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Origin of the concept

Gender identity is not a discovery in nature but a concept that grew over fifty years out of a clinical working definition. Its genesis runs from Hirschfeld's first experiments via Money's David Reimer case, which he presented as a success, to Stoller's untested postulate — and ends as a dogma on which puberty blockers for children rest.

Early roots (1910–1950)

The earliest outlines can be found with Magnus Hirschfeld , who in 1923 used the term "transsexualismus" for men who believed themselves to be women. Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Berlin, 1919) experimented with the first medical interventions — without evidence, without follow-up. In the US, endocrinologist Harry Benjamin took this up starting in the 1940s and continued the medical-technical line that still influences WPATH.

Money and the Reimer case

The term "gender identity" entered the clinical literature in the early 1960s, through Evelyn Hooker and Robert Stoller; John Money had introduced "gender role" in 1955 and used "gender identity" in 1966 in a press release about the Johns Hopkins clinic (source). Money advised the parents of David Reimer, a boy who lost his penis in a botched circumcision, to raise him as a girl. Money presented the case as a success, while Reimer did not identify as a girl, began living as a boy at fourteen and took his own life in 2004 (source). The true course only became known in the scientific literature through Diamond and Sigmundson (1997) (source).

Stoller (1968): postulate without proof

Psychoanalyst Robert Stoller established the term in 1968 with *Sex and Gender* , in which he proposed "core gender identity" as an unchangeable inner given that forms in the first years of life. Not a measuring instrument, not a biological marker, not a falsifiable prediction — an untested postulate that is presented as a fact half a century later. That the assumption rests on circular reasoning and is unfalsifiable has never been refuted since then, merely dismissed.

Activist escalation (1970–1990)

From the 1970s onwards, activists such as Virginia Prince linked the term to crossdressing and launched the broader term "transgender." In the 1990s , Judith Butler established a radically different line with Gender Trouble (1990): gender as a performative act of speech . Both traditions—the medical-essentialist of Money/Stoller and the constructivist of Butler—coexist simultaneously within activism today, despite the fact that they are logically mutually exclusive. See essentialism versus constructionism .

From clinical working definition to dogma

What began as a hypothesis to categorise transvestism and transsexuality has become a belief on which puberty blockers are prescribed and legal categories are changed. Hruz, Mayer and McHugh argue in The New Atlantis (2017) that puberty suppression for gender dysphoria rests on an insufficiently tested hypothesis. The Cass Review (2024) calls care for young people with gender dysphoria 'an area of remarkably weak evidence' (source), and in her foreword Hilary Cass writes that there are few other areas of healthcare where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views (source). See also the dissemination since 2010 and detransition research .

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