this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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Gender identity is biological, and gender is not only a social construct:
https://www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2013/10/07/book-excerpt-gender-more-performance
EDIT: this is clarified in the walls of text in my responses below, but to be clear here, I do not endorse a biological essentialist account of gender, by saying gender is not only a social construct and has biological components, I am disagreeing with a view that gender is just socialization / performance / etc., but this does not mean I endorse the view that gender is just your chromosomes / genitals / etc. Neither of these views work.
Please read the article I linked to, and for additional reading see Whipping Girl by Julia Serano, esp. relevant to this discussion is chapter 6, some of which I quoted in my responses below.
When I say gender identity is biological, I am talking about what Julia Serano calls "subconscious sex" which she also sometimes interchanges with "gender identity", which is basically that innate and unchanging sense of your sex / gender. What I don't mean by gender identity is the label you choose to identify with (or the concept that label represents).
From Whipping Girl:
That's not saying what you seem to be implying, and it's not contrary to what people mean when they say gender is a social construct.
Saying gender expression is not only performance is not really related to gender being a social construct.
What we define the genders to be is what is a social construct. The masculine gender encompasses a wide array of behaviours and expressions, as does the feminine. The behaviours and attitudes we assign to each gender is what's socially constructed. People tend to have a gender identity that matches their biological sex, and through acculturation we teach them the behaviors associated with each gender in our culture. Some people later realize that they're most comfortable conforming to a different gender than what matches their sex.
I agree with you that the "gender is a social construct" is ultimately an ontological claim, about what gender is. When I hear "gender is just a social construct", especially from an anthropologist, I am entirely expecting a social constructionist account of gender, that's what they are communicating - what gender is.
Clearly there are social elements to gender, like the color we associate with a gender, which has changed over time and is arbitrary. There is nothing intrinsic about gender-color associations, no reason "blue" means "boy" and "pink" means "girl".
Regarding gender expression not only being performance: some people use Butler's performative theory of gender as a social constructionist account of gender. It's not really a coincidence in my mind that Butler shares some intellectual roots with the psychoanalytical sexologists who popularized social constructionist views in the 1960s, so while I'm sure you could parse several social constructionist accounts I don't think it's unfair to lump them together as a broad camp. The Julia Serano article I linked even does this:
Notice how she lumps together views like "all gender is performance" and "gender is just a construct". I think this article is a relevant response to "gender is a social construct".
And yes, it depends somewhat on what people actually mean when they say "gender is a social construct", but I generally take them to mean that they believe in a social constructionist account of gender, i.e. that gender is entirely arbitrary, the result of how we are raised, and the result of socialization. If you are raised a boy, you are a boy because of how you were raised.
The idea that gender identity is biological, which is what that Safer meta-analysis concludes, contradicts the social constructionist account because it claims that a person's gender is intrinsic to them in some way, for example you can't just take a boy and raise them as a girl without problems (as the case of David Reimer illustrates, when the sexologist, John Money, who believed gender was just a construct and tested that theory by trying to have a boy raised as a girl).
You're putting far too much thought into what other people mean by the phrase, particularly in the context of a joke.
Most people are not referring to several different anthropological, sociological, and feminist theories/philosophies.
When you disagree with "gender is a social construct" in a casual setting, intentionally or not, you're conveying the statement "gender is innately tied to biological sex, there are precisely two, and trans people are invalid".
It's better to take the phrase as meaning "having a vagina doesn't mean you're a hot pink wearing pretty princess, nor does a penis imply you aren't. Gender is more complicated than a binary, and we're better off raising children as little people who tell us who they are than spending too much time being concerned that they only play with plastic figurines compatible with their genitals and playacting the right chores".
It's a joke about tricking people into attending an event usually focused on baby genitals, and then instead giving them cake that isn't coded to the babies genitals with a lecture about how they don't tell you as much about who this little person will be as people think.
