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:
If one more person tells me that “all gender is performance” I think I am going to strangle them. What’s most annoying about that sound-bite is how it is often recited in a somewhat snooty “I-took-a-gender-studies-class-and-you-didn’t” sort of way, which is ironic given the way that phrase dumbs down gender. It is a crass oversimplification that is as ridiculous as saying all gender is genitals, all gender is chromosomes, or all gender is socialization.
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.
If one more person tells me that “all gender is performance”
There is frustration that is generated by the “gender is just a social construct”.
hour long lecture from an academic on how gender is actually just a social construct
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.
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:
Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other. As a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time.
Gender interacts with but is different from sex, which refers to the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons, such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive organs.
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:
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.
Gender [categories] refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed.
Gender interacts with but is different from sex
Gender and sex are related to but different from gender identity.
Gender identity refers to a person’s deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the person’s physiology or designated sex at birth.
(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:
Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other. As a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time.
Emphasis is mine.
Furthermore, gender (as a social construct) is differentiated from sex, which is treated as biologically real, again from the WHO article:
Gender interacts with but is different from sex, which refers to the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons, such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive organs.
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?
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.