Clarifying aspects of sexual development can eliminate confusion in people's minds. Researchers distinguish between gender identity, sex roles, sex-typed behavior and sexual orientation.
Gender identity refers to a child's self-labeling as either "male" or "female" along with the knowledge that this is a stable, permanent attribute. Research indicates that most children have acquired an accurate, stable gender identity by age three. Their gender identity is highly resistant to change and is based upon what people around them tell them they are.
The development of both sex role stereotypes and sex-typed behaviors is a more gradual, flexible process. Sex roles refer to the child's conception of how members of each sex should behave. Young children (under 4-5 years) are likely to judge the appropriateness of a behavior according to their desire to engage in the behavior. Somewhat older children (around 6 years) develop fairly rigid stereotypical sex role conceptions. Finally, adolescents and adults develop more flexible sex role notions.
Sex-typing refers to the extent to which a child chooses to exhibit or inhibit various sex role stereotyped behaviors. The factors which affect the development of sex roles and sex-typing have not been fully delineated. It is believed that a combination of social factors influences the child: parental reinforcement, social pressure, modeling and imitation of parents, peers and television characters. The child's own cognitive development and biological predisposition also seem to play a role.
Sexual orientation, unlike gender identity, is not necessarily established early in childhood. The causes or factors influencing the development of sexual orientation are by no means fully understood. However, homosexuality is not considered to be the result of an inversion of gender identity. Sexual orientation, like sex roles and sex-typing, is more fluid and amenable to social shaping although recent research emphasizes the biological contributions.
A number of researchers have studied to development of gender identity, sex-typed behavior and sexual orientation among children of lesbian mothers. Green (1978) studied children of both transsexual and lesbian parents. He found that all children had a gender identity consistent with their biological sex and that they engaged in stereotypical and gender appropriate sex-typed behaviors.
Researchers also compared the development of children of lesbian and single heterosexual mothers and found that sexual orientation of the mother was not a factor in the children's development of gender identity, sex-typed behaviors or sexual orientation.
The general consensus among researchers is that children raised by lesbian mothers develop an appropriate gender identity, follow typical developmental patterns of acquiring sex role concepts and sex-typed behaviors, and generally develop a heterosexual orientation. Although these results follow a traditional pattern, this should not be taken to imply that in individual cases other outcomes such as the development of more androgynous sex-typed behavior or a homosexual orientation is possible.
The scientific literature indicates that being raised by a lesbian mother does not impair a child's psychosexual or psychosocial development. In fact it suggests that children of lesbian mothers may become more tolerant than others of cultural and individual diversity. The most likely result would be that the child will grow up with a balanced understanding of homosexuality without homophobia.
