Dr. Diane Ehrensaft Shares Knowledge Gained from Decades of Working with Gender Creative Children in 'Gender Explained'

In Gender Explained: A New Understanding of Identity in a Gender Creative World, developmental and clinical psychologist, Diane Ehrensaft, PhD, and her co-author, Michelle Jurkiewicz, PsyD, explore the changing culture of gender in today’s world. According to Ehrensaft, this is a time in history where the uncertainty of this topic is making many people anxious. She said, “It’s one of the reasons we wrote this book, to try and get anxiety down… but we would like to get compassion and understanding up around the significant changes in what we call the gender zeitgeist.” She went on to explain, “In each period of history, there’ve always been critical moments where a new sense of the culture evolves… and around gender, we see it going back to the time… something was afoot about gender… and it rolled around to the… women’s movement… and civil rights movements before that… and it certainly then went to the LGBTQI+ phenomenon that we have today of that everybody should have a right to live in the gender that feels authentic to them, and love and live with the person that feels like the best match for them, and that has been now crystallized, I think, into a new zeitgeist of gender, a new paradigm of gender, that looks like a sudden explosion, but it’s not. It’s grown to be what it is today that now looks different than it did in 1952…”

As far as the various gender identity terms we use in society today, how does one know which word to use to describe someone correctly? Ehrensaft said, “Every person has a unique gender web. So even when we have these categories… there’s spaces in between. For example, in our clinic, there are several children, or youth, adolescents, who say they’re agender, but it means something different to each of them, so you have to go further… the one that’s most prevalent right now as a category is nonbinary, and nonbinary usually goes along with the pronoun ‘they,’ which makes many people very uncomfortable because it’s not grammatically correct… but what really makes them uncomfortable, I believe, is this new category of gender…” She concluded by saying, “There’s been moments in history where we have strong objections to change because it makes us anxious and it defies what we know of the world… it’s basically been decades and decades of socialization and therefore it becomes habitual, and that’s why it feels like bedrock…”