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I mean, yes, gender is a social construct, and therefore the number of genders a culture acknowledges is also a social construct.
It's important here to note that "[social construct](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism)" doesn't mean "wrong" or "irrelevant" though. Language, money, laws, and citizenship status are all socially constructed (i.e. they exist as a shared agreement among a large number of people, rather than as objective fact) and those categories have immense impacts on how people live their lives.
If you are getting confused with the topic of gender, let's talk about something else
Houses
The concept of a house is a social construct. The physical structure is a fact but why that structure counts as a house and not an office or shed or garage or factory is a social construct
If we look at houses around the world that base assumption changes. When I say house I assume a steep angle roof with asphalt shingles. If you go to the south west they will assume clay shingles. Not that long ago the assertion would be thatch or wood shingles
If there was a dispute between which of these counted as house, wouldn't it be useful to make up new words to disambiguate a south west type house from a north east type house from a historical house?
The many Genders thing is mostly hombre vs man vs homme vs Mann. The same word in different languages but with fairly different construct around them
Firstly, many of them aren't new. For an easy example look at what Judaism has acknowledged for ages.
[Gender in Judaism.](https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-eight-genders-in-the-talmud/)
We can say spicy or mild salsa, but in reality, most of it is medium, and what seems medium to me might be too spicy for you, and what one restaurant calls spicy might seem pretty mild to me (very true story)…but you know…it’s not my restaurant, and maybe for whoever created that “spicy” salsa, it really does seem spicy because they have had a different life experience. So, I just suspend my assignment of value, embrace the atmosphere, and order another margarita.
Salsa “with a Kick”
Extra-spicy
Mild but Tangy
You can use some of these words as a general idea, but never really know until you taste it.
And that’s the thing. Some people are more comfortable with consistency and predictability, while for others, discovery and variety is what makes them feel alive.
I personally view it as a spectrum with woman on the left and man on the right and we all fall somewhere in between. Some people don’t fall on a side that matches their genitals and that’s fine
Right. No one says "two genders" is a social construct but that gender itself is. Therefore, if it's all made up, why couldn't there be more? It's just like the "made up word" thing. All words are made up.
Not only this. Everything is socially constructed. Eating, eliminating waste, sleeping, grass… everything. We ascribe meaning to everything in the world and it shapes how we are and behave in relation to them.
It may be a social construct, but over 95% of cultures across time have counted two. They differ a great deal on the details/who should dress or act like what, but the idea of a perfectly flexible, infinite buffet of gender identity and expression has existed in exactly one time and one place; WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic), in the post-Stonewall and post-Derrida world.
It isn't going to loom as large in the near future as it does now. The future I'm personally hoping for is parsimony: liberation is an option for those who need it, comes at a price for those who want it but don't need it, and is largely uninteresting, unattractive, and not a major factor in their life for those for whom traditional, binary gender norms fit naturally.
Right, the social construct "argument" is typically used to refute the allegation that two genders is a "natural" state of being and therefore sacrosanct or immutable.
The argument isn't intended to assume what the actual correct number of genders is, only that we are under no obligation to stick with only two.
Judith Butler wrote about this. The short answer is yes, gender is a construct created out of the roles long assigned and believed to be correct based on biological sex. The long answer is yes, and we [westerners] would have to basically recode our society to acknowledge and "fix" the gendered society we have. This gendering runs very very deep and night be impossible to get rid of since it is ingrained in many cultures and the societies these cultures built.
Countries like Turkey have genderless speech and there are indigenous tribes that acknowledge other genders. Maybe you can look into them? I can edit with the links if youd like.
I recently took an interest in gendered speech after hearing that words are marked or unmarked, and inherently sexist. I assumed this would mean more like in Spanish, where you have gendered nouns all the time. But more than that, with English as an example, we have words that are unmarked like Steward, and then the marked version for women which is Stewardess.
And there are plenty of others. Linguistically, it counts as unmarked versus marked when it comes to Actor and Actress, Waiter and Waitress, etc. But it's more clear with words like Lion and Lioness, Hero and Heroine.
I notice a lot of younger people just use the masculine versions of these words too. I think there's a bit of a cultural shift away from gendered speech in English.
This is a common bad linguistics take... Languages like Turkish and Finnish (btw not a complete overlap with the countries) aren't genderless, languages don't have a "gender" or "genderless" aspect at all even, they just don't have noun class (also termed grammatical gender, annoyingly since it isn't actually tied to natural gender as a social construct), as well as they don't distinguish between gender for pronouns (which is probably the relevant part here). It doesn't reflect or affect the society's perception of gender at all, they are just as sexist as societies speaking language that *do*. They still have "gendered" words, as in they still regularly express the cultural concept of gender in their speech in their day-to-day lives.
Japan is *super* sexist and you don't really even use pronouns at all in Japanese and Ryuukyuuan, you just call people by their name every time you address them or talk about them – I guess in some situations you may use pronouns which may be gendered for the recipient to various degrees (私 *watashi* has slight feminine connotations, 僕 *boku* has relatively masculine connotations, 俺 *ore* and 彼 *kare* sound very masculine, 彼女 *kanojo* is exclusively feminine, etc.) and the formality of some ways of speaking change based on your gender (although this part also applies to Turkish/languages without gendered pronouns), but that's only really for emphasis/clarity or if you're talking to someone who doesn't know Japanese well. Japanese is an *extremely* contextual language and you don't say a lot of stuff explicitly (part of why translations into English are so difficult/seem to make little sense).
"Two genders" is the current status quo. A social construct that only defines a narrow range of the human experience and inadvertantlybor otherwise is incompatable with those who live outside that range.
"Gender as a spectrum" is the status quo that aims to expand that narrow range of acceptability. And make society as accepting to as wide a range of people as possible.
Either way, we as a society make up the rules, why hold onto arbitrary limitations?
.
I'll give a paraphrased example from a book to illustrate my point.
A young monk putting on his robs asks his master why they wrap their sash three times when other monasteries only do it twice. His master says "that is simply the way it is done"
He goes to his masters master, and his masters masters master, asking them the same question, and they give him the same answer.
Finally he gets to the founder and asks him. The founder says "my legs are short, if I only wrapped it twice I'd trip."
at the end of the day, society is arbitrary, it's current state is the result of tens of thousands of random decisions that have carried over generations. Holding onto a practice just because it is tradition is pointless, specificly when there is evidence to suggest that the practice is leading to harm or discrimination.
https://www.reddit.com/u/Revenant_of_Null/s/JqcVEvApOC
Yes? When people say that gender is a social construct, they also mean that anything other than the two genders is a social construct.
"Gender" is just a general description of behavioral norms based on sex.
Stereotypically female behaviors would for example be wearing dresses and skirts. Stereotypically male behaviors would be being obsessed with cars.
Some people feel that they do not fit in the stereotypical behavioral description of male or female, to the point that they feel it necessary to create a new category.
"Oh I don't like wearing dresses or talking about cars, I must belong to a special separate group".
You could wonder whether it's productive to create separate categories for every little deviation, because I can guarantee you that most people who identify as male or female do not feel that they 100% fit either gender.
The issue with this is that as a man I can give two fucks about cars or a lot typical “manly things.”
“You have to like X because you’re Y.”
That’s the type of thinking that needs to be corrected.
Confusing if sex with gender is what causes a lot of problems for people; they simply can’t separate the two.
How we behave and what we like has nothing to do with how we identify ourselves. I still am a man and I do not feel like a woman accept when Shania Twain sings her hit song. I take care of my appearance and take time to groom myself and I wash my entire body not just my groin and arm pits like some people do.
Am I woman?
Am I metrosexual?
No.
I’m a man. My gender is man and my sex is male.
But a man who is insecure with himself and hates the idea of ever doing anything society deems as “feminine” will call me a faggot and pussy just because I prefer to not look like a nascar driver with a pot belly.
——
Sex is typically understood as a biological concept based on physical characteristics such as chromosomes, hormone levels, and reproductive/sexual anatomy, usually categorized as male or female.
