this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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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?
I don't know, they just said Swedes. I'm a swede so I took it as a funny joke
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
Ducks rape.
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.
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:
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?
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.