Is gender merely a social construct or are we born with it?
I asked my cat what he thinks of gender and he just stared at me, so I think it’s a social construct
That’s the only way to test if something is a social construct. Ask a non-human animal.
Are there human animals?
Swedes.
With a name like yours I can only be scared at what the swedes might do
Serious answer: humans are animals, apes specifically.
Non-serious answer: see Swedes comment
I have a response/comment that i cant see, guess because i blocked that user whoever it was, but imo this was a missed chance to make a joke about furrys.
Well they said Swedes. And yes, that was a missed opportunity.
Why swedes though?
Ducks rape.
I am not a native English speaker, in my native tongue we only have one word for both, may I ask for clarifcation, so gender is the role, but sex is the biological like XY or XX or something? so you can have one sex but another gender, right?
Sex is the parts on your body that physically makes you male or female of form, while gender is every social rule that comes with having those specific parts. The social rules are made up constructs and can be broken. Pretty much.
thanks that makes sense
Gender as sex is what you are born in
Gender as a role/identity is a social construct
Leftists push for the first one, right wingers push for the 2nd
Think you mixed those up, conservatives believe sex and gender are identical and don’t differentiate. Progressives believe gender is a social construct, but depending on who you talk to that means the path forward is twofold and not everyone really agrees on what form gender should take in the future.
I’m not sure what conservatives you talk to but moderate right has trans people, enby, etc. then you go further and you have men where suits, women wear dresses. And further you get men work while women take care of the home
When you go left of centre you get men have a Y and women don’t. Further you go the less it becomes identifiable, like you can have men without penises (by accident or surgery) and behaviours don’t matter (no matter how gem/masc someone is it doesn’t change anything because the stress the right put on it as part of self isn’t there)
if you have a penis i won’t consider you a girl, that’s how it really works. you on the other hand can consider yourself whatever and whoever you want.
Can’t believe you’re outing yourself as a Genital Inspector, looking into everyone’s pants when you meet them.
I’m not LGBTQ, I’m just explaining how the two different philosophies fall into political discourse.
Based
Both. Just like race. Its subject to change based on changing concepts, but are regardless of which version of the social construct is used, race and gender are generally based vaguely on immutable things.
I think the analogy with race is a good one, but it also raises further questions. I profess to be unclear about how we should think about race.
Not sure I can help with that question. I just know the answer isn’t disingenuously adapting the language of equality to attack those oppressed by the system of race by acting like “black lives matters” is bad. Likewise, using “gender abolition” as an excuse to be a TERF by getting mad at trans people for fitting any stereotypes of their gender (while ignoring cis people doing the same thing) or telling trans people they’re delusional. Even if long-term we want to eliminate race and gender, it doesn’t mean we can ignore the relatively short-term impacts they’ve had historically and continue to have.
I have the same problem with the implication that race and gender are social constructs so they don’t matter. The impacts that these aspects of identity have in the real world matter a great deal to many people. Saying they “don’t exist” isn’t far from saying that we can just ignore them.
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But people who are transgender say they are born with their gender. And I’m inclined to believe them given their testimony.
I don’t see how that contradicts my statement.
You’re saying gender is a social construct. People who are transgender say they are born with their gender. Being born with something is incompatible with it being a social construct. Since you don’t see a tension here, are you saying gender is a social construct for everyone except transgender folk? In other words, do you think transgender people are the only ones born with their gender? That seems like an odd view to me.
The feelings/emotions/sensations are legit and are a complex mix of nature and nurture that you can’t really change voluntarily. They exist in the body and mind.
The grouping of those feelings into a rather large container-terms that also includes social roles, looks, expressions and a host of other stuff IS a social construct.
Like, a gemstone can be red, triangular and opaque, and those are objective properties. But calling it pretty is a social thing. The big difference is that “this is red” is a whole lot simpler to put into words than anything gender related.
I basically agree with you except for one caveat. I would call the “grouping” that you describe as gender expression. Whether men where kilts or pants is mostly based on societal expectation. But the unchanging gender identity is not a social construct (in my view).
That said, I raise the question because I am open to having my views changed. They’ve certainly changed in the past.
No one could possibly know they were “born” with a gender.
By the time they’re old enough to have memories and concious thought, they have already been socialized.
This response is initially persuasive but the line of reasoning doesn’t hold in other cases. For example, let’s replace gender with sexuality:
No one could possibly know they were “born” with a sexual preference. By the time they’re old enough to have memories and conscious thought, they have already been socialized.
Now, we all agree that sexual preference is something you’re born with. Analogously, if we reject the idea that lack of knowledge of innate sexual preference implies sexuality is a social construct, then we should reject the argument that lack of knowledge of gender identity implies gender is a social construct.