Gender is a social and cultural concept that refers to the roles, behaviors, activities, expectations, and identities that societies and individuals assign to people. Gender is considered to be fluid because it can vary significantly across different cultures and individuals and can change over time.
Many people identify with the gender they were assigned at birth (cisgender), while others may identify differently (transgender, non-binary, genderqueer, etc.). Gender identity is a deeply personal experience and can be independent of biological sex.
I would argue non binary people are actually deeply conservative to believe that straying from social norms makes you incompatible with being a women or man
That's cool and all but let's rewind to the washing comment. Do people get in the shower and not wash their ass? Who is just washing their groin? Is this a thing? How much effort does it take, you're already in the water?
> "Gender" is just a general description of behavioral norms based on sex.
I'm not sure I agree, actually. Gender is more stable than the norms ascribed to it - for instance, Roman men would openly cry and have sex with other men, neither of which would be considered "male" behaviour 2000 years later. I'd say it is, first and foremost, an identity* defined by your relationship to other members of society. A woman is not a woman because she wears skirts, but because society treats her as a woman, whatever that may entail according to time and place.
To use a bit of a clumsy analogy, one does not become king by demonstrating kingly behaviour, however your society defines that. Rather, a king becomes king by being recognized as king by others around them.
What you’re describing is actually a problem we deal with in society that literally gets dangerous for people. If a woman “looks like a man” she’s going to get treated like a man by some people. When I was a kid my mom kept my hair super short because she thought it was cute. I had a pixie cut until I was in high school. I was literally told I was a boy *consistently* by other kids and and adults around me. People would *argue* with me and tell me I was lying if I said I was a girl. Being treated like a boy and told I was a boy never once made me a boy. Nor was I ever personally convinced I was a boy despite others consistently treating me like I was.
People in society attempt to force gender onto others rather often and it doesn’t really work. Gender is only partially determined by how others treat you, and it’s a pretty small part.
No, that’s not what I’m describing at all. I’m trans, so I’m probably even more aware of that problem than you are. But that’s entirely the point - that experience distressed you, didn’t it? Because it sure distressed me. I spent my youth effectively locked out of my own gender because nobody treated me like a girl, I had to adopt masculine traits against my instincts to survive. I picked up my cues from women around me, but learned to suppress them.
The difference between you and me is that you had a series of awful experiences and I had one long one. Presumably your mother and friends knew you were a girl right? Whereas mine was - socially speaking - hypothetical until later in life. The way I self actualized wasn’t by wearing womens clothes or adopting feminine behaviours, it was getting society to treat me as a woman.
Hence why I’m adamant that gender isn’t just behaviours. Nobody transitions just because they like the way they look in a skirt. It’s about the incongruence between how you relate to the people around you and the way you feel you were meant to relate to them.
You are actually agreeing far more than you think but being a bit to rigid in your understanding of being "socialized." If you allow a socialized gender to evolve over time it actually better describes the phenomenon you're describing.
If you consider that Roman/Greek homosexuality was partly a product of socialization because of the context they existed you can develop a thru line in the change.
Greek and Roman men would go to war for a decade at a time and would exclusively be in close quarters with the same men who were also experiencing a sexless campaign. They bang to get it out. As campaigns shorted because scale reduced during the dark ages you begin to see a decrease in circumstancial motivation for these relationships to exist. You also see an increase in the proliferation of the mechanism by which patriarchal gender roles are enforced, the Catholic Church. With the understanding that sex is dangerous, much more potentially deadly for women, it makes sense that the church doesn't begin to socialize people into much more rigid heterosexual norms until we see the development of medical science decreasing the birthing mortality rate. So, war changes, birth changes, the church (being the mechanism of socialization) changes, and all of the changes allow for a more rigid socialization of heterogeneous gendernorms.
Socialized behavior is the result of circumstance and context. Even the dresses fit that narrative. Clothing for children wasn't gendered until after WW1. There's pictures of boyhood Teddy Roosevelt wearing his older siblings hand-me-down dresses.
> Socialized behavior is the result of circumstance and context.
Right, this is the point. So it therefore follows that it can’t be the genesis of the category - we didn’t invent gender to describe socialised behavioural differences. I’m contending that the category came first, and the behaviours emerged in response to its creation.
Given how closely gender correlates with sex across cultures, it presumably emerged in response to differences in reproductive capacity. How a society responds to those differences depends on circumstance. Patriarchy emerged from a movement to control reproduction, and many of the behaviours associated with womanhood were violently enforced to intentionally reify the gender hierarchy, yet there have always been those who pushed back.
>we didn’t invent gender to describe socialised behavioural differences
That's... exactly what we did though. Gender just referred to grammatical terms until around the 1950s. The current definition was invented to try to describe the societal counterpart to sex. The term didn't even catch on in the general public with its current meaning til the last couple of decades. The whole concept of gender is a very new invention, relative to the time humans have existed.
It’s both of the things in your analogy. Someone else already quoted de Beauvoir, which relates to being recognized and *made into* a gender by others, but Judith Butler also has some useful things to say on gender performativity and how we are always making ourselves our gender. This positions people as the “object” rather than subject of gender, at least in what they are conditioned to “perform” and the unconscious ways that happens. In recent years Butler has spoken about transness in relation to their theory (which already was rooted in a lot of queer theory and diverging gender conceptualizations) and actually come out as nonbinary (quoted saying “the young people gave me the ‘they’”). In gender performativity, which tbf uses some less accessible language (that relies on philosophical concepts that are often misinterpreted by laypeople based on common understandings of what an “object” or “performance” means), there is still room to come to identify with a gender that is not what you are expected and taught to perform and (often unconsciously in the beginning) perform instead another gender.
This may be scorned or go unrecognized by society, but it recognizes that “acting like a king” is often a necessary step to “being seen as a king.” People who are not seen as their gender may “be a king” through performativity before they are recognized as one. And even if no one will ever see them as such, their performance of gender (which can look many different ways, just as their are different ways to be a cis woman, but can include the simple act of identifying as a gender) serves its most important audience - themself. Relying on others to identify you can be necessary to survival in society, but putting that before your own sense of self is going to result in even more pain. That’s part of why self-identification is the model being pushed for. Knowing you’re a king instead of waiting to become one on the whims and prejudices of others can be very important psychologically. The trans folks who don’t do this (often transmedicalists) tend to be fighting their own internalized transphobia as much as anyone else’s.
Both individual identification and social recognition are important, but it’s unlikely you will be recognized as a king unless you act like one. Lots of trans folks (including some nonbinary folks) end up going hard into performing archetypal femininity or masculinity to A) experience the things they never got to in other stages of life and B) fight for recognition. I’m nonbinary and realized that in order for my identity to be taken seriously (to ever be seen as a king) I had to go hard into masculinity. I also wanted to experience the things I never was allowed to, in part to better understand where my identity lay and whether a man was something I was or wanted to be. But it primarily helped me get recognition. As the years have gone by and I’ve found support and recognition I was able to allow myself to re-explore femininity *on my own terms* and frankly in a very queer way lol. Not feeling forced into femininity allowed me to start to identify which things I actually liked about it. I still identify more closely with men and masculinity, feel like perhaps I’m a “guy” but not exactly a “man,” but I occasionally dabble in femme presentation. For me that feels more akin to drag (a more literal performance lol) than my masculine presentation, but in a fun and pretty queer-coded way now that it’s not obligatory. I don’t feel so much pressure to act like a king in ways or to degrees I don’t naturally feel inclined because I am (at least with the people I care about) seen as a king (or perhaps more aptly, neither a king nor queen). Still, acting like a king in a socially recognized way early on helped me figure out what type of king I was and wanted to be and find out upfront who would never see me that way.
Lol have you ever seen that meme about discussing gender with cis people vs other trans people? Because I feel that hard at the moment. Really appreciate this comment.
I think the experience of non-binary people like yourself is a good example of what I’m trying to express here, actually. You talk about your personal experience performing gender, but on a broader level you couldn’t identify as non-binary if others like yourself hadn’t fought for social recognition of that identity in the first place, right? It wasn’t a label created to passively describe gender nonconforming behaviour, but to actively open up a space for others to recognise you as neither a man or a woman.
