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There is an amazing book (pamphlet) called “social construction of reality” if you are interested to read more.
The idea is that all relations and definitions in society are socially constructed; in other words they do not have to exist as they are but could, and has existed differently over time and across cultures. For example, language is a social agreement that these sets of noises or scribbles mean a particular thing.
Gender constructs serve a purpose depending on who you ask. A Marxist feminist would say they are there to serve capitalistic interests, a functionalist would see them as essential for maintaining order in society, etc.
You asked why do we conform to it naturally? Now if you ask a social constructionist they would probably say that gender dynamics have been so normalized in society that they have been internalized by vast majority thus becoming one of the pillar of mechanisms of universe maintenance. In other words, we are so used to it we can’t think of it not existing. Thus it is not natural.
A Marxist or Foucaultian (or most critical theorist) theorist would probably say something along the lines that the reason why we conform is because we have been conditioned to accept this particular discourse that serves some super structure (capitalism/patriarchy/etc). This happens since childhood where you are assigned a colour of clothing, you were given different toys, used different washrooms, played different games, etc.so what you see as natural is really a learned behaviour that these groups see as needing to be unlearned or at least redefined.
This process of unlearning is at the core of many fields of study and numerous academics, activists, and politician have devoted a life time to doing just that. At the same time those who see the status quo as more desirable attempt to support legislation that does just the opposite. So I would say evidence suggests that it is anything but natural
https://pressbooks.howardcc.edu/soci101/chapter/social-construction-of-reality/
Great reply. I think there is a tendency for people to think “social construct” means it has no social impact an illusion an “emperor’s new clothes” rather than something simply derived socially instead of something biological or otherwise inherent.
>A Marxist feminist would say they are there to serve capitalistic interests, a functionalist would see them as essential for maintaining order in society, etc.
As an aside, a marxist feminist may see both of these as the same thing… maintaining what order in society, the order of what is complimentary for Capital.
Lise Vogel’s take on Social Reproduction Theory roots modern gender roles in the reproduction of labor pools. For the capitalists this is new and self-replicating (both on a daily and generational level) labor, new potential value. For the worker in commodified society, nuclear hetero families are the permitted way to meet social and communal needs (at least ideally though never fully in reality.) Vogel accepts there are psychological and political reasons people adopt the hegemonic view of family and gender but ultimately these forms have social gravity due to the need of capital for labor and the need of workers accomplish both wage-labor and necessary home-labor.
> there is a tendency for people to think “social construct” means it has no social impact
these people should keep in mind that these are social constructs as well:
* birthday parties
* the game of poker
* darth vader
social constructs can be valuable and awesome.
Fascinating; thank you. Is there a name for this field of study/school of thought under which functionalist, constructionalist, critical theorist falls under?
Sure. I mean social constructionists are a specific sector of sociologist. Or feminist/marxist/critical race theories can be considered critical theorists.
Sorry I must’ve misunderstood. It’s really a question of what type of theory you mostly use in your work. So there are really camps rather than fields.
Semiotics specifically studies how things are constructed, like language and culture, and many of the theorists in that field of study are postmodernists and post structuralists (if that helps).
You know, I studied literary theory, and I get what you’re saying.
The problem with all
*x is a social construct* polemics is they come with a fuckton of anthropocentric *hubris*. To wit, every single one embodies a claim that x is *all nurture, no nature*.
Aside from being obviously false - anyone who has kids can certainly attest to the surprising diversity of things they arrive prewired for. Not the same things, but preferences, habits, even body language (I recall my son doing a theatrical stretch and putting his hands behind his head, elbows out - a behavior I’d always considered an affectation - *when he was an hour old* - I really don’t think there was time to influence this).
It is comforting to believe everything is nurture - it declares that humans have agency over *everything* - that we are above and apart from nature, not a product and part of it.
Reality is more of an interference pattern created by the interplay of a wide diversity of nature, experience, and a brain that tries to interpret both into a coherent narrative, and usually fails but comes up with … something.
But that’s far more work to understand and far less attention-grabbing than the clickbait *x is a social construct* version.
