Clinical studies underway for several years to help clarify the concept of gender identity have recently brought forth further data that may add a few clues to a search for sources of masculinity and femininity. Before presenting these new data, however, it may be useful to review the findings and concepts presented earlier. At the Stockholm Congress in 1963, the concept of gender identity, its sources and its earliest stages, were described (Stoller, 1964).
At that time I felt that the earliest stages in the development of gender identity were produced by the parental attitudes toward the infant’s sex, the infant’s growing awareness of its external genitalia, and a biological force. Regarding the latter, I said then (and still feel) that I did not know what produced this force?, that it silently augments the developing gender identity in the normal, can be overwhelmed by post-natal psychological experiences in certain abnormal people, but on the other hand in rare cases may be so strong that even in the face of the child being reared in the wrong sex, it may overpower the effects of such rearing.