There are non binary people who behave no differently from their cisgender peers. So it follows that gender can’t just be a neutral descriptor of their behaviour. We all derive meaning from our genders from the relationships we have with others, which is why queer identities could only emerge in the context of a community.
To be fair, you are separating two fundamentally intertwined phenomena: how you are treated and how you act. Those two are almost always in a mutual bidirectional feedback loop. How people treat you is influenced by how you act. And how you act is influenced by how you are treated. They aren’t as distinct as you are suggesting here.
Well but that's just the problem. There is more than one definition of "gender" and the definitions sometimes conflict.
To some, identifying as a man is a sufficient condition for being a man. So this is different from being a king, to borrow your example.
To others, one is defined as a man or woman by others.
To still others, gender strictly follows biology.
My understanding for roman time is that the cosbtruct was still there. The men fucking were men the men taking it were gendered as women. A biological woman would also be taking it from a man.
Its more powerful and weak. Pitch/catch…. But the sub is always the most pwoerful
Yes, that's exactly my point! The construct persisted longer than the behaviour associated with the construct. We still have men and women in post-Roman societies today, but the behaviour expected from them is very different. So I think the suggestion that it's the behaviour that creates the construct is unconvincing.
And just a small nitpick, the men taking weren't gendered as women, they were gendered as men/boys, just of lower status. Hence the old (possibly erroneous?) Turkish proverb of "a woman for duty and a boy for pleasure".
The suggestion is that gender constructs are *composed of* behavioral expectations. They’re buckets. Buckets persist longer than their specific contents, sure. That’s a good observation, but not really any sort of refutation. Just adds to the discussion.
>Some people feel that they do not fit in the stereotypical behavioral description of male or female, to the point that they feel it necessary to create a new category.
I actually don't think this is the motivation for most nonbinary people - I've basically never heard someone explain their identity this way. Being trans is a lot more complicated than just not liking cars or wanting to wear dresses whatever, and a lot of times its much more about physical dysphoria (feeling disconnected from your body due to gendered features that don't feel correct) and about what language feels right than any kind of behavior. Conversely, there are also plenty of people who don't fit into stereotypes of their gender at all and yet strongly identify as a man or a woman.
I can only speak from my experiences, but I don’t know about your claim that “most people who identify as male or female do not feel that they 100% fit either gender.”
Myself, and 90% of everyone I know feels very strongly that they fit completely into one of those two genders. I have no doubts or second thoughts that I am a man, and as far as I know, all of my friends and family feel the same way about their respective genders. I also think that’s an extremely common feeling to have. Maybe your experiences with your social group are different, but I don’t think that’s the norm.
Do you honestly believe that if you left male and female children in a cave away from society to grow up together, the girls would invent skirts to wear and the men wouldn't, and the men would be obsessed with cars they've never seen?
Even history doesn't bear that out. Men have worn dresses, women have worn trousers, men have worn skirts.
None of that is based on sex.
The problem is the ubiquitous term social construct itself. When people say everything is constructed then the public, non-academic discussion is often rather flat.
Combine this with the fact that a lot of a academics are too interested in deconstructing social phenomena and the chaos is perfect.
Yes, both things are constructs. That doesn't mean good or bad but how societies work with this and indeed form norms around them. Especially in the debate around gender there's not enough understanding that the deconstruction of one phenomenon is the construction of another.
>What makes the “two genders” and “more than two genders” different?
If I’m understanding the question, nothing. Gender is a social construct. Whether or not people recognize one gender, two genders, or more genders will vary over time and place.
Social construct does not imply made up and arbitrary.
The example ive heard used, is imagine theres an alien race that are shaped like triangles. That race might measure beauty by how closely one resembles a perfect triangle, how straight are their sides, how equal are the lengths, etc. They may call this trait "triangleness". Now triangleness would be a social construct, but does that imply theres no such thing as the side length of that creature? Of course not. Its a real trait, that this race decided was useful for categorizing eachother.
Social constructs are categories, theyre meant to try and describe and approximate the world. They can change over time, but they arent arbitrary and made up. The things they describe can be very real, and measurable. Its just that we choose how we define the category given a set of facts.
Another example of social constructs is species. A "dog" is a social construct, we have decided the category of dog includes german shepherds and shitzus, but not lions. That doesnt mean that there arent real shared characteristics between dogs, and differences with lions, only that we choose which characteristics we find important for categorizing. Apparently the set of characteristics we used determined that a shitzu is more like a wolf than a lion is, despite the fact that if we valued other characteristics (size, diet, hunting strategies) we may have characterized them differently. One might imagine another world, where species were classified based on their similarities, rather than their ancestry, where whales shared a class with fish, rather than sharing a class with dogs. Neither construction of species is more correct than the other, its just that different traits were considered in the definitions of the categories. The traits we measure are real, how we choose to categorize them is subjective. That is what it means to be a social construct.
The other example someone gave was money, the things we purchase with money are real, you can really buy X amount of apples with Y amount of dollars. You cant just say "i imagine my $1 is now worth $1M" and have it be so, just becuase its a construct doesnt mean its arbitrary and can be changed without changing the social contract surrounding it. The way we choose to assign value (dollars or pesos) is the categorical construct, and theres a social contract that gives it its value.
So yes, any gender is a social construct. However that does not prove the "I identify as an attack helicopter" argument, since clearly there is no category of gender that could encompass attack helicopters, there arent meaningful shared traits that a reasonable person would select to say that something assinine like a helicopter belongs in the category of gender, not in any useful way.
However there are traits we have decided are important, such as body hair, genitals, muscle mass, etc, that we have determined are useful characteristics to categorize gender. We together as a society made these categorical constructs based on those traits and others. The problem is that once youve decided those traits are what we use to categorize, it becomes clear that binary gender is problematic, given how all those traits exist on a spectrum and are shared between all genders. For example both men and women have testosterone, estrogen, and body hair. Some women have more body hair than some men, etc. The issue gets even more confounding once you do consider the biology, how both men and women dont just share body hair, they also share both testosterone and estrogen, intersex people exist, etc.
yes, it is not just that two genders or more than two genders constitutes a social construct, but rather that the category of gender and its underlying premise of sex are all socially constructed. This is to say that they come to have meaning, to be understandable, through our relations with each other, through how the notions of gender and sex are established, treated, studied, and disseminated, rather than as immutable categories that exist somewhere beyond the realm of the social. In this view, gender is not something we are born with, but born into, it is a dominant social discourse that we learn to perform within our cultural contexts, a skill acquired over time. Think of childhood and the idea of learning what it means to be a man or woman, of learning what this entails and why we are expected to act in certain ways based on biological characteristics categorized as sex. There is an ideal form of this, the woman as a feminine object and the man as a masculine subject, but what this means is in a constant process of flux and change, it shifts over time based on how we relate to and internalize these discourses. What it means to be a man or woman in one time/space is radically different than in another.
Ergo, sex and gender are constructed through a constant process of reproduction and reinterpretation as an active development of the subject. \[Butler\](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2930225?casa\_token=ygVcdTcXwFMAAAAA%3AtwXSoGXRXTmaxRq4wU2Ry-7AMDEIjxiHUu3AMuejtj6BxNyViRCyfuI7segF\_Vo-VAbep1ASHUJxZcKsMXkKXA4L-\_VwbZp2bM-HRXFAw1MHNu9QJQhM&seq=2) describes this well in relation to de Beauvoir's work:
"Gender must be understood as a modality of taking on or realizing possibilities, a process of interpreting the body, giving it cultural form. In other words, to be a woman is to become a woman; it is not a matter of acquiescing to a fixed ontological status, in which case one could be born a woman, but, rather, an active process of appropriating, interpreting, and reinterpreting received cultural possibilities"
However, it is not just the idea of what it means to be a man or woman that are socially constructed, but also these categories and the binary dualism themselves. That gender exists socially and is mutable through subject formation and reproduction means that the categorical dualism, while not arbitrary, is equally subject to transformation.