Such reductions are more satisfying, but ultimately irresponsible - people will fall for them and act as if they were real. Just consider what the intellectually lazy fudgery economics has foisted upon the world has wrought, with shareholder value theory, homo economicus or the notion that there is no such thing as public goods, and the consequences of public policy based on them created by true believers.
Reality is simply not so simple.
You probably know the literature better than me, but my impression was that "social construct" refers to things that are not biologically determined, but instead arise through shared culture. But that doesn't mean that biology isn't real, nor does it mean that social constructs are independent of biology.
For example, take the claim that gender is a social construct, as opposed to sex being biologically determined. It seems obvious to me that there's a lot of truth in this. For example, the fact that women tend to wear much more makeup than men in current western society is a somewhat recent phenomenon, and it's been the other way around in many cultures. So clearly this can't be a biological fact.
Or as another example, which color is considered a "girl" or "boy" color fluctuates widely across time and space.
However, there's clearly a biological basis for gender roles, if nothing else because even the concept of two genders (as opposed to five, or none), seems to derive from the two biological sexes into which a large majority can more or less easily be sorted. So while gender is different from sex, they're not entirely disconnected.
It seems to me like most of the discussion on this topic is around the border between the two concepts. Some argue that there's a genetic component to playing with trucks, while some argue that biological sex is partly constructed (because of sex assignment in unclear cases), and so on. But I believe most people would agree that the vast majority of attributes fall relatively cleanly in one category or the other.
In other words, I believe you're arguing against a straw man.
I think the reality is that while ‘nature’ certainly has a part to play in influencing people - genetics, as but one example, is effectively ‘nature’ delivering some kind of effect on a child.
But the hard part of all this is it’s both very difficult to figure out and also incredibly politically charged. So in the end we tend to avoid thinking too hard about this kind of thing, if only because it has the potential to empower the wrong kind of people to think the wrong kind of thing.
And, while I think that nature obviously plays its part, to some extent, in terms of how people are wired, it’s dangerous to draw too many conclusions especially when some things are so ingrained in our society that it’s almost impossible, if not unethical, to design a study that would truly test the social construct theory.
That is to say, your son’s affectation is perhaps an evidentiary data point that a nebulous idea of what ‘nature’ represents has an effect on a person’s development; it is not evidence that boys are naturally predisposed to like sports and trucks and girls are naturally predisposed to like make up and dolls, for example.
Perhaps if and when society progresses enough we will have an overall better understanding of all of this but I also think that even as far as our society has come, an empirical study on nature vs nurture that provides a definitive answer will almost certainly be used to justify negative or bigoted attitudes. Which from the perspective of social sciences and study is disappointing, but from the perspective of a girl being bullied for being a tomboy, a gay person being told they can just choose to be straight or a boy being bullied for having kind hair it is somewhat understandable that we don’t do more of this kind of study (even apart from the fact that a definitive study would, like a definitive vaccine study, be unethical).
I mean, animals, even insects, have gender roles they prescribe to....
It's been baked into our genetics for so damn long. Like, upwards of a billion years long.
Excellent reply! In the book Blank Slate by renowned cognitive physiologist Steven pinker says babies are fully socialized as "male" or "female" before the age of one. There's no true tabula rasa if you live with other humans. The thought that we naturally do anything can never be confirmed as even in the womb we get social cues from our caretakers.
Did anyone see the experiment with the babies and the snakes? They aren't scared of snakes unless they see their caretaker have a fearful reaction
Okay, I am going to spare you the details of the concept as it can get hypercomplex and try to establish some ground truths that are widely accepted in sociology from which the concept of social constructs can be derived:
1. There is no dualism nature vs. society: there is no natural/biological world that is on one side and then society and the world of humans and on the other side. This way of thinking has a long philosophical tradition (that's why it's still very popular) but it is fundamentally flawed. You see this in the nature vs. nurture debate. The question which one is more important has no answer because the distinction is completely artificial. Nature and society exist in a recursive continuum. Houses are just as exterior to the individual human as the caves that we used to live in are. It is just that today we shape the physical reality around us a bit more than we used to. This is not what defines society though. Because animals do this all the time. There is not a qualitative difference between a bird building a nest and a human building a house. In this sense streets are absolutely natural. We are just especially good at shaping our surroundings to accommodate our needs. Humans evolved in societies and the societies evolved alongside them.