Wild to see such a binary view on this given the context. How can this be taken to be any less constraining (to someonen who views gender as a spectrum) than the view that "there are only two biological genders"?
Dandelion is giving examples on how it is not necessarily a social construct and providing examples and sources. That portions of gender have a propensity to be tied to biological sex.
I think there's a conflation of terms here. There's Big G Gender, and little g individual-gender-identity.
Genders are social constructs. "Girls like pink and ponies" is not tied to anything except culture.
Your gender identity however, is absolutely not a social construct. Otherwise people wouldn't be raised as one gender, live that way for decades and then figure out that the reason things have felt "wrong" is because they've been living a gender that doesn't fit.
The given examples were about gender identity, how that's correlated with biology, and how it's more than just how you present yourself to the world.
Conflating Gender and gender identity can lead to a lot of confusion.
My comment was more toward the first influencing an individuals relationship with the second if that makes sense.
I agree, I am taking this way out of the original context, but I think the joke is maybe a straw breaking the camel's back here. I think Julia Serano's article communicates this well enough:
She's frustrated, I'm frustrated. There is frustration that is generated by the "gender is just a social construct". The joke is literally about how the dumb cis people really just need an hour long lecture from an academic on how gender is actually just a social construct. I can't think of a better example of this condescending and ironically confidently-incorrect attitude.
Maybe I think too much, but I guess my whole point is that people are not thinking enough. When they say gender is just a social construct they may not be familiar with gender theory or understand the nuances, and maybe stamping out biological essentialism is worth the oversimplifying, but there is something that feels wrong to me about penalizing a trans person challenging a view that invalidates their gender as an arbitrary fiction. I understand the intentions are not to be invalidating, and that most people don't understand the consequences of social constructionism, but that's exactly why I'm raising the problems and challenging it.
To your point I could have done a much better job to not be confused with taking a biological essentialist view, but I think anyone who actually parses what I said and reads the articles I linked to will understand I am not endorsing biological essentialism. Still, that maybe is too high of a bar, and it would have been better if I did more to anticipate this knee-jerk reaction to my challenge. It's always good to make sure you are easy to understand, and this is admittedly a mea culpa because I was rushing and didn't have much time, so I wrote a much shorter comment and linked to articles to cover the extra ground for me (which was clearly not adequate).
I don't know what to make of your claim that I shouldn't interpret "gender is just a social construct" as supporting social constructionism ... there is something compelling here about what people are trying to convey is more rooted in their intentions than any kind of theory, like a lot of times when people tell me "gender is just a social construct" it's because they are trying to signal they are trans-accepting. That said, I don't think there is any consistent or coherent view that we could really point to then, that is I'm not sure we could say "gender is just a social construct" actually communicates "the gender binary is not valid", for example, because some people will take the social constructionism more seriously than others, some people use it to actually mean, "I think trans people are valid", and others use it to mean "I will tolerate you as a trans person", and others still might use it to mean "you are dumb and don't understand gender, but I went to school and in my anthropology class we talked about how gender is cultural and sex is biological, blah blah blah".
In summary, maybe you're right that I am inappropriately hijacking this joke to attack social constructionism, but I still don't think it's that crazy that I thought "gender is a social construct" was espousing some form of social constructionism.
Thanks for putting up with me and reading my responses, and for challenging me - you have some compelling points that I should think about more.
I get that it can be frustrating to know a deeper and more nuanced definition of a thing and come up against people using a simpler, different or "hijacked" definition: I work in computer security and enjoy playing with machine learning. Most people get a very different impression if I say I do a lot of stuff with crypto and AI from what I mean. They hear finance bro and wasteful chatbots, and I mean user authentication, privacy and statistics.
A big point of friction I see is that it seems you're reading the words people say, interpreting them as though they're coming from the same background as you, and then responding in their terms.
The "performance" and "just" a social construct interpretations are what you're bringing, not the person typing.
