Sexual identity is a construct that indicates how a person experiences pleasure, feeling, relating to others, and how they act out their sexuality through behavioral choices, and is directly influenced by a person’s experience of belonging to a gender.
There are four components of sexual identity: biological sex, gender identity, gender role and sexual orientation (Fig.1).
The process of sexual differentiation begins early: as early as fertilization of the uterus, genetic determination of the sex of the unborn child takes place.
Humans have 22 pairs of autosomes and one pair of sex chromosomes (X and Y) that define biological sex:females have two X chromosomes, while maleshave both X and Y chromosomes.
Gender identity , on the other hand, refers to how the person perceives their gender and feels they are male/male, female/woman, or a combination of these two definitions.
In most cases, gender identity develops in accordance with biological sex.
However, conditions may occur in which the process of sexual differentiation proceeds abnormally, resulting in atypical development of gender identity. Those born with disorders of sexual development have atypical chromosomal, gonadal, and anatomical sex development.
For example, the external genitalia may not correspond with the gonads and/or sex chromosomes, so the child’s gender identity may conform to the chromosomes and gonads, but not the genitalia.
Some, however, may perceive an incongruence between the experienced gender and the biologically assigned sex, even in the absence of congenital abnormalities, with typical development of chromosomes, gonads and genitalia. They identify with the opposite gender, display behaviors and attitudes that do not conform to their gender, and may find their physical sexual attributes objectionable.
People who experience gender variance do not always identify with the opposite sex from their assigned gender: there are people who have nonbinary gender identities, so they do not identify with either of the proposed genders, and are in an undefined condition. This is also the case with gender fluid individuals, whose gender identity is variable and changes, and they may feel sometimes male, and sometimes female.
If gender identity is a person’s private experience of gender identification, gender role is the public behavioral expression of this inner perception.
Money defined gender role as “the set of all those things a person says or does to reveal (his or her) status as boy or girl, man or woman, respectively. Included in this is, but not limited to, sexuality in the sense of eroticism.”
Stoller also distinguished between gender identity, understood as an awareness of belonging to a particular gender, and gender role, defined as the manifest behavior enacted in relationship to the other.
In general, the gender role corresponds to the attitudes and behaviors that are attributed to the gender of membership, and is influenced by shared social stereotypes. Finally,sexual orientation indicates a person’s emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attraction to individuals of the opposite sex, the same sex, or both.
In the case ofhomosexuality, the attraction is directed toward individuals of the same sex as one’s own, in heterosexuality toward individuals of the opposite sex, and in bisexuality toward individuals of both sexes.
Pansexuality is a sexual orientation characterized by aesthetic, sexual, or romantic attraction to people regardless of their sex or gender identity.
There is also polysexuality, which on the contrary refers to those who are attracted to more than one sex but do not want to identify as bisexual, as this would imply the existence of only two sexual genders.