I’d make a couple points against that
1.We don’t “all agree” we’re born with specific sexual preferences. That’s not objective fact, it’s a hypothesis that can’t really be proven.
I’m Bi and don’t inherently know I was born this way. I have tons of personality and character traits that are impossible to assign to nature vs nurture, including sexual orientation.
2.Gender tropes change between cultures a ton, with various expectations and preferences. Differences in sex doesn’t just change by region like gender-tropes, humans are humans. Hence sexual preference based on sex and physical bodies is arguably more immutable
Most of us? Are there actual cases where a viable off spring had no x or y?
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Sex is also a social construct. Its separate from gender though.
Gender is a social construct designed around sexual dimorphism
Females of the species are equipped to and (before the development of birth control) likely to carry children, which inconveniences them physically for several months. Historically this was somewhat frequent. This caused a selective evolutionary pressure to concentrate traits compatible with said inconveniences on the female chromosome, and concentrate traits less compatible on the male chromosome. This created the kernel of gender roles, which themselves evolved over the years under the resulting social pressures of gender interplay.
Consequentially, women traditionally fill roles that can be accomplished while pregnant and/or breastfeeding (cooking, cleaning, childcare, weaving, sewing, etc) and men traditionally fill roles which are particularly difficult to do while pregnant and/or breastfeeding (hunting, farming, other strenuous labor, etc). These were reasonable adaptations that were broadly useful for quite some time. So in a sense, we’re born with it.
Recently, developments in housekeeping (breast pumps, formula, automatic appliances, public schooling and childcare, affordable industrial textiles, etc) and labor (the transition from physical to mental work) have made the biological differences between males and females less relevant in fulfilling social roles. What’s more, social roles have changed so much anyway.
Personally I think we’re getting to the end of the usefulness of gender as a social concept.
gets hit by a car
Won’t kill me! 🤑 🤑 🤑 🥰 😍 🤩 🤠 🥳 👺 👹 👿 👽 👻 👾 🤖 🤌 🧑🎤 🏄♀️
If gender is fake why is gender identity so important? If gender is fake then how some people feel they’re the wrong gender? If gender is fake why is it so important to learn about someone’s gender because using the wrong pronouns will give them trauma?
Get your story straight on gender challenge for leftists (IMPOSSIBLE)
Average sincere and genuine question-asker.
Do you want an honest answer to your questions or are you set on your worldviews?
I always want to learn more about things. To be totally honest with you, what I’m having the most trouble understanding in the current gender discourse is how can gender be both a social construct/abstraction (in the famous words of Judith Butler “an imitation without an original”) but then also gender identity is a deeply-seated innate feeling that people have that then enables the feeling of “my gender is wrong and I need to change it.”
I really don’t want to be transphobic or even enbyphobic or anything and I will use whatever pronouns people want to be nice. But just on an epistemological level, I’m having trouble understanding it.
I’m (trans) nonbinary, and I’ll try to put to words what this amorphous feeling is. Apologies in advance for the wall of text, this isn’t simple and has been a years long process for me to arrive at this ultimately incomplete articulation.
Spoiler: It all relates back to the social construct of sex and gender and it’s not an either/or as an abstract or deep seated feeling that drives us to change.
Growing up I was socialized as a boy and told who I was supposed to be and how I was supposed to act, both implicitly by society and explicitly by my community (evangelical Christians). I was, however, never able to conform to those norms. I was always left on the outside no matter how hard I tried to fit. I grew up with significant dissonance without understanding that it was these gender labels created for and placed on me causing it.
In my 30’s I started to meet people and acquire language that resonated with me regarding gender. This new language started to connect the dots for me that my ‘aberrant’ and secret feelings and behaviors (wishing I could be a woman while still being a man, being jealous that women got to dress in ways I wasn’t allowed to, wishing I could adopt norms applied to women without repercussion, among others) that caused me so much distress were ultimately due to the fact that I was told they were aberrant and, most importantly, told they were wrong.
So when I discovered that the primary problem was the label, the way to combat that was to accept a new label that gives me the freedom to express myself how I want to. Gender is important to me because I was socialized with gender as a central pillar to my identity, and because society has done the same at scale. That is to say, I look like a man so I shouldn’t wear makeup, shouldn’t paint my nails, shouldn’t wear skirts or dresses, shouldn’t move my body in certain ways, shouldn’t speak in certain ways determined to be feminine, shouldn’t be excited about certain things, and a thousand other ‘shouldn’ts’ that I want to do. I’ve always more closely identified with and been easier friends with women. My motivation for many things has always been in closer alignment with women. But I still feel masculine from time to time and have many ‘masculine’ traits like the desire to protect, an appreciation and love for cars and mechanics, a desire to be bigger and stronger than the person next to me, and a number of other traits considered to be ‘manly’.