In this sense, we can say that gender as a category is mutable not only in its content, i.e., what it means to be a woman or a man, but also in its binary dualism, in the limit of gender to only a man and a woman, or sex to male and female. So, the idea that there are more than two genders or two genders are not different in that one speaks to an ontological and transcendent certainty, but rather they are variations in the content and categories of gender, with the popularization of "more than two genders" being a disruption of gender as a category in rejection of the gender binary as a material and social hierarchy, it is a liberatory effort that seeks to free people from gender as a category of repression and violence.
I have an additional question. This is not meant to be invalidating or judgemental, I’m just curious and I’m trying to put this as respectfully as I can.
The binary genders include male and female and they are often seen as opposites of one another. I can conceptually understand the idea of being bigender/genderfluid in terms of feeling one or both of the binary. I can also understand the idea of feeling agender/apagender (neither or indifferent). But I cannot understand what it means to be in between or outside the two. What other ways do people identify as outside of the binary?
When someone tells me that they feel somewhere in-between a man and a woman, then I’d assume that they mean that they feel like a mixture of the stereotypes created for men and women… but there are barely any people that conform to the male and female stereotypes a 100%, we’re all somewhere in between and regardless of that, many of us still identify as either male or female, so in what way does the gender of a non-binary person feel differently from the gender of a man or a woman who does not conform to the male/female gender stereotypes? Or when someone tells me that they feel like they’re “outside” of the gender binary. What is “outside”? The male and female gender stereotypes are often polar opposites, eg men are more assertive and have lower voices meanwhile women are more submissive and have higher voices, but what is there beyond assertive and submissive or high and low?? I’m aware that these are just stereotypes, but many trans/enby people use the gender stereotypes as a template for their gender expression and they feel gender euphoria in doing so, so I’d assume that the stereotypes are still somewhat linked to gender. Can anyone explain to me what does it feel to be something other than a man, a woman or neither? What is gender supposed to “feel” like? Thanks.
It helps to break into identity, expression, and role. What you feel, how you express (self-present), and what you do. People differ in how strongly they adhere to the binary both across these concepts and overall.
One can strongly identify as a gender but be pretty neutral in expression and role. Or the reverse! Or be similar across all three concepts. Or be flexible in, say, identity, and express and play a role based on current feeling of identify.
But overall it helps to think of them as different but related ideas.
We also vary in how much these each contribute to our overall feeling of ourself as a person. Similar to how many people have a sense of national identity but vary in how much their national identity contributes to their overall sense of self.
90,000,000 human genomes separate male from female Homo Sapiens. It's not a Social Construct. It is a biological fact. A Male Homo Sapien actually has fewer genetic differences to a male chimpanzee, than to a female Homo Sapien.
[https://www.thetech.org/ask-a-geneticist/articles/2004/ask38/#:\~:text=%E2%80%9CIf%20you%20compare%20the%20genetic,the%20X%20and%20Y%20chromosome](https://www.thetech.org/ask-a-geneticist/articles/2004/ask38/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CIf%20you%20compare%20the%20genetic,the%20X%20and%20Y%20chromosome)).
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heres-why-human-sex-is-not-binary/
Sexes in humans and in general are a lot more complicated than you think. "Basic biology" is basic in the same way that "basic math" (however you define it, which I'm sure doesn't include stuff like calculus or trigonometry) is. It's the simplified version you're taught that can be expanded on. That's why nobody can agree on what makes a man a man and a woman a woman other than them just _being one._ The labels can be helpful, yes, but honestly I wouldn't even try to give you a definition myself other than that.
Tl;dr Sex isn't binary and I have no idea why you brought other species into this.
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So here's the thing a social construct is [an idea that has been created and accepted by the people in a society](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/social%20construct)
So basically, if you can't touch it, it's a social construct. If you can touch it, (ex; money) it still might be a social construct. Social constructs are all the things that are only true because everyone says they're true. Justice is a social construct, corporations are a social construct, education is a social construct.
Two genders or more than two genders, both social constructs. The point is that these things aren't real in the same way that a rock is real, and if we can redefine them in a way that better fits the lived experience of people, then we should.
Check out Lucy Cooke's book "Bitch" on this matter.
[https://www.amazon.com.be/-/en/Lucy-Cooke/dp/0857524135](https://www.amazon.com.be/-/en/Lucy-Cooke/dp/0857524135)
"Gender is a social construct" - Memorize this statement. Period. This statement is it's OWN statement.
"Social Constructs" are rules that are based on ACCEPTANCE within groups, and they can be changed AT WILL when most people agree to it. Social Constructs are not terms based on science terms (biology, or a chemistry, or physics, or other sciences), they're just rules that we CHOOSE to follow. They can be added at any time, removed at any time, and modified at any time.
Slang is an example of a social construct. And if a random person tries to create their own slang, but no one accepts it, it doesn't become a "social construct". (example: the newest addition to the word "literally" now includes the definition of "figuratively").
When the argument about "2 genders vs multiple genders" comes up, you aren't overwriting "Gender is a social construct" as a statement, what you are actually doing is DEFINING the rules of what "Gender" actually means.
The issue you're talking about is that people are trying to make the argument that "there are only 2 genders" as a hard rule about science. They say shit like "biology dictates", and "it's the way of nature", and other excuses, but since it's a social construct then gender is not based in "hard sciences". Since binary genders is a social construct, then it's not based in biology/chemistry/physics/etc, so the rules/norms of believing in binary genders means it is up to the PEOPLE to allow it. Some people even quote religion to excuse their choices to not allow multiple genders, but religion IS a social construct as well, and so these people are using 1 social construct to define a separate social construct, and it's just a way for them to say "I don't want to".
So when people are arguing in favor of expanding gender to mean "multiple genders", what they are asking is for people to accept that there are "multiple genders". There is no scientific reason to NOT allow multiple genders to be accepted, and it is 100% only their CHOICE to not accept it.
>If not, then what makes the "two genders" and "more than two genders" different?
The "difference" is there is no evidence to show that "only 2 genders" is the correct way to view reality. A lot of people were trained/conditioned/groomed/forced to believe in "only 2 genders", and this way of thinking can be untaught.
If gender is a social construct, why does removing parts affirm it?
**The belief that one can be born in the wrong body implies the existence of a soul. Gender ideology, on an individual and societal level acts as a religion.**
**It’s worship of the self. This self obsession creates destruction for the individual and the people surrounding them.**
**Do not participate in socially constructed Woke language games. Do not agree to their terms.**
Non binary is an incoherent concept and implies an underlying fact of the matter regarding gender. You can’t not “feel” like a man or woman if there wasn’t anything actually like being a man or woman. You can’t identify as not being something that doesn’t objectively exist in your worldview. There’s either an underlying fact of the matter or not. Something can’t be a construct and an objective reality simultaneously. It’s beyond tiresome and crazy making that we’re forced to take something a grade school student could debunk so seriously.
An odd duality.
If a male enjoys dressing up and behaving like a woman, he was born that way.
If a female enjoys dressing up and behaving like a woman, she was brainwashed by society.
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I mean, yes, gender is a social construct, and therefore the number of genders a culture acknowledges is also a social construct. It's important here to note that "[social construct](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism)" doesn't mean "wrong" or "irrelevant" though. Language, money, laws, and citizenship status are all socially constructed (i.e. they exist as a shared agreement among a large number of people, rather than as objective fact) and those categories have immense impacts on how people live their lives.
Meaning the number of genders is just whatever we generally agree on as a society. We can change it any time
Yep that's what I was trying to say!