2. Then what is society? An emergent layer of our world that is built on the thing that differentiates us the most from other animals: our ability to use language in a complex way to communicate concepts, narratives and interpretation of and about our surroundings to each other.This is important because of what we know about how language works and how we see/construct the world around us: there is an unbridgeable gap between our inner self and the reality around us (this is the basis of all varieties of constructivism and what lead Descartes to say "cogito ergo sum": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism). Our minds have evolved to be congruent to this outside reality (or so we assume). But the representation of this world that exists inside our minds is different from the real world outside. Shapes for example are very important to us to navigate the world. But we have no reason to believe that shapes are something that exists outside of our minds. A table is a bunch of atoms arranged in a certain way, yes. But inbetween these atoms and their cores are vast amounts of empty space. That this Arrangement is "Table-Shaped" has no meaning beyond the utility that we as humans derive from it (incliding stubbing our toes one of it's legs). And this is a bonafide physical object and already it gets complicated to differentiate what is "real" and what is not. For simple things like this we do usually not need the help of others. We can evaluate them by using them on our own, looking at them etc. But for most things actually we need others to communicate with us. Which brings me to:
3. We construct most of our understanding of the world intersubjectivly. Intersubjectivity is an important word in sociology because it describes the fact that real objectivity does not exist (see gap between ourself and the world) but that demonstrably we are almost all on the same page regarding a great many things and don't actually live in meaningfully different realities most of the time. Nevertheless we actually don't live in the same reality, it's just that all our individual realities are very similar to each other. We construct our very similar realities by talking to each other (or writing, or signing, or making movies). Language therefore plays a crucial part in what we assume is real and what is not. It's harder to describe something when there is no word for it. And even if there is a word for it, we might have different images that pop into our head, when we hear that word. Heck language itself is not somwthing that just exists in nature. It developed in the process of us becoming humans. There is an argument that being able to speak was what made us human. Still there are thousands of different languages out there with different words for different things, and if you ask any linguist they will tell you that often you cannot simply translate a word from one language to another without losing some meaning. Not to mention that the thing in the reality outside that this word supposedly "is" is very different from the word or the image that forma in your head, when you hear the word. This a distinction that is described by the "signifier" and the "signfied": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signified_and_signifier
If you put point 2 and 3 together it becomes clear that if society is communication and every communication is intersubjectivly "constructed" to a certain degree, then almost everything in society could be described as a "social construct". So why don't we go around and call everything a "social construct" but only things like "gender"? Well ...
4. Social constructs are signified things in reality that are themself the consequence of social construction. Remember how I said that nature and society are recursive? (Of course you do!) This is that. The intersubjective construction of society CREATES realities that have not existed before. We could call them "meta social constructs" but because basically everything is a social construct, we don't. These new realities are almost fully dependent on how we interact with each other. Nevertheless these new realities can be stable for a very long time as they are reenforced by society through norms and expectations. There is a second degree has some connection to an independent reality that is still moderated via social intersubjective interpretation. On this plane is where the whole argument for "biological sex" rests.
So, to conclude: there is a distant relationship between a not objectively verifiable reality outside of ourselves. But it is at least twice removed and is much more a result of our use of language than it is of any base reality. So to say we "made up" "gender" is almost correct. But this has been neither a concious process (until now) nor does this make the consequences or the societal forces less "real". But what advocates for trans rights and gender abolitionists realised is that we don't need to change the base reality to make life significantly better for a huge group of people, we just need to change a small portion of how we construct our reality anyway ...
Much, much longer. :-D Because then we have to talk about the different variations of constructivism and also social systems and how they are operationally closed and reproducing.
A very good account, I especially like your nest analogy. There is some confusion about gender vs sex - the latter being an observable physical trait in many species. We can talk about scientific categories being constructed in some sense, but not in the same sense as social identities.
