The History of Gender: How Culture has Shaped the Way We Think About Identity

Across cultures and eras, human societies have organized gender in wildly different ways. Some recognized three, four, or even more genders long before Western medicine ever entered the conversation. In this lecture, Alex Lindsay, a doctoral candidate in Clinical Psychology at the University of San Francisco, traces how colonization flattened these plural traditions into rigid binaries, and how psychiatry later turned gender diversity into a diagnosis.

Drawing on trans history, anthropology, clinical psychology, and critical theory, Alex examines who gets to decide which identities are considered real, legitimate, or worthy of care. Their work as a clinician specializing in queer-affirming therapy, combined with dissertation research on the pathologization of trans identities, gives them a front row seat to how these questions play out in real people's lives.

This talk asks us to reconsider gender not as something fixed inside us, but as something built, contested, and constantly redefined by the institutions around us.