the prenatal period, masculinises the developing brain and is linked to aggression and spatial performance. Oestrogen directs female sexual development and the menstrual cycle and is tied to physical and emotional changes such as PMS. Oxytocin, released in large amounts during childbirth and breastfeeding, promotes bonding and is nicknamed the 'love hormone' — though men release it during intimacy too, which undercuts any neat 'female hormone' story.
The evidence is deliberately messy, and that is the point examiners reward. Hormones clearly shape the body, but whether they determine identity — whether biology is destiny — is exactly what the cognitive, psychodynamic and social explanations that follow are built to challenge.
A strong way to evaluate the biological role is to set two real cases against each other. David Reimer was reassigned female yet never accepted it — nurture failed to overwrite his prenatal male biology. Against that, Imperato-McGinley (1974) documented the Dominican 'Guevedoces': genetically male children with 5-alpha-reductase deficiency who appear female at birth, are raised as girls, then virilise at puberty when testosterone surges — and the majority switched smoothly to a male identity. Two cases, one line for your essay: biological sex exerts a pull that rearing struggles to reverse. The mark-winning move is the evaluative sting on the end — neither case is a controlled experiment, so cultural expectation (the Dominican villages anticipated the switch) cannot be ruled out. That single added sentence turns a described case study into genuine AO3 analysis rather than AO1 narration.
ModelSex-role stereotypes, androgyny and the BSRI
Sex-role stereotypes are shared cultural beliefs about how males and females ought to behave — men competitive and unemotional, women nurturing and passive. They are transmitted so early and so consistently that children begin policing them by age three. Androgyny, the idea associated with Sandra Bem, holds that masculinity and femininity are not opposite ends of one line but two independent dimensions, so a person can score high on both — assertive AND tender — and that this flexibility predicts better psychological health.
Bem built the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) to measure it. Respondents rate themselves on a seven-point scale across 60 traits — 20 stereotypically masculine ('dominant', 'competitive'), 20 feminine ('affectionate', 'gentle') and 20 neutral fillers — sorting people into four types: masculine, feminine, androgynous (high on both) and undifferentiated (low on both). Bem argued the androgynous group copes best across varied situations.
The evaluation almost writes itself. The BSRI is a self-report snapshot taken from 1970s American students, so its temporal and cultural validity are shaky, and reducing something as rich as gender identity to a numerical score is arguably a crude oversimplification. Yet it was among the first attempts to treat androgyny as measurable and healthy rather than as a deviation to be corrected.
MechanismThe cognitive route: Kohlberg and gender schema
Cognitive explanations say gendered behaviour follows a child's understanding of gender, which matures in fixed steps. Kohlberg proposed three stages, modelled on Piaget. In gender identity (around 2-3) the child can label their own and others' sex but thinks it could change — a boy might grow up to be a mummy. In gender stability (around 4-6) the child grasps that gender is fixed over time but is still fooled by appearance, believing a man in a dress becomes a woman. Only at gender constancy (around 6-7) does the child understand gender is permanent regardless of appearance — and, crucially, this is when Kohlberg says children start actively seeking out same-sex role models to imitate.
Gender schema theory (Martin and Halverson, 1981) accepts the cognitive framing but disagrees on timing. It argues that as soon as a child has basic gender identity — around 2-3, long before constancy — they build schemas: organised clusters of beliefs about what boys and girls do. Children then attend to and remember information that fits their own in-group and distort or ignore what does not. Shown a picture of a boy cooking, a week later a young child often 'remembers' it was a girl.
The theories therefore make a testable clash: Kohlberg says gendered imitation waits for constancy at six; gender schema says it starts at two. The evidence — young children showing strong gender-typed play well before six — tends to favour the schema account.
MechanismThe psychodynamic route: Freud, Oedipus and Electra
Freud located gender in the phallic stage (roughly 3-6), where the child's identity is forged through an unconscious family drama. In the Oedipus complex, a boy develops desire for his mother and jealous hostility toward his father, then — terrified the father will retaliate by castration (castration anxiety) — resolves the conflict by identifying with the father, taking on his attitudes, values and gender role, a process Freud called internalisation. Freud read his case study of Little Hans, a boy with a phobia of horses, as a displaced fear of the father, and thus as evidence for the theory.
Girls, in the Electra complex, are said to experience penis envy, blame the mother, and desire the father, eventually identifying with the mother — though Freud admitted his account of female development was weaker, and it has drawn heavy criticism for androcentrism.