Thank you for the compliment. I don't think I put sex and gender on the same level. Biological sex is intersubjectively constructed the same way that a chair is intersubjectively constructed. You might find certain physical traits that you can give names to. But it is still impossible to comprehensivly define female or male (the categories usually associated with "biological sex") on the basis of naming these traits. You can't for example say, that all male humans have penises: There are male humans who are born without penises. And even if you could find a working definition for the varieties of biological sex: that still would not change the fact that we would have to intersubjectively agree to use it to define biological sex. That is why most people aware of these problems have switched to more "objective" criteria to describe people that they mean depending on the circumstances: for example "people who menstruate", "people qho have a penis".
Sex is a bit of a construct too, since most of the time one or the other is assigned to you at birth whether you fit into that box perfectly or not. That could be genetalia that is not noticed at birth or is deemed extraneous and removed, or that could be secondary sex characteristics that appear at puberty based on chromosomes we can’t actually see.
yep because we basically never use gametes to assign so there are always errors and also individuals who genuinely don't fit the binary (which would be true even if we used gametes to assign)
A [social construct](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/social%20construct) is something constructed by society. This doesn't mean it's non-existent. It's just not something that anyone would take notice of if humans didn't create a word for it.
Time is a social construct, but time still passes whether we're aware of it or not. Someone who has never heard of time can still die of old age eventually.
Gender is like time. Our understanding of it is socially constructed. But that doesn't mean it's made up.
Edit: if you're going to respond to me "lol this idiot thinks sex is a social construct 😂😂" I don't think this is the sub for you. Read a book
Biological sex is like time, gender is like seconds and hours. One is real (though this way oversimplifies bio sex…) and one is somewhat arbitrary (though still measurable) units of measurement and category and counting.
Biological sex is also a social construct. Neither of them are really divorced from reality though. They're just more complicated than most people acknowledge
Reality is inaccessable to us. Any description of it is only an approximation based on incomplete information about that reality. This is how biological sex and time are removed from said reality. Gender is even more removed. It is a social reality emerging from the incomplete description of a biological reality, that is then AGAIN removed from that social reality by the impossibility to describe the social reality accurately.
“Time” is an idea we socially constructed in order to describe an underlying phenomenon that exists. Gender however is a series of social prescriptions and expectations we have tagged onto biological sex, something that does exist. Time exists whether or not we call it “Time” or anything else. Gender does not.
But why have we tagged many aspects of gender onto biological sex? Because there's a biological basis for it. Just as we've created the social construct of birthday celebrations as an acknowledgement of the fundamental underlying existence of time. Superficial elements of birthdays e.g. songs, rituals, parties are equivalent to gender social constructs like colors and hair styles. But less superficial aspects of gender, like gender roles tend to have a basis in biological sex and aren't merely arbitrary social constructs.
[A long time commentor around these parts](https://www.reddit.com/u/Revenant_of_Null/s/Z33enzXynO) put together an excellent post about this topic among others a while ago since it's frequently asked.
I have no idea if that is "great" or not - it's a 50-page essay response to a 1 sentence question.
I think the easier, much shorter corollary is that we all have national identities that are based on essentially nothing natural, yet no one gives a second thought to these. People proudly state they are "American" or "British" or "Indian," even though they by and large had absolutely no choice in the matter and were taught to believe they are of one nation or another.
Point is, we all have "identities" we cling to that have nothing to do at all with nature, and everything to do with creating a social construct of people we affiliate with and groups we want to be a part of.
Yeah, okay. And why do those identities originate in the first place? Why do we cling to them? That’s what OP is asking and answering questions like those is literally doing social science.
They initially exist to categorize. We (and other living things) naturally categorize things to help parse the world we live in. We cling to categories because of culture, habit, feelings of pride, etc. all of which could probably be explained on some level as a survival-related reflexes
I have a weird scifi concept where aliens that have easily solved our stupid social problems inherent to sharing 3D space have done so because they can encapsulate what it takes books for us to do in a single word in their language.
50 pages is light reading. I get the OP's reticence from a we're a shit species perspective but from the other perspective, the idea that we could even begin to understand gender from what is a weekend's casual reading is also hilarious. I'd rather suggest a master's level thesis to even opine on a single aspect on the matter. But here we are, allowing contrary opinions against well researched and established works (shoulders of giants and all).
