[4]: 1 With the advent of Christianity, the earlier Greek model was expressed in theological discussions as the doctrine that there are two distinct sexes, male and female, created by God, and that individuals are immutably one or the other.
During second-wave feminism, Simone de Beauvoir and other feminists in the 1960s and 70s theorized that gender differences were socially constructed.
[citation needed] Feminist theorist Sandra Bem analyzes the claim and its roots in her 1993 book, The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality.
Bem also breaks down how gender differences are perceived in society and how patriarchal views and claims of biology work together to “reproduce male power.”[4]: 1–3 The male–female dichotomy has been an important factor in most religions.
The 1995 LDS Church statement The Family: A Proclamation to the World declares gender to be an "essential characteristic" and an "eternal identity".
Church regulations permit, but do not mandate, ex-communication for those who choose sexual reassignment surgery, and deny them membership in the priesthood.
[8] This claim is analyzed in detail by Emily Martin in her article Medical Metaphors of Women’s Bodies: Menstruation and Menopause.
[14] Biological reductivism "claim[s] that anatomical and physiological differences—especially reproductive differences—characteristic of human males and females determine both the meaning of masculinity and femininity and the appropriately different positions of men and women in society".
[14] It asserts the science of biology to constitute an unalterable definition of identity, which inevitably "amounts to a permanent form of social containment for women".
[16] Proponents of gender essentialism propose that children from the age of 4 to 10 show the tendency to endorse the role of nature in determining gender-stereotyped properties, an "early bias to view gender categories as predictive of essential, underlying similarities", which gradually declines as they pass elementary school years.
[14][page needed] Elyce Rae Helford, a gender researcher, notes that Laura Mulvey's theory of male gaze has been criticised for essentialism.
[13]: 241 Martin's piece provides insight on how society places great importance on the different biological processes between genders.
[19] Sandy Stone offered a critique to essentialist discourses of gender in "The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto" (1987), a foundational essay in transgender studies.
[20][21] Since then, other theorists like Jack Halberstam, Jay Prosser, Judith Butler, Julia Serano, Paul B. Preciado and Susan Stryker have written on the topic.
[15] In 1993, Patrice DiQuinzio wrote that critics of exclusion argue that this issue stems from feminist theory's focus on theorizing women's experiences solely through the lens of gender.
[15] Addressing this, some propose adopting an intersectional framework, which considers the interconnected experiences of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
[25] Post-structuralism, as articulated by Judith Butler, refers to "a field of critical practices that cannot be totalized and that, therefore, interrogate the formative and exclusionary power of sexual difference.
[26] Post-structural feminism does not represent a fixed position but rather provides tools and concepts that can be "reused and rethought, exposed as strategic instruments and effects, and subjected to critical reinscription and redeployment.
[28] Candace West and Sarah Fenstermaker also conceptualize gender "as a routine, methodical, and ongoing accomplishment, which involves a complex of perceptual, interactional and micropolitical activities that cast particular pursuits as expressions of manly and womanly 'natures'" in their 1995 text Doing Difference.