Being told gender, that you had to struggle to find a way to make right, is reducible to how you were socialized or choose to act flies in the face of the existence of trans people and the difficulties they invariably have and is justifiably infuriating.
That the message is being given by people who very clearly, in both intent and action, believe the exact opposite should make it clear that there's a dictionary mismatch somewhere.
I feel like it stems from the belief that "social construct" implies "social constructionism".
Social constructionism is a specific theory involving social constructs , and acknowledging the existence of a social construct doesn't imply acceptance of that theory.
I don't think any reasonable person would argue that law is anything other than real by fiat of convention or collective agreement, but someone could easily disagree with the notion that scientific discovery is more about social convention than empirical reality.
Most people mean it in the sense that the WHO means it: https://www.who.int/health-topics/gender#tab=tab_1
I agree that the central problem here is that when the WHO or others refer to gender as a social construct, that it implies a social constructionist account of gender. However, I don't see another interpretation that makes much sense. I do precisely think that people can have intentions opposite of the content of their statement, like if a person wanted to reassure a racial minority by telling them that they don't even see race - it sounds supportive, but it communicates a racial eliminativist stance that undermines attempts at justice and repair. Sure, the well-meaning person may not be versed on the nuances of racial eliminativism vs racial constructivism, but it doesn't mean the sentiment isn't still problematic, or that the racial minority is just not understanding the interaction and there must be a mismatch somewhere.
I think the mismatch is between the view being espoused and that person's understanding of the view. Sure, I might smile and nod trying to not soil the interaction, but I don't think the problem is that actually I am mistaken and they aren't communicating a social constructionist account of gender ...
Also, the WHO article does communicate a social constructionist view of gender, and uses the typical gender/sex distinction on the typical basis that gender is social and sex is biological:
This distinction doesn't hold up, as sex is more socially constructed than is acknowledged here, and gender has more of a biological basis than is acknowledged. It is just inaccurate and out of sync with current evidence, as far as I can tell.
Besides the readings I have suggested, another resource covering some of this territory is this lecture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZymYiwoRoC0
The chapter around 26 minutes in covers why the sex/gender distinction falls apart.
I don't think that reading of the who page tracks, and I kinda struggle to see how you got what you did from it.
(As an aside, I feel like picking on an overview that explicitly acknowledges intersex individuals for not addressing the social construction of sex, while simultaneously being critical of it for addressing the social construction of gender is a bit nit-picky)
I really feel like there's this persistent conflation of gender categories and gender identity in your interpretation of what others are expressing, and an insistence that talking about social constructs is an endorsement of social constructionism as a whole.
It seems like we agree that the roles and attitudes we ascribe to gender categories are not objective, but socially constructed.
"Gender" is regularly used to refer to both the category and the individuals identity as being to some degree a member of that category, and it's expected that people know which is being referred to by context.
In your example involving race, I don't think that's a good comparison. In your example the person is saying words that generally minimize the importance of race while attempting to convey that they're not prejudiced. Critically, everyone agrees to what the words are referring to.
In the "gender is a social construct" case, I don't think there's agreement about what the word "gender" is referring to. The speaker means gender category, and the listener keeps understanding it as gender identity.
It's like if someone says "gender isn't a social construct" and I keep hearing them imply "women are naturally more differential and domestic, and men more forceful and outdoorsy", even once they explain they meant an individuals identity is more than social convention.
I claimed that the WHO article communicates a social constructionist view of gender (i.e. that gender is a social construct). This is based on how the WHO article specifically says:
Emphasis is mine.
Furthermore, gender (as a social construct) is differentiated from sex, which is treated as biologically real, again from the WHO article:
I am failing to see what doesn't track about my interpretation of this WHO page, which part of my interpretation do you think I am mistaken about?
Hm, I don't yet see the connection you are making between intersex individuals and sex? Are you saying that the acknowledgement of intersex individuals implies sex is a social construct? The article explicitly says sex is the biological and physiological characteristics, and contrasts it with gender as a social category.