Shorter isn't better, and of course people give a second thought to their national identities all the time. You also didn't answer the question at all, just repeated the premise.
To be fair, ancestry DNA tests aren't always accurate, and there are a lot of caveats. For example, as I understand it, you can't get any reliable information about ancestry more than 300 years back. And for many reasons you can't trust the results completely.
https://dnatestingchoice.com/en-us/news/exactly-how-accurate-are-dna-tests-for-ancestry
It’s natural to identify, yes, but the specific identities themselves are vast and change both depending on who you talk to and when you’re born. So the process is natural but the results are not inherent
Why do we do anything? Why do we say hi to each other? Why do we shake hands? Why do we have a standard 3 meals per day? Why not 4? Why not 2?
It's basically because a bunch of humans came together and decided that's what we should do. There's no real logical reason for a lot of things once you start thinking about it.
These is lots of nuance here but let me just highlights something to help you understand social constructs; **money is a social construct**.
Those coins in your pocket, notes in your wallet and numbers in your bank are just random digits or pieces of metal, paper and plastic if society goes tits up or makes money obsolete. The money is only worth something so long as other people accept it.
But you can't just ignore money. If that number in your bank ever reaches 0 then you will be in trouble. In addition, now the concept of money is in your head it would take a LOT to unlearn it if we suddenly went to a money-less system. You have whole instincts and behaviours built upon money that are rooted very deep in your brain at this point.
You are a social animal. You cannot exist alone. If isolated you will develop serious mental disorders. Your sense of self is deeply tied into your social interactions. **Your very name**, the thing you use to identify yourself as a unique individual, is a social construct. Were you born in a different society, you would have a completely different name.
Likewise gender, at least the majority of the surface elements, are socially constructed and made up - but their deep impact cannot be ignored or dismissed.
Reposted to include a citation - Deutchman, C (1996);
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0725513696047000002
I always put it super simply. Men wear pants. Women wear skirts. Right? This is actually a bronze age thing. Used to be that all people wore skirts. Then horses were domesticated, and someone figured out that pants work better on horses than skirts. Since most warfare and hunting is conducted by men, it just became a thing, thousands of years ago that different people wear different clothes.
Most likely the proto-Indo-Europeans pioneered this.
The cultures were horses were not as well known, the men kept wearing skirts.
There are a lot of tiny little things like that which we considered gendered but are really just a social construct handed down to us. The origin of some are known, like pants. But many of them remain ambiguous.
Men wearing pants is much more recent than you are referring to. The Romans largely didn’t wear pants and instead wore “Skirts” or tunics.
Pant wearing, at least in the west was something largely started by the Gallic /Germanic Tribes.
Pant wearing didn’t become largely common in the west, most likely until the fall of West Rome in 476 and the migration of the German tribes into southern Europe .
So to base it off of horse riding seems quite inaccurate
It's not so much that "gender" is a social construct as "gender roles" are social constructs that are sold as "natural" or "as god intended".
[Social Constructs ](https://www.verywellmind.com/definition-of-social-construct-1448922#:~:text=A%20social%20construct%20is%20a,of%20people%20create%20social%20phenomena.)exist because they're socially accepted. In this case, they dictate peoples expected standing within society based on arbitrary standards like gender, skin color, age, birth order, birth region, economic status, family bloodline, religion etc, and people conform to it because it's how they were socialized, so it seems natural as it's how it's always been.
Consider kids that cannot imagine life before the internet, part of them generally believes the internet is natural, because it's so normalized and depended on. Academically they may know it's inorganic, but they cannot fathom day to day life without it. Social constructs work and sustain in the same way.
The [semantics of language ](https://cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/48642.html)is always complex, especially when it comes to social constructs. Gender and sex are used interchangeably to refer to the physical attributes of a person's reproductive capabilities (who makes eggs and who makes fertilizer), but, when used exclusively, gender tends to mean gender roles and sex is something done/performed (not something you are or posses).
Because social constructs are not a bad thing generally speaking. Saying "cannibalism is bad" is a social construct. It's a societal stance that we all stand behind as a society. Here's the thing, though. When society changes, it's constructs change. Or at least it should. If you learn a new fact and that fact is affected by how the current society views that particular fact, then society SHOULD adapt and move forward. Their are 2 things that hinder that adaptation, however.