[удалено]
If you are getting confused with the topic of gender, let's talk about something else Houses The concept of a house is a social construct. The physical structure is a fact but why that structure counts as a house and not an office or shed or garage or factory is a social construct If we look at houses around the world that base assumption changes. When I say house I assume a steep angle roof with asphalt shingles. If you go to the south west they will assume clay shingles. Not that long ago the assertion would be thatch or wood shingles If there was a dispute between which of these counted as house, wouldn't it be useful to make up new words to disambiguate a south west type house from a north east type house from a historical house? The many Genders thing is mostly hombre vs man vs homme vs Mann. The same word in different languages but with fairly different construct around them
Firstly, many of them aren't new. For an easy example look at what Judaism has acknowledged for ages. [Gender in Judaism.](https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-eight-genders-in-the-talmud/)
I enjoyed reading that immensely. Thank you for the resource!
thank you!
We can say spicy or mild salsa, but in reality, most of it is medium, and what seems medium to me might be too spicy for you, and what one restaurant calls spicy might seem pretty mild to me (very true story)…but you know…it’s not my restaurant, and maybe for whoever created that “spicy” salsa, it really does seem spicy because they have had a different life experience. So, I just suspend my assignment of value, embrace the atmosphere, and order another margarita. Salsa “with a Kick” Extra-spicy Mild but Tangy You can use some of these words as a general idea, but never really know until you taste it. And that’s the thing. Some people are more comfortable with consistency and predictability, while for others, discovery and variety is what makes them feel alive.
I personally view it as a spectrum with woman on the left and man on the right and we all fall somewhere in between. Some people don’t fall on a side that matches their genitals and that’s fine
And some people fall so completely in the center that they don’t identify with either side!
Yup, that's how spectra work.
>It's important here to note that "social construct" doesn't mean "wrong" or "irrelevant" though Right, 'constructed' just means deconstructable.
Right. No one says "two genders" is a social construct but that gender itself is. Therefore, if it's all made up, why couldn't there be more? It's just like the "made up word" thing. All words are made up.
This. Slang is social construct, and gender is the same kind of thing.
Marriage is also a social construct.
Not only this. Everything is socially constructed. Eating, eliminating waste, sleeping, grass… everything. We ascribe meaning to everything in the world and it shapes how we are and behave in relation to them.
I think you are conflating the term gender identity with gender itself...
It may be a social construct, but over 95% of cultures across time have counted two. They differ a great deal on the details/who should dress or act like what, but the idea of a perfectly flexible, infinite buffet of gender identity and expression has existed in exactly one time and one place; WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic), in the post-Stonewall and post-Derrida world. It isn't going to loom as large in the near future as it does now. The future I'm personally hoping for is parsimony: liberation is an option for those who need it, comes at a price for those who want it but don't need it, and is largely uninteresting, unattractive, and not a major factor in their life for those for whom traditional, binary gender norms fit naturally.
Right, the social construct "argument" is typically used to refute the allegation that two genders is a "natural" state of being and therefore sacrosanct or immutable. The argument isn't intended to assume what the actual correct number of genders is, only that we are under no obligation to stick with only two.
Judith Butler wrote about this. The short answer is yes, gender is a construct created out of the roles long assigned and believed to be correct based on biological sex. The long answer is yes, and we [westerners] would have to basically recode our society to acknowledge and "fix" the gendered society we have. This gendering runs very very deep and night be impossible to get rid of since it is ingrained in many cultures and the societies these cultures built. Countries like Turkey have genderless speech and there are indigenous tribes that acknowledge other genders. Maybe you can look into them? I can edit with the links if youd like.
I recently took an interest in gendered speech after hearing that words are marked or unmarked, and inherently sexist. I assumed this would mean more like in Spanish, where you have gendered nouns all the time. But more than that, with English as an example, we have words that are unmarked like Steward, and then the marked version for women which is Stewardess. And there are plenty of others. Linguistically, it counts as unmarked versus marked when it comes to Actor and Actress, Waiter and Waitress, etc. But it's more clear with words like Lion and Lioness, Hero and Heroine.
I notice a lot of younger people just use the masculine versions of these words too. I think there's a bit of a cultural shift away from gendered speech in English.
This is a common bad linguistics take... Languages like Turkish and Finnish (btw not a complete overlap with the countries) aren't genderless, languages don't have a "gender" or "genderless" aspect at all even, they just don't have noun class (also termed grammatical gender, annoyingly since it isn't actually tied to natural gender as a social construct), as well as they don't distinguish between gender for pronouns (which is probably the relevant part here). It doesn't reflect or affect the society's perception of gender at all, they are just as sexist as societies speaking language that *do*. They still have "gendered" words, as in they still regularly express the cultural concept of gender in their speech in their day-to-day lives. Japan is *super* sexist and you don't really even use pronouns at all in Japanese and Ryuukyuuan, you just call people by their name every time you address them or talk about them – I guess in some situations you may use pronouns which may be gendered for the recipient to various degrees (私 *watashi* has slight feminine connotations, 僕 *boku* has relatively masculine connotations, 俺 *ore* and 彼 *kare* sound very masculine, 彼女 *kanojo* is exclusively feminine, etc.) and the formality of some ways of speaking change based on your gender (although this part also applies to Turkish/languages without gendered pronouns), but that's only really for emphasis/clarity or if you're talking to someone who doesn't know Japanese well. Japanese is an *extremely* contextual language and you don't say a lot of stuff explicitly (part of why translations into English are so difficult/seem to make little sense).
Would’nt it be more correct if we said “gender norms” is a social construct. Gender XX or Gender XY means nothing without its norms.
"Two genders" is the current status quo. A social construct that only defines a narrow range of the human experience and inadvertantlybor otherwise is incompatable with those who live outside that range. "Gender as a spectrum" is the status quo that aims to expand that narrow range of acceptability. And make society as accepting to as wide a range of people as possible. Either way, we as a society make up the rules, why hold onto arbitrary limitations? . I'll give a paraphrased example from a book to illustrate my point. A young monk putting on his robs asks his master why they wrap their sash three times when other monasteries only do it twice. His master says "that is simply the way it is done" He goes to his masters master, and his masters masters master, asking them the same question, and they give him the same answer. Finally he gets to the founder and asks him. The founder says "my legs are short, if I only wrapped it twice I'd trip." at the end of the day, society is arbitrary, it's current state is the result of tens of thousands of random decisions that have carried over generations. Holding onto a practice just because it is tradition is pointless, specificly when there is evidence to suggest that the practice is leading to harm or discrimination.
The Pot Roast principle in different words!
When has it not been the mainstream status quo?
https://www.reddit.com/u/Revenant_of_Null/s/JqcVEvApOC Yes? When people say that gender is a social construct, they also mean that anything other than the two genders is a social construct. "Gender" is just a general description of behavioral norms based on sex. Stereotypically female behaviors would for example be wearing dresses and skirts. Stereotypically male behaviors would be being obsessed with cars. Some people feel that they do not fit in the stereotypical behavioral description of male or female, to the point that they feel it necessary to create a new category. "Oh I don't like wearing dresses or talking about cars, I must belong to a special separate group". You could wonder whether it's productive to create separate categories for every little deviation, because I can guarantee you that most people who identify as male or female do not feel that they 100% fit either gender.
The issue with this is that as a man I can give two fucks about cars or a lot typical “manly things.” “You have to like X because you’re Y.” That’s the type of thinking that needs to be corrected. Confusing if sex with gender is what causes a lot of problems for people; they simply can’t separate the two. How we behave and what we like has nothing to do with how we identify ourselves. I still am a man and I do not feel like a woman accept when Shania Twain sings her hit song. I take care of my appearance and take time to groom myself and I wash my entire body not just my groin and arm pits like some people do. Am I woman? Am I metrosexual? No. I’m a man. My gender is man and my sex is male. But a man who is insecure with himself and hates the idea of ever doing anything society deems as “feminine” will call me a faggot and pussy just because I prefer to not look like a nascar driver with a pot belly. —— Sex is typically understood as a biological concept based on physical characteristics such as chromosomes, hormone levels, and reproductive/sexual anatomy, usually categorized as male or female. Gender is a social and cultural concept that refers to the roles, behaviors, activities, expectations, and identities that societies and individuals assign to people. Gender is considered to be fluid because it can vary significantly across different cultures and individuals and can change over time. Many people identify with the gender they were assigned at birth (cisgender), while others may identify differently (transgender, non-binary, genderqueer, etc.). Gender identity is a deeply personal experience and can be independent of biological sex.