Perhaps I am being nit-picky (I've been told I can be this way, lol), but I don't intend to be critical or harsh as much as just very clear about what the WHO article is communicating - which is the typical sex/gender distinction that I am trying to point out doesn't work.
I've been thinking about this. You want to distinguish gender, as social roles and categories, from gender identity and point out that gender is clearly a social construct but gender identity is not.
Sure, the biology determines the gender identity (read: subconscious sex), but it also plays a role in behavior and physiology in a way that can't be cleanly separated from social roles, attitudes, categories, etc. Just to state the obvious, sexual traits have a bimodal distribution in a way that shows up in the binary quality of the social categories - it's not really a coincidence that the biology displays broad sexual dimorphism and the social categories reflect this, even if the biology is much more nuanced and complicated than our social categories imply. My point here is that the social categories are not entirely separate from the biology, there are obvious ways the biology influences the categories.
Furthermore, the gender identity is a way that the biology has consequences on gender as social categories and vice versa, since gender identity seems to orient the person's gender and those social categories can either accord or conflict with that person's gender identity. David Reimer, a cis man, being raised as a girl felt conflict with being raised that way - he was rowdy and showed certain proclivities that boys commonly do, despite being raised as a girl. Trans people have similar experiences where their innate tendencies accord with the gender category they were not being raised as. Somehow a person knows they should be a man or a woman, despite those being social categories.
I don't think the gender vs gender identity distinction solves the problem I am describing though it is an interesting argument. There are still biological components that play a role in what we call "gender" that we cannot claim only comes from socialization, even if some aspects of the social categories clearly are due to arbitrary socialization (like girls being drawn to pink and boys being drawn to blue).
Meanwhile, we tend to think about the biology wrong too, we fail to see the way the biology itself is communicated and understood through scientific concepts which are created to be useful to a particular end, and are not perfect accounts of the underlying reality it is trying to describe. Our biological concepts are useful fictions in many ways, and in that sense the supposed objectivity of "biological sex" melts into the same arbitrariness of a social construct. Sex is not as objective as we would have thought, and gender is not as arbitrary as we might think. In fact the sex/gender distinction doesn't makes sense when we know the gender category a person lives as comes from the biology and the sex characteristics are oversimplified models.
I used this example precisely because it illustrates a case where the person is accidentally racist, and where the racist doesn't understand the nuance and racist side-effects of their supposedly progressive color-blindness. I think this is exactly like "gender is a social construct", since it has accidental transphobic outcomes that are not commonly understood and certainly aren't what people usually are trying to support.
You don't have to think gender is gender identity to think "gender is a social construct" is problematic, hopefully I have managed to communicate the reasons why above.
Thank you for trying to give a well documented take on the effects of biological sex on gender identity on Lemmy lol
lol, thanks - hopefully I'm actually helping, I feel so far like I'm just pissing people off
Okay, but what about those of us that have never had an innate and unchanging sense of my sex/gender?
The closer you look at these things the more complicated they become. What we seem to know from the science is that:
The science is just the current body of evidence we have, so we should expect our understanding to evolve as our evidence grows.
To more directly answer your question requires some clarification. It is unclear whether you're asking how subconscious sex relates to agender people (no sense of gender), or to gender fluid people (a changing sense), or detransitioners (sometimes changing sense), or even just any normal person, since none of us has that kind of direct access to our subconscious sex, it is implicit. If we could inspect it directly it would certainly make the whole "am I trans" or "am I a woman" question much easier, wouldn't it? Maybe someday we will have the technology, or maybe we will find that our concept of "woman" simply cannot be mapped to a complex biological trait like brain sex.
