MIND MOVES: Are you sexually confused? What happened to the simple symmetrical world wherein one was either male or female? Now there are endless combinations, manifestations, and transformations to one's gender, sexual orientation, inclination, activation and identity. There is a descriptive vocabulary as extensive as a thesaurus with political nuances as demanding as DeBrets. Sex is not simple any more.
Gender identity is usually consistent with being male or female and is fixed from the earliest age, while sex roles are the incorporation of the behaviour, dress, mannerisms, appearance and the general demeanour that a culture considers to be masculine or feminine.
In recent decades Irish culture has had increasing gender role overlap, particularly in work roles. Youth culture has embraced more casual unisex clothes, jewellery and social behaviours while simultaneously displaying extreme gender distinctions by body exposure and adornment.
However, even without gender specific attire, there are many gender gestures that remain as significant signals of being masculine or feminine. The most prominent of these are hand movements, size of steps taken or length of stride when walking, general body postures, body grooming and mannerisms.
This is why parody portrayals of gay men provide exaggerated female signs by mincing steps, hair-fixing, eyebrow rubbing, lip pouting and hand flapping, thereby constructing what has become the comedy stereotype of the male gay. Parody portrayals of gay women maximise masculine signals: muscle flexing and voice depth. This confuses the issue of orientation and identity and makes revealing sexual orientation to family and friends difficult for gay people.
Gender identity disorder, also known as transexualism or gender dysphoria is rejection of one's gender assignment. This is different to transvestism in which heterosexual males dress in female clothes. This is also different to homosexuality. Gay men and women rarely report dissatisfaction with their gender identity: their initial dilemma is with their sexual orientation, which is towards their own gender.
Dressing in female clothes by gay men, the 'drag queen' image is regarded by many, more as a masquerade, a symbol of pride, enjoyment and exhibition rather than gender rejection. Some suggest that it is a challenge to cultural assignments of masculinity and femininity and acceptance of heterosexuality as the norm.
Challenges have also been made to former psychodynamic theories such as Freud's analysis of homosexuality as akin to psychological immaturity: a promiscuous failure to accept adult relationships. More recently, genetic factors have replaced previously posited causal explanations such as an over-protective and 'male hostile' mother, weak or absent fathers.
Attempts to 'cure' homosexuality have been replaced by an understanding that gay mental health is dependent on family acceptance and social inclusion. In this way homosexuality, once the province of psychiatric disorder and criminal sanction, was removed from the DSM111 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in the late 1970s. Ireland decriminalised homosexuality in 1993. There has since followed vociferous vocalisation of the 'gay' position.
But for a parent who discovers that a son or daughter is gay the news is usually devastating. The news can plunge parents into an abyss of emotions, which may include anger, incredulity, shame, self-blame and recrimination. Denial is common, particularly in late-teen declarations where many parents clutch at the hope that this 'coming out' is but a transitory teen phase induced by inappropriate peer pressure or insidious abuse.
In this way parental reactions are often akin to grief reactions: shock denial, anger, the futile search to have the news refuted, exhaustive questions about how this could have happened or what might have prevented it. The social, emotional, religious, safety, discriminatory and health consequences of the lifestyle terrify parents, many of whom discover that they hold previously unidentified prejudices.
Clinical practice suggests that mothers and fathers also struggle with equally intense but painfully different reactions. Mothers report more self-blame and anxiety, while fathers report helpless anger at the situation for their sons and untold depths of sadness to learn that their daughter is lesbian.
Most parents also report fears that their child will be sad, lonely ostracised, attacked, at risk of psychological ill-health and of suicide. These worries are not unnatural, particularly in light of the reports (Gibson 1989, Garofalo 1998, 1999, Ramafedi 1998) however controversial, of alarmingly higher risks of suicide in gay men and women than their heterosexual peers. Families often free-fall emotionally as brothers and sisters respond, causing many unanticipated disputes to erupt.
With population estimates of homosexuality as high as 10 per cent, how people are told, when and what they are told, their accurate or erroneous beliefs and worries make this a major mental health issue.
Marie Murray is director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital Fairview, Dublin.