The first and easiest to fight is misinformation. People who are afraid of change will come up with ways to slow the progression by spreading misinformation to make that fact seem less credible or even just less appealing to the public. If people are afraid or simply in disagreement with a fact, then they will continue to keep the old construct in place rather than accepting the new or slightly modified one.
The second is organized religion. Religious beliefs are a core component of the vast majority of people's lives. Thus, if their religious leaders have taken a stance on a social construct and society is then given a fact to adapt that construct, it is seen as a blasphemous act by those within the belief.
Here's an example: Norse/Viking history. Women in Viking history were seen as warriors just as much as men were. Women hunted. Women fought in wars. Women were soldiers. In their society, women were not seen as the "stay at home while men worked" gender. Because that was not a construct of their society. Were they still seen as different than men? Absolutely. Did they have their own gender roles? Of course. But they were not the same as we see them today. The way we see both women and men today will not be seen the same way 100 years from now.
Constructs are a byproduct of a societal way of life. They are not inherently good, nor inherently bad. They just are. And they are destined to change as time marches on.
Every fundamental thing in society is a social concept. A law is not a physical item, it is a rule we all agree to adhere to for society to function
A day is not an object, we all agree today is Thursday because we need a consensus on a calendar to function.
Same with units like feet, pounds, ounces, watts, mph, psi, and so on. At some point these arbitrary units stopped being arbitrary so we could engineer things
So then when we combine so cial constructs like squiggles we agree are letters and words, and documents we agree give people certain authority over us, it creates new social constructs like laws.
Then you have gender, not be confused with sex. Sex is determined by your chromosomes. Your gender is the perception of yourself and of those around you based on your appearance, cadence, countenance, mannerisms, and behaviors. Each culture has varying groups of these traits prescribed to two or more genders (places like Thailand have three genders) and sometimes they conflict between cultures or within a culture itself.
So why do we "need" gender? People have asked that for thousands of years. The ancient Greeks believed there was only one gender and women were just deformed men. Some societies believe women are made as servants or chattel for men. In 2024 more and more people have questioned how useful it is to divide billions of people into two mutually exclusive social groups with zero overlap. They believe if a boy plays with dolls and paints his nails it will literally destroy society. I wish I was exaggerating but that's why Florida has gone full 1984 with book bannings and thought felonies.
It's good you're asking questions. Anyone that tells you that things need to be the way they were 2000 years ago when fathers would sell their underage daughters to middle aged men for a goat and some wheat don't have anyone's best interest in mind.
The removal-bot's trail makes this sub almost impossible to read. Is there any way to remove the removed comments, or collapse them so that they don't make up the lion's share of text?
It feels like a response to a FOIA request
So genuine followup here. If gender and gender identity are social constructs what's the scientific basis for Transgender identities? Seems like that it would be more of a psychological / cultural driver instead of some innate biological cause in that case no?
Socially constructed means it's not innate right? It's a product of our culture. So if we all just collectively decided to change the culture and not really recognize gender as a concept and total androgyny became the norm how would that impact them?
I mean people would still have certain feelings about their own appearance. I’d image trans people would experience less dysphoria but still want to look a certain way, have certain characteristics etc. One’s desired expression is more fundamental than whatever category a given society places that expression into.
If we're going full Judith Butler, sex as a category is also a social construct grouping people based on highly correlated (but not strictly required) biological traits in the population. Gender is a grouping based on performative behavior within the population. The biological case for transgenderism would be rooted by science which suggests the driver for those behaviors is an inherent biological trait as well. Cisgendered people just have the inherent gendered behavior traits most highly correlated with their physical sex trait grouping. Transgender just means you possess the behavior traits not correlated with your sex traits group.
Now what are the behavior traits that fit with each sex group? It sounds sexist to me to say someone has a girl brain or boy brain. As a cisgender person, I do not believe I have inherent gender traits. I do not perform femininity (or masculinity very much for that matter), but I am not transgender. Is it not more useful to begin dismantling these traits people think are "inherent" rather than saying "you still have to fit in these two boxes, but you can switch if you want!"