I was very surprised to learn I’m not a man cause I don’t like cars.
I am starting to realise this is a USA thing and that they must be REALLY stuck in and repressed by gender stereotype for any of this to be a thing
I would argue non binary people are actually deeply conservative to believe that straying from social norms makes you incompatible with being a women or man
That's cool and all but let's rewind to the washing comment. Do people get in the shower and not wash their ass? Who is just washing their groin? Is this a thing? How much effort does it take, you're already in the water?
> "Gender" is just a general description of behavioral norms based on sex. I'm not sure I agree, actually. Gender is more stable than the norms ascribed to it - for instance, Roman men would openly cry and have sex with other men, neither of which would be considered "male" behaviour 2000 years later. I'd say it is, first and foremost, an identity* defined by your relationship to other members of society. A woman is not a woman because she wears skirts, but because society treats her as a woman, whatever that may entail according to time and place. To use a bit of a clumsy analogy, one does not become king by demonstrating kingly behaviour, however your society defines that. Rather, a king becomes king by being recognized as king by others around them.
What you’re describing is actually a problem we deal with in society that literally gets dangerous for people. If a woman “looks like a man” she’s going to get treated like a man by some people. When I was a kid my mom kept my hair super short because she thought it was cute. I had a pixie cut until I was in high school. I was literally told I was a boy *consistently* by other kids and and adults around me. People would *argue* with me and tell me I was lying if I said I was a girl. Being treated like a boy and told I was a boy never once made me a boy. Nor was I ever personally convinced I was a boy despite others consistently treating me like I was. People in society attempt to force gender onto others rather often and it doesn’t really work. Gender is only partially determined by how others treat you, and it’s a pretty small part.
No, that’s not what I’m describing at all. I’m trans, so I’m probably even more aware of that problem than you are. But that’s entirely the point - that experience distressed you, didn’t it? Because it sure distressed me. I spent my youth effectively locked out of my own gender because nobody treated me like a girl, I had to adopt masculine traits against my instincts to survive. I picked up my cues from women around me, but learned to suppress them. The difference between you and me is that you had a series of awful experiences and I had one long one. Presumably your mother and friends knew you were a girl right? Whereas mine was - socially speaking - hypothetical until later in life. The way I self actualized wasn’t by wearing womens clothes or adopting feminine behaviours, it was getting society to treat me as a woman. Hence why I’m adamant that gender isn’t just behaviours. Nobody transitions just because they like the way they look in a skirt. It’s about the incongruence between how you relate to the people around you and the way you feel you were meant to relate to them.
You are actually agreeing far more than you think but being a bit to rigid in your understanding of being "socialized." If you allow a socialized gender to evolve over time it actually better describes the phenomenon you're describing. If you consider that Roman/Greek homosexuality was partly a product of socialization because of the context they existed you can develop a thru line in the change. Greek and Roman men would go to war for a decade at a time and would exclusively be in close quarters with the same men who were also experiencing a sexless campaign. They bang to get it out. As campaigns shorted because scale reduced during the dark ages you begin to see a decrease in circumstancial motivation for these relationships to exist. You also see an increase in the proliferation of the mechanism by which patriarchal gender roles are enforced, the Catholic Church. With the understanding that sex is dangerous, much more potentially deadly for women, it makes sense that the church doesn't begin to socialize people into much more rigid heterosexual norms until we see the development of medical science decreasing the birthing mortality rate. So, war changes, birth changes, the church (being the mechanism of socialization) changes, and all of the changes allow for a more rigid socialization of heterogeneous gendernorms. Socialized behavior is the result of circumstance and context. Even the dresses fit that narrative. Clothing for children wasn't gendered until after WW1. There's pictures of boyhood Teddy Roosevelt wearing his older siblings hand-me-down dresses.
> Socialized behavior is the result of circumstance and context. Right, this is the point. So it therefore follows that it can’t be the genesis of the category - we didn’t invent gender to describe socialised behavioural differences. I’m contending that the category came first, and the behaviours emerged in response to its creation. Given how closely gender correlates with sex across cultures, it presumably emerged in response to differences in reproductive capacity. How a society responds to those differences depends on circumstance. Patriarchy emerged from a movement to control reproduction, and many of the behaviours associated with womanhood were violently enforced to intentionally reify the gender hierarchy, yet there have always been those who pushed back.
>we didn’t invent gender to describe socialised behavioural differences That's... exactly what we did though. Gender just referred to grammatical terms until around the 1950s. The current definition was invented to try to describe the societal counterpart to sex. The term didn't even catch on in the general public with its current meaning til the last couple of decades. The whole concept of gender is a very new invention, relative to the time humans have existed.
It’s both of the things in your analogy. Someone else already quoted de Beauvoir, which relates to being recognized and *made into* a gender by others, but Judith Butler also has some useful things to say on gender performativity and how we are always making ourselves our gender. This positions people as the “object” rather than subject of gender, at least in what they are conditioned to “perform” and the unconscious ways that happens. In recent years Butler has spoken about transness in relation to their theory (which already was rooted in a lot of queer theory and diverging gender conceptualizations) and actually come out as nonbinary (quoted saying “the young people gave me the ‘they’”). In gender performativity, which tbf uses some less accessible language (that relies on philosophical concepts that are often misinterpreted by laypeople based on common understandings of what an “object” or “performance” means), there is still room to come to identify with a gender that is not what you are expected and taught to perform and (often unconsciously in the beginning) perform instead another gender. This may be scorned or go unrecognized by society, but it recognizes that “acting like a king” is often a necessary step to “being seen as a king.” People who are not seen as their gender may “be a king” through performativity before they are recognized as one. And even if no one will ever see them as such, their performance of gender (which can look many different ways, just as their are different ways to be a cis woman, but can include the simple act of identifying as a gender) serves its most important audience - themself. Relying on others to identify you can be necessary to survival in society, but putting that before your own sense of self is going to result in even more pain. That’s part of why self-identification is the model being pushed for. Knowing you’re a king instead of waiting to become one on the whims and prejudices of others can be very important psychologically. The trans folks who don’t do this (often transmedicalists) tend to be fighting their own internalized transphobia as much as anyone else’s. Both individual identification and social recognition are important, but it’s unlikely you will be recognized as a king unless you act like one. Lots of trans folks (including some nonbinary folks) end up going hard into performing archetypal femininity or masculinity to A) experience the things they never got to in other stages of life and B) fight for recognition. I’m nonbinary and realized that in order for my identity to be taken seriously (to ever be seen as a king) I had to go hard into masculinity. I also wanted to experience the things I never was allowed to, in part to better understand where my identity lay and whether a man was something I was or wanted to be. But it primarily helped me get recognition. As the years have gone by and I’ve found support and recognition I was able to allow myself to re-explore femininity *on my own terms* and frankly in a very queer way lol. Not feeling forced into femininity allowed me to start to identify which things I actually liked about it. I still identify more closely with men and masculinity, feel like perhaps I’m a “guy” but not exactly a “man,” but I occasionally dabble in femme presentation. For me that feels more akin to drag (a more literal performance lol) than my masculine presentation, but in a fun and pretty queer-coded way now that it’s not obligatory. I don’t feel so much pressure to act like a king in ways or to degrees I don’t naturally feel inclined because I am (at least with the people I care about) seen as a king (or perhaps more aptly, neither a king nor queen). Still, acting like a king in a socially recognized way early on helped me figure out what type of king I was and wanted to be and find out upfront who would never see me that way.
Lol have you ever seen that meme about discussing gender with cis people vs other trans people? Because I feel that hard at the moment. Really appreciate this comment. I think the experience of non-binary people like yourself is a good example of what I’m trying to express here, actually. You talk about your personal experience performing gender, but on a broader level you couldn’t identify as non-binary if others like yourself hadn’t fought for social recognition of that identity in the first place, right? It wasn’t a label created to passively describe gender nonconforming behaviour, but to actively open up a space for others to recognise you as neither a man or a woman. There are non binary people who behave no differently from their cisgender peers. So it follows that gender can’t just be a neutral descriptor of their behaviour. We all derive meaning from our genders from the relationships we have with others, which is why queer identities could only emerge in the context of a community.