Subconscious sex is inferred, gender dysphoria and innate behavioral drives seem to give us footprints from which we can infer that subconscious sex from. Being a man and feeling the desire to wear a dress and skirt, how does he make sense of this? Maybe he assumes it's a fetish, but what if they enjoy it outside of sex, and maybe the sex when dressing up brings up so many complicated feelings (later she learns: dysphoric, even). Can it still be a fetish, can you be a crossdresser if you just want to wear a skirt around the house, but you have trouble extracting sexual pleasure from it? These are the kinds of investigating thoughts, the attempt to read between the lines. Some people might live their whole lives and never know their subconscious sex, they might successfully put off dealing with dysphoria or taking their crossdressing further. Some people have strong convictions from a young age and just know without as much ambiguity. There is quite a variety, just as the complex biology would imply.
It is also worth noting that it is a complicated relationship between something like subconscious sex or an innate brain sex and something like a self conception of one's gender. I certainly experience fluctuations in my self conception and even my felt sense of gender. Testosterone can make it much harder for me to feel like a woman. Moving through the world as a woman and being seen and treated as one by others creates a social circumstance that bolsters a psychological self conception as a woman. Neither of these things directly tell me my subconscious sex, but when the testosterone makes me feel awful, or when being treated and seen as a woman makes me feel wonderful, or when estrogen gives me mild waves of buzzing bodily euphoric, I make inferences about my subconscious sex from that.
So I don't know what you mean, but hopefully I have covered some of the ground you had in mind.
So, I'm afab and probably agender, which is where the confusion is coming from. I'm on estrogen and progesterone because otherwise my cycle is stuck to 'on', so even my relationship with hormones is complicated.
See, none of that resonates with me at all. Going off my meds makes me feel terrible, but that's from the resulting anemia. I've tried living as a man, I've tried living as a woman, I've never gotten that "yes, this is me" feeling that people talk about. I don't know what "psychological self conceptualization" as a gender means, because it's all uncomfortable for me?
It feels like what you're talking about is the university course and I'm still in primary education.
Sure, you have to realize - I spent several decades never questioning my gender and living as a man, and I certainly could have gone the rest of my life that way. It took a lot of change for me to even recognize the experiences I had were even gendered. You may actually lack the hermeneutical tools to interpret and understand your gendered experience, but it sounds like "agender" is already giving you a foothold. Feeling alienated from both genders is a thing that tells you "this is me". The evidence from the brain scans about subconscious sex shows that most people are going to not evenly fall into two camps like male and female, so why is it surprising that you wouldn't feel at home in either?
What I mean about psychological self-conceptualization of my gender: when I dream, my brain sometimes generates a "me" that moves around and does things, interacts and experiences in the dream, etc. That "me" has a gender! I think of myself as a certain way, and it determines how I interact with other people, and how they interact with me. When I am stuck thinking of myself as a man, even when I feel dysphoria from being a man, it can be distressing - but I don't have direct control over my self-conceptualization. It's like a habituated way of thinking about myself.
Sometimes in my dreams I will be interacting as a man, and then a sudden shift in my gender happens as I interact with a male stranger for example, shaking his hand I become aware of my breasts and suddenly I'm interacting with him as though I were a woman. It is a bizarre experience for me, and most of my life I never thought about my self conceptualization at all. Of course, the self concept is not just in dreams, and when I started voice therapy I realized my self-concept influenced how my voice sounded, and that I had to tackle habituating a voice partially by habituating conceiving of myself as a woman, by reminding myself over and over that I look like a woman and I need to navigate the world as a woman.
You probably have a self-conceptualization as a woman to some extent, you probably have to for pragmatic reasons. I think socialization can play a big role in that psychology, the ways we acculturate and learn how to interact according to the gendered roles. To not do so is generally not adaptive and creates friction, for example I am learning that my habit from living as a man of holding doors open for everyone is starting to backfire as I learn that men would rather die than have a woman hold a door open for them. I am violating social norms when I hold doors open, and they rush forward to take over holding the door I'm trying to hold open for them.
The socialization is still separate from the self-conceptualization, but I think they can be related in terms of the self-concept tapping into those social roles we have learned.
Good luck exploring your gender!