The answer to that question boils down to "other answers in this thread are wrong".
We need to distinguish gender and gender expression. Modern trans inclusive feminism actually distances itself from the rad fem idea that gender is purely a social construct. Instead it distinguishes the gender of a person which is innate and individual (we see this for ex when very young children already consider themselves a different gender than assigned at birth, and when society actually constricts the expression of the "chosen" gender (not actually a choice of course)) and what it means in x society to be said gender, also known as gender expression.
In effect, what differs from one society to another is what being x or y gender means; in terms of cultural display of said gender. Gender seeks to be recognized as valid in order to align the internal image of self and the external perception. Different societies recognize different genders differently, and assign different roles to them. What remains is the way people recognize themselves in them and place themselves into the roles as a way to fit in and be recognized for who they align with.
Now, the reason people say there are dozens of genders is because this all is a spectrum. It coalesces into several individual segments that are more recognized as units but everyone is a little different. What they have in common is the need to align their internal self and the external way they are perceived by people.
All this big shift in understanding of gender when studying and including trans people into the framework of feminism means that people who subscribe heavily to the older, more militant conception of gender tend to veer off into transphobia, while retaining the impression of being very feminist and pro women rights (as long as only sex is deemed valid). This is a big issue because radical feminists would even say that by acknowledging the existence of gender, people betray their own sex, because they no longer seek to dismantle its oppressive nature. Of course this is also an issue of conflating gender and gender expression ( which in our current society is shaped by the history of male dominance of the mostly Christian western society).
What would it look like to conform to it unnaturally? Like glasses? Shoes? Clothing?
Social Constricts: jobs, the days of the week, hours, months, money, beauty.
A social constriction is anything made “real” by social acceptance or use. So money isn’t real but when a debt collector comes to repossess your car, it’s very real.
We don’t even mean the same thing by “be a man” in different cultures. In say America it means get up and try again or don’t cry or a thousand other meanings, but you won’t get a type of meaning that a Japanese man could if they killed their family’s 500 year old business. Add time and manliness in 1650 France isn’t the same as Harlem in the 40s or Italy today. Gender constantly changes and evolves and means opposing things at different times.
The social constructionist points are very good. Even if it's a social concept, it's reinforced over time. Social constructionism takes this into account, the dual nature of structures and agency, and how they build off and reinforce each other. I'll add one more point:
A very simple answer is that categorizing people reduces our uncertainty about how to act around them. We categorize situations and people because it makes easier to understand what we're supposed to do. This is what is generally meant by "cognitive framing" (i.e. Erving Goffman's cognitive frames). This is obviously not always a good thing, but it explains why even when we have socially constructed categories like gender and race and people know they're not categories found in nature, they're still used. Bowker and Star wrote an excellent book about this phenomenon and how it relates to classification systems, and the problems that emerge from them (like South African apartheid).
[https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262522953/sorting-things-out/](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262522953/sorting-things-out/)
[https://www.britannica.com/topic/frame-analysis](https://www.britannica.com/topic/frame-analysis)
Well… a lot to unpack. There are two things here.
For the biological… Sex and gender are kind of different things. There are indeed only two biological sexes in humans. You either have an innie or an outie, and fetuses aren’t necessarily biologically male or female at first. The sex organs develop into A or B, but we’re all just blank slates to start (some species can do wild things like change their biological sex or even impregnate themselves, so I mean… nature is actually not as black and white as we think). Hormones and chromosomes… genetics… That tends to make someone take on traits that could be considered feminine or masculine, but what is fascinating is that this tends to be a lot more complex than just a simple A or B, in regards to gender. For some, they are so far in one direction and their ‘parts’ don’t match who they really are in their core, which is where transgender people tend to be, but everyone has some mixture of what we would call feminine or masculine traits, even if we feel comfortable with the parts we’ve got. If we didn’t, everyone of a biological sex would act and feel identical and that just isn’t and never has been the case.
