“The subjects in this study were 37 adolescents taken from a larger cohort of prenatally stressed children. There were 22 males and 15 females.” This is an excerpt taken from the poster I will be presenting next week on my honours project. Anyone in psychology will recognize this as a standard piece of information included in pretty much any study using human subjects. But I have a significant problem with this, and the way the information is phrased: it treats gender as if everyone fits into two neat boxes, and gives no consideration to those who don’t identify as either.

Since coming to McGill, I have met so many incredible people of all backgrounds. Many identify as male, many identify as female, and perhaps surprisingly to some readers, many identify as agendered, transgendered, or with the infinite other possibilities for gender. Some identify as one gender one day, and another gender the next. Although I feel like it’s a hard concept for some people to grasp, identities, which encompass gender, are up to the person to choose. How you choose to identify is not up to me or anyone else except yourself.

Last week, when we spent class time filling out each other’s self-made psychological tests. I won’t lie- I was really surprised by the extremely low number of tests that offered “other” or an empty box in which to type your gender as an alternative to “male” or “female. While some argue that most people do fit into these two categories and only a small minority does not, I don’t think it’s ever okay to restrict someone’s ability to express their identity, even if it is on a psychological test. Surely we, as psychology majors, have learned enough about identities, personalities, and self-image to understand how damaging and alienating it can be to not fit into the neat little boxes that society has created for us.

I’ve spent a lot of time criticizing the inability of the field of psychology to recognize gender as a spectrum — so what do I suggest as an alternative to the gender binary implied by research designs? At the very least, the possibility of identifying as something other than male or female should be recognized, perhaps in the form of an open box to write your own gender. Another approach could be a self-report of masculinity or femininity on a rating scale. Yet another change could be to not measure gender at all; gender is, after all, just one of society’s most ingrained social constructs.

Ultimately, I don’t think there is any perfect solution to fixing a deeply embedded tradition in psychological test design. However, I think a good first step to take would be to conduct more research in general with people not identifying with the traditional gender binary. No one should be excluded from studies just because they don’t adhere to norms and gender expectations, yet this has been the trend for almost all of psychological research history. It would be a small step forward, but an important one for including people with diverse identities. What do you think — is asking about gender in psychological research legitimate? Can we ever move away from the implied gender binary?