The strength worth quoting is that Freud captured something real: identification with same-sex parents does correlate with gender development. The fatal weakness is falsifiability — concepts like castration anxiety and penis envy are unconscious and cannot be measured or disproved, and evidence rests on a single, over-interpreted boy. Neat, memorable, but not scientific in the way the specification's 'features of science' demands.
MechanismThe social route: learning, culture and media
Social learning theory says gender is learned from the environment. Children experience differential reinforcement — boys praised for being tough, girls for being sweet — and vicarious reinforcement, watching a model rewarded and copying the behaviour. They selectively imitate same-sex models with whom they identify, and Bandura's mediational processes (attention, retention, motor reproduction, motivation) sit between seeing and doing. Unlike the biological account, SLT explains change: gender roles shift across generations because the models and rewards do.
Culture supplies the evidence on both sides. Some sex-role patterns recur worldwide, hinting at a biological floor; but Margaret Mead's fieldwork in Papua New Guinea described tribes with strikingly different arrangements — the gentle Arapesh, the aggressive Mundugumor, the role-reversed Tchambuli — suggesting large cultural plasticity. Media then amplifies stereotypes: rigid portrayals of assertive men and domestic women act as role models, and seeing your own group succeed at a behaviour raises self-efficacy, the belief you could do it too.
The evaluative balance to strike is that SLT elegantly explains cultural and historical variation, yet by treating the child as a sponge it underplays the biological and cognitive readiness a child brings — which is precisely why examiners reward answers that combine explanations rather than crown one.
CaseAtypical gender development
Gender dysphoria — formerly 'gender identity disorder' — is the distress arising when a person's felt gender does not match their biological sex. It is a socially sensitive topic, so precise, non-judgemental language matters. Two families of explanation compete.
Biological explanations point to the brain and genes. Brain-sex theory argues that dysphoria reflects a brain that developed along atypical lines: Zhou et al. (1995) found the BSTc, a region of the stria terminalis, was smaller in transgender women and closer to the typical female size. Twin studies show higher concordance in identical than non-identical twins, implying a genetic contribution, and prenatal hormone exposure is proposed as a mechanism that shapes the brain before birth.
Social explanations reject a purely biological story. The psychoanalytic account of Ovesey and Person suggested that in biological males, dysphoria stems from separation anxiety, the boy fantasising fusion with the mother. Social-constructionist views argue that the very idea of a fixed gender binary is a cultural invention, so 'dysphoria' partly reflects a society that offers too few categories rather than a disorder in the individual. As with the whole topic, the examiner's real test is whether you can weigh biological against social evidence rather than simply describe each.
Here is a model AO3 paragraph on the biological explanation of atypical gender development, with the moves labelled so you can reuse the shape. Point: 'One strength of brain-sex theory is supporting neuroanatomical evidence.' Evidence: 'Zhou et al. (1995) found the BSTc was smaller in transgender women than in typical males and closer to the size seen in females.' Explain: 'This suggests gender dysphoria has a physical, prenatal basis rather than being purely a product of upbringing, giving the biological account real explanatory power.' Counterpoint — the mark-winner: 'However, the BSTc is not fully developed until the early twenties, so the difference could be an effect of the hormone therapy taken by transgender participants rather than a cause of their dysphoria, reversing the direction of causation.' Four sentences, one clean idea, and the counterpoint doubles the depth. AQA's top band rewards discussion that is 'thorough and effective', which in practice means pushing every strength until it either survives a challenge or concedes to one.
VocabularyKey terms the mark scheme pays for
TrapsMisconceptions that cost marks
ExamWhat examiners want
AQA marks Psychology against three assessment objectives: AO1 (accurate knowledge), AO2 (applying it to a scenario or 'stem') and AO3 (evaluation). A 16-mark essay is 6 marks AO1 and 10 marks AO3, so the balance of your writing should tilt the same way — roughly one description paragraph to two of evaluation. If the question gives you a named child or situation, that stem must appear in your answer; ignoring it caps you out of the top band on AO2.
Build AO3 as PEEL paragraphs with a counterpoint: Point, Evidence, Explain, then a 'however' that challenges or extends the claim. On Gender the highest-scoring evaluations are almost always comparative — set biological determinism against social plasticity using real cases (David Reimer, the Guevedoces, Mead's tribes), then refuse to crown a winner, because the interactionist conclusion is what the top band expects.
Use precise, socially sensitive language on atypical development, and always name your evidence with a researcher and rough date (Zhou et al. 1995, Imperato-McGinley 1974) — 'a study showed' earns partial credit, a named citation earns full. Finally, watch the discriminators the examiner reports year after year: gender constancy versus stability, and androgyny meaning high-on-both rather than neutral.