There is no paradigm within mainstream western culture to account for this fluidity. I am a deviant from the social norm, and because of that I am an outsider with no community or home. As humans we are social beings and we crave, even need, belonging. So when I discovered that my perceived gender was the source of these feelings of dissonance and loneliness, it became imminently important for me to figure out why, because figuring out why it was important gave me the path to finally finding my community where I can finally experience belonging. Finding the labels that resonate with me helps me find the people that can really understand me. It doesn’t matter how much of an ally you are, if you’re CIS you’ll never truly understand me as a human because of the way that society has structured itself with regards to gender norms. You can empathize, accept, and love me, but that will never fill the void created in me by never feeling truly seen.
With CIS people I will always have to filter and translate what I say in order to be understood as a person, but with other gender-queer people I don’t have to. These are my people, they’ve been on the same road as me, and when I talk about these amorphous feelings md experiences they look at me with understanding and knowing and that’s it. I don’t have to keep going, I can just say what I’m feeling and they not only understand, they are right there in the same space breathing the same air. I have a partner who is trans-masc and one of the things we love to talk about and gush over is when we get misgendered to whatever gender we weren’t assigned at birth. I was recently asked if my pronouns are ‘she/her’ and that filled me with a joy that I can’t articulate. But with them they immediately understood and shared in my excitement. To share that with a CIS person requires significant emotional labor to be put into explaining the context and setting the scene in order for them to be able to celebrate with me (kind of like that last 40 minutes I’ve put into crafting this post). But with this partner it’s immediately known and viscerally understood. Sharing this story with my gender queer friends results in a communal sense of feeling seen and known that I just can’t find from even my closest CIS friends.
I’m fortunate that I don’t have body dysphoria with any of the biology that I have, but this is complicated by the fact that I do have dysphoria with biology I don’t and can’t have. I love having my biologically male body, but I have a deep longing to have a biologically female body too. I don’t talk about this often, so bear with me as I try to stumble through this. This duality is why I know I’m not a trans-woman and why I’ve adopted the non-binary label. It’s also why being gendered he/him is disruptive to me psychologically (I have a bad relationship with masc pronouns because of the quiet trauma I experience being socialized as a boy when I am, in fact, not a boy, and a complicated relationship with femme pronouns, though if I’m going to be misgendered in the binary I’d rather be misgendered in the femme direction). My sense of self vacillates across the spectrum of the binary while sometimes jumping off the scale entirely where gender is meaningless and I best describe my gender as the way kinetic sand drops and falls apart when it’s held loosely (that makes as much sense to me as it does you, I promise…. It just feels right and I can’t explain it. This type of description is common in the nonbinary community). So I have the double dissonance of this physical dysphoria along with my social dysphoria.
And all of this is ultimately important to me because I had it pounded into me like a spike in my head that I am a boy and that I am supposed to experience life a certain way because I’m a boy. Gender is important to me because the expectations for my behavior in society are determined by my (perceived) gender. If I just go along with what society thinks I am, I will never be happy because I will always be stuck trying to conform to what others think I should be. If I could, would express with 100% androgyny, but I can’t for various reasons. So as I hope you can see, I experience gender from both the abstract nature of it being a social construct and as a deeply seated innate feeling that drives me to be different.
What I can say is that in order to not be transphobic (non-binary folks are trans btw), you should learn to accept that we experience the world and ourselves differently than you do. You have no problem accepting that from other people groups, like children, people with disabilities, and people across socioeconomic strati, so apply it to us as well and recognize that we just want to exist as we are and not as we are wanted to be. And you can help by using our pronouns and believing us when we say we are something other than what we look like, even if you can’t viscerally understand it. At the end of the day, if you are CIS, this conversation isn’t for you, it’s for those of us finding ourselves, so of course it will be difficult to impossible for you to understand. And that’s ok. We don’t need that, we need acceptance.
Something being a social construct doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter, especially in this society where your gender is a thing people want to know about so that they can form opinions about you. It is also a way of self expression because with your gender you can signal to the outside world how you see yourself and how you want to be.
If you are forced into a role that does not reflect who you are, you are going to have a rough time, because people automatically assign you traits and how they will treat you based on that role. And then it doesn’t matter if gender is a thing imposed on us by nature or something we invented to categorize people.
I’m not sure if this helps but I hope it does at least a little.
It’s fake. Gender is like a style. Both are abstractions. Nobody can say what guy and gal mean in any meaningful sense.