Fluidity of gender identity induced by illusory body‑sex change

Gender identity is a collection of thoughts and feelings about one’s own gender, which may or may

not correspond to the sex assigned at birth. How this sense is linked to the perception of one’s

own masculine or feminine body remains unclear. Here, in a series of three behavioral experiments

conducted on a large group of control volunteers (N = 140), we show that a perceptual illusion of

having the opposite-sex body is associated with a shift toward a more balanced identification with

both genders and less gender-stereotypical beliefs about own personality characteristics, as indicated

by subjective reports and implicit behavioral measures. These findings demonstrate that the ongoing

perception of one’s own body affects the sense of one’s own gender in a dynamic, robust, and

automatic manner.