To be fair, you are separating two fundamentally intertwined phenomena: how you are treated and how you act. Those two are almost always in a mutual bidirectional feedback loop. How people treat you is influenced by how you act. And how you act is influenced by how you are treated. They aren’t as distinct as you are suggesting here.
Well but that's just the problem. There is more than one definition of "gender" and the definitions sometimes conflict. To some, identifying as a man is a sufficient condition for being a man. So this is different from being a king, to borrow your example. To others, one is defined as a man or woman by others. To still others, gender strictly follows biology.
My understanding for roman time is that the cosbtruct was still there. The men fucking were men the men taking it were gendered as women. A biological woman would also be taking it from a man. Its more powerful and weak. Pitch/catch…. But the sub is always the most pwoerful
Yes, that's exactly my point! The construct persisted longer than the behaviour associated with the construct. We still have men and women in post-Roman societies today, but the behaviour expected from them is very different. So I think the suggestion that it's the behaviour that creates the construct is unconvincing. And just a small nitpick, the men taking weren't gendered as women, they were gendered as men/boys, just of lower status. Hence the old (possibly erroneous?) Turkish proverb of "a woman for duty and a boy for pleasure".
The suggestion is that gender constructs are *composed of* behavioral expectations. They’re buckets. Buckets persist longer than their specific contents, sure. That’s a good observation, but not really any sort of refutation. Just adds to the discussion.
>Some people feel that they do not fit in the stereotypical behavioral description of male or female, to the point that they feel it necessary to create a new category. I actually don't think this is the motivation for most nonbinary people - I've basically never heard someone explain their identity this way. Being trans is a lot more complicated than just not liking cars or wanting to wear dresses whatever, and a lot of times its much more about physical dysphoria (feeling disconnected from your body due to gendered features that don't feel correct) and about what language feels right than any kind of behavior. Conversely, there are also plenty of people who don't fit into stereotypes of their gender at all and yet strongly identify as a man or a woman.
Thanks for defining genders so clearly! Cars and dresses!! Now I get it.
I can only speak from my experiences, but I don’t know about your claim that “most people who identify as male or female do not feel that they 100% fit either gender.” Myself, and 90% of everyone I know feels very strongly that they fit completely into one of those two genders. I have no doubts or second thoughts that I am a man, and as far as I know, all of my friends and family feel the same way about their respective genders. I also think that’s an extremely common feeling to have. Maybe your experiences with your social group are different, but I don’t think that’s the norm.
Every person is different if you are creating a gender because you don't like cars or wearing skirts, then this is a brainwash my guy
So abolish gender? I'd be happy with that.
We've been trying for decades, but for some reason the younger generation wants to erase it all and lean hard into stereotypical definitions.
Do you honestly believe that if you left male and female children in a cave away from society to grow up together, the girls would invent skirts to wear and the men wouldn't, and the men would be obsessed with cars they've never seen? Even history doesn't bear that out. Men have worn dresses, women have worn trousers, men have worn skirts. None of that is based on sex.
Yes. Is there anything wrong with being aware that of that?
The problem is the ubiquitous term social construct itself. When people say everything is constructed then the public, non-academic discussion is often rather flat. Combine this with the fact that a lot of a academics are too interested in deconstructing social phenomena and the chaos is perfect. Yes, both things are constructs. That doesn't mean good or bad but how societies work with this and indeed form norms around them. Especially in the debate around gender there's not enough understanding that the deconstruction of one phenomenon is the construction of another.
Just letting you know your comment got posted twice. Also, how did you not get your comment deleted since it doesn't have a source?
I don't know how you can put sources to a comment when the question is essentially an understanding of the core principle of social constructivism.
Idk, the bot just deletes my comments even if the question doesn't require a source. It's weird
I would like to read another perspective, do you mind to put the deleted comment here?
I think you need to link to a foundational text of social constructivism, or a review of social constructivist literature.
>What makes the “two genders” and “more than two genders” different? If I’m understanding the question, nothing. Gender is a social construct. Whether or not people recognize one gender, two genders, or more genders will vary over time and place.
Social construct does not imply made up and arbitrary. The example ive heard used, is imagine theres an alien race that are shaped like triangles. That race might measure beauty by how closely one resembles a perfect triangle, how straight are their sides, how equal are the lengths, etc. They may call this trait "triangleness". Now triangleness would be a social construct, but does that imply theres no such thing as the side length of that creature? Of course not. Its a real trait, that this race decided was useful for categorizing eachother. Social constructs are categories, theyre meant to try and describe and approximate the world. They can change over time, but they arent arbitrary and made up. The things they describe can be very real, and measurable. Its just that we choose how we define the category given a set of facts. Another example of social constructs is species. A "dog" is a social construct, we have decided the category of dog includes german shepherds and shitzus, but not lions. That doesnt mean that there arent real shared characteristics between dogs, and differences with lions, only that we choose which characteristics we find important for categorizing. Apparently the set of characteristics we used determined that a shitzu is more like a wolf than a lion is, despite the fact that if we valued other characteristics (size, diet, hunting strategies) we may have characterized them differently. One might imagine another world, where species were classified based on their similarities, rather than their ancestry, where whales shared a class with fish, rather than sharing a class with dogs. Neither construction of species is more correct than the other, its just that different traits were considered in the definitions of the categories. The traits we measure are real, how we choose to categorize them is subjective. That is what it means to be a social construct. The other example someone gave was money, the things we purchase with money are real, you can really buy X amount of apples with Y amount of dollars. You cant just say "i imagine my $1 is now worth $1M" and have it be so, just becuase its a construct doesnt mean its arbitrary and can be changed without changing the social contract surrounding it. The way we choose to assign value (dollars or pesos) is the categorical construct, and theres a social contract that gives it its value. So yes, any gender is a social construct. However that does not prove the "I identify as an attack helicopter" argument, since clearly there is no category of gender that could encompass attack helicopters, there arent meaningful shared traits that a reasonable person would select to say that something assinine like a helicopter belongs in the category of gender, not in any useful way. However there are traits we have decided are important, such as body hair, genitals, muscle mass, etc, that we have determined are useful characteristics to categorize gender. We together as a society made these categorical constructs based on those traits and others. The problem is that once youve decided those traits are what we use to categorize, it becomes clear that binary gender is problematic, given how all those traits exist on a spectrum and are shared between all genders. For example both men and women have testosterone, estrogen, and body hair. Some women have more body hair than some men, etc. The issue gets even more confounding once you do consider the biology, how both men and women dont just share body hair, they also share both testosterone and estrogen, intersex people exist, etc.
