Ideas rooted in gender essentialism are particularly harmful to transgender, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people who have a gender identity or presentation that's different from the one prescribed at birth.
Why is essentialism a problem?
When gender is treated as an essentialist category, women as a group are considered faulty and needing to change in order to belong as leaders. Worse, for women, essentialist beliefs can lead to self-blame, rather than considering patriarchal social systems as the source of their difficulties (Scholz, 2010).
What is the impact of essentialism?
Essentialist beliefs shape how people represent and reason about certain aspects of the world from at least the early preschool years3, and contribute to many critical cognitive, social and behavioral processes.
