Fluidity of gender identity induced by illusory body-sex change.
Gender identity is the inner sense of being male, female, both, or neither. How this sense is linked to the perception of ones own masculine or feminine body remains unclear. Here, in a series of three behavioral experiments conducted on a large group of healthy volunteers (N=140), we show that a perceptual illusion of having the opposite-sex body was associated with a shift toward more balanced identification with both genders and less gender-stereotypical beliefs about ones own personality characteristics, as indicated by subjective reports and implicit behavioral measures. These findings demonstrate that the ongoing perception of ones own body affects the sense of ones own gender in a dynamic, robust, and automatic manner.
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