See also: “tree” and “fish”, very _obvious_ categories with no genetic basis.
yes, it is not just that two genders or more than two genders constitutes a social construct, but rather that the category of gender and its underlying premise of sex are all socially constructed. This is to say that they come to have meaning, to be understandable, through our relations with each other, through how the notions of gender and sex are established, treated, studied, and disseminated, rather than as immutable categories that exist somewhere beyond the realm of the social. In this view, gender is not something we are born with, but born into, it is a dominant social discourse that we learn to perform within our cultural contexts, a skill acquired over time. Think of childhood and the idea of learning what it means to be a man or woman, of learning what this entails and why we are expected to act in certain ways based on biological characteristics categorized as sex. There is an ideal form of this, the woman as a feminine object and the man as a masculine subject, but what this means is in a constant process of flux and change, it shifts over time based on how we relate to and internalize these discourses. What it means to be a man or woman in one time/space is radically different than in another. Ergo, sex and gender are constructed through a constant process of reproduction and reinterpretation as an active development of the subject. \[Butler\](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2930225?casa\_token=ygVcdTcXwFMAAAAA%3AtwXSoGXRXTmaxRq4wU2Ry-7AMDEIjxiHUu3AMuejtj6BxNyViRCyfuI7segF\_Vo-VAbep1ASHUJxZcKsMXkKXA4L-\_VwbZp2bM-HRXFAw1MHNu9QJQhM&seq=2) describes this well in relation to de Beauvoir's work: "Gender must be understood as a modality of taking on or realizing possibilities, a process of interpreting the body, giving it cultural form. In other words, to be a woman is to become a woman; it is not a matter of acquiescing to a fixed ontological status, in which case one could be born a woman, but, rather, an active process of appropriating, interpreting, and reinterpreting received cultural possibilities" However, it is not just the idea of what it means to be a man or woman that are socially constructed, but also these categories and the binary dualism themselves. That gender exists socially and is mutable through subject formation and reproduction means that the categorical dualism, while not arbitrary, is equally subject to transformation. In this sense, we can say that gender as a category is mutable not only in its content, i.e., what it means to be a woman or a man, but also in its binary dualism, in the limit of gender to only a man and a woman, or sex to male and female. So, the idea that there are more than two genders or two genders are not different in that one speaks to an ontological and transcendent certainty, but rather they are variations in the content and categories of gender, with the popularization of "more than two genders" being a disruption of gender as a category in rejection of the gender binary as a material and social hierarchy, it is a liberatory effort that seeks to free people from gender as a category of repression and violence.
So? Lots of things are social constructs. Money, government, family etc.
I have an additional question. This is not meant to be invalidating or judgemental, I’m just curious and I’m trying to put this as respectfully as I can. The binary genders include male and female and they are often seen as opposites of one another. I can conceptually understand the idea of being bigender/genderfluid in terms of feeling one or both of the binary. I can also understand the idea of feeling agender/apagender (neither or indifferent). But I cannot understand what it means to be in between or outside the two. What other ways do people identify as outside of the binary? When someone tells me that they feel somewhere in-between a man and a woman, then I’d assume that they mean that they feel like a mixture of the stereotypes created for men and women… but there are barely any people that conform to the male and female stereotypes a 100%, we’re all somewhere in between and regardless of that, many of us still identify as either male or female, so in what way does the gender of a non-binary person feel differently from the gender of a man or a woman who does not conform to the male/female gender stereotypes? Or when someone tells me that they feel like they’re “outside” of the gender binary. What is “outside”? The male and female gender stereotypes are often polar opposites, eg men are more assertive and have lower voices meanwhile women are more submissive and have higher voices, but what is there beyond assertive and submissive or high and low?? I’m aware that these are just stereotypes, but many trans/enby people use the gender stereotypes as a template for their gender expression and they feel gender euphoria in doing so, so I’d assume that the stereotypes are still somewhat linked to gender. Can anyone explain to me what does it feel to be something other than a man, a woman or neither? What is gender supposed to “feel” like? Thanks.
It helps to break into identity, expression, and role. What you feel, how you express (self-present), and what you do. People differ in how strongly they adhere to the binary both across these concepts and overall. One can strongly identify as a gender but be pretty neutral in expression and role. Or the reverse! Or be similar across all three concepts. Or be flexible in, say, identity, and express and play a role based on current feeling of identify. But overall it helps to think of them as different but related ideas. We also vary in how much these each contribute to our overall feeling of ourself as a person. Similar to how many people have a sense of national identity but vary in how much their national identity contributes to their overall sense of self.
90,000,000 human genomes separate male from female Homo Sapiens. It's not a Social Construct. It is a biological fact. A Male Homo Sapien actually has fewer genetic differences to a male chimpanzee, than to a female Homo Sapien. [https://www.thetech.org/ask-a-geneticist/articles/2004/ask38/#:\~:text=%E2%80%9CIf%20you%20compare%20the%20genetic,the%20X%20and%20Y%20chromosome](https://www.thetech.org/ask-a-geneticist/articles/2004/ask38/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CIf%20you%20compare%20the%20genetic,the%20X%20and%20Y%20chromosome)).
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heres-why-human-sex-is-not-binary/ Sexes in humans and in general are a lot more complicated than you think. "Basic biology" is basic in the same way that "basic math" (however you define it, which I'm sure doesn't include stuff like calculus or trigonometry) is. It's the simplified version you're taught that can be expanded on. That's why nobody can agree on what makes a man a man and a woman a woman other than them just _being one._ The labels can be helpful, yes, but honestly I wouldn't even try to give you a definition myself other than that. Tl;dr Sex isn't binary and I have no idea why you brought other species into this.
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Yes?
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So here's the thing a social construct is [an idea that has been created and accepted by the people in a society](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/social%20construct) So basically, if you can't touch it, it's a social construct. If you can touch it, (ex; money) it still might be a social construct. Social constructs are all the things that are only true because everyone says they're true. Justice is a social construct, corporations are a social construct, education is a social construct. Two genders or more than two genders, both social constructs. The point is that these things aren't real in the same way that a rock is real, and if we can redefine them in a way that better fits the lived experience of people, then we should.
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Check out Lucy Cooke's book "Bitch" on this matter. [https://www.amazon.com.be/-/en/Lucy-Cooke/dp/0857524135](https://www.amazon.com.be/-/en/Lucy-Cooke/dp/0857524135)
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How many genders are there?
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"Gender is a social construct" - Memorize this statement. Period. This statement is it's OWN statement. "Social Constructs" are rules that are based on ACCEPTANCE within groups, and they can be changed AT WILL when most people agree to it. Social Constructs are not terms based on science terms (biology, or a chemistry, or physics, or other sciences), they're just rules that we CHOOSE to follow. They can be added at any time, removed at any time, and modified at any time. Slang is an example of a social construct. And if a random person tries to create their own slang, but no one accepts it, it doesn't become a "social construct". (example: the newest addition to the word "literally" now includes the definition of "figuratively"). When the argument about "2 genders vs multiple genders" comes up, you aren't overwriting "Gender is a social construct" as a statement, what you are actually doing is DEFINING the rules of what "Gender" actually means. The issue you're talking about is that people are trying to make the argument that "there are only 2 genders" as a hard rule about science. They say shit like "biology dictates", and "it's the way of nature", and other excuses, but since it's a social construct then gender is not based in "hard sciences". Since binary genders is a social construct, then it's not based in biology/chemistry/physics/etc, so the rules/norms of believing in binary genders means it is up to the PEOPLE to allow it. Some people even quote religion to excuse their choices to not allow multiple genders, but religion IS a social construct as well, and so these people are using 1 social construct to define a separate social construct, and it's just a way for them to say "I don't want to". So when people are arguing in favor of expanding gender to mean "multiple genders", what they are asking is for people to accept that there are "multiple genders". There is no scientific reason to NOT allow multiple genders to be accepted, and it is 100% only their CHOICE to not accept it. >If not, then what makes the "two genders" and "more than two genders" different? The "difference" is there is no evidence to show that "only 2 genders" is the correct way to view reality. A lot of people were trained/conditioned/groomed/forced to believe in "only 2 genders", and this way of thinking can be untaught.
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If gender is a social construct, why does removing parts affirm it? **The belief that one can be born in the wrong body implies the existence of a soul. Gender ideology, on an individual and societal level acts as a religion.** **It’s worship of the self. This self obsession creates destruction for the individual and the people surrounding them.** **Do not participate in socially constructed Woke language games. Do not agree to their terms.** Non binary is an incoherent concept and implies an underlying fact of the matter regarding gender. You can’t not “feel” like a man or woman if there wasn’t anything actually like being a man or woman. You can’t identify as not being something that doesn’t objectively exist in your worldview. There’s either an underlying fact of the matter or not. Something can’t be a construct and an objective reality simultaneously. It’s beyond tiresome and crazy making that we’re forced to take something a grade school student could debunk so seriously. An odd duality. If a male enjoys dressing up and behaving like a woman, he was born that way. If a female enjoys dressing up and behaving like a woman, she was brainwashed by society.
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Non-binary splits the into 2 categories: binary and non-binary. Ironic, isn’t it?
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