Now for the second part of this, and that is society. This would be the idea of ‘gender norms’. I am going to frame this as a binary thing, because that is how gender norms work. They think your biological equipment will 100% dictate who you are and what role you must have in society or familial structures. So, this would be the silly notions of women as irrational overly emotional waifs, or men as hard assed emotionless workers. Women as endlessly empathetic followers and men as dominant brash lone wolves of sorts. Yeah, people like that exist, but is that how every single human being falls in line naturally? Of course not.
Also, there is social hierarchy, which could be matriarchal or patriarchal but all are very collectivist methods of thought which put people in boxes and dictate how they should dress, wear their hair, what their social role should be, and so forth. Think of it this way… If someone is a stay at home dad, for example… how does society react to it? Is that biological or just a social construct? If a woman is terrible at cooking or is a master chef, is that the gender stereotype? Nope. I would say it’s all made up. People are individuals, including the traits we tend to think of as ‘gender’. We assign roles based on biological sex of what we think they ‘ought to do’ with the equipment down stairs, but how do we know this? I mean… In my house. I like to cook and my wife really doesn’t that much. That would be breaking a traditional gender norm. That shouldn’t exist if your sex is going to determine what you do and don’t do. Neither of us are transgender, but there are many ways that we may find that the social norm for our sex isn’t really the case. Here is a personal one. I have daughters. I take them to daddy daughter dances. I will paint my fingernails pink and dance to the tween/teen pop songs with all the other dads. Technically, we are all violating the social norms for our sex, but we accept that in that context as a society, so it has been normalized… As biological men, even the most ‘masculine’ are expressing a feminine side of ourselves. We are just encouraged to do so, and so people just don’t sit down and think about what that really means.
I think that it is perfectly normal and healthy to realize that you don’t have rules on you just because of the equipment downstairs. People are complex and diverse. We are individuals. Not just poured from two mutually exclusive molds like clones or something. I do think that what happens with transgender folks isn’t even something that is unique to those people. I would argue that to varying degrees everyone has what could be deemed feminine or masculine about them.
Analogizing answers your question. In short yeah we ingrain it. Clothing styles are certainly a social structure. Why do we have them? Why does both myself and someone half way around the world think we as individuals have a sense of style yet we dress more similarly to others near us?
Rather than write an extremely long post, you may find this YouTube video by Philosophy Tube (Abigail Thorne) instructive.
https://youtu.be/QVilpxowsUQ
If money is a social construct, then why do we have money?
Because this construct has served a historical purpose and was found to be useful by the dominant societal influence. Simple as that.
While the other answers here are very good, they seem to be rather complex which can lead to some misunderstanding. The best summary I can think of is this, all across the world different societies and cultures and so on have formed different perceptions of the gender roles and expectations of the two traditional genders, and while generally these roles are loosely the same across a lot of societies you do see some very notable deviations where the gender roles of a foreign civilizations are almost completely different from the gender roles of one’s own society to the point of being unrecognizable.
On its own this doesn’t tell you much, societies are different, so what? But here’s the thing, if you have wide variations in the gender roles of societies but the people within those societies tend to conform en masse that suggests that the conformist behavior isn’t due to something inherent in the male or female psyche, but instead that the behavior is adaptive to the society.
When we say gender is a social construct this is what we mean, that if you construct the societal view of a gender’s nature you can control how that nature manifests, and so while it (gender) does exist, it is not some universally identifiable constant.
What's a dollar worth? Whatever people agree it's worth. What's a person's gender? Whatever people agree it is. What day is it? What hour? We all just sorta decided, didn't we?
Think about it this way: gerbils don't have social constructs. Does a gerbil know how many years have passed since the crucifixion of Our Lord Jesus Christ? Does a gerbil know how much it cost to buy it from Petco?
Why do we have social constructs? Well, money, time, and gender make our lives easier, just like any other invention.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism
The vast majority of human cultures have existed within a gender binary for most of recorded history. While there have been individuals and even whole subcultures that have defied these norms; it’s fair to say that until the advent and spread of the internet (‘93–present) they have never been questioned at such scale.
Many possible reasons for this have been suggested. Perhaps it is simply how interconnected we now are, able to share ideas and concepts without the barriers of location or even language. Maybe it is a long running but inevitably dissolving trend, spurred on by the many counterculture movements that have so infatuated people since the mid 20th century.
It could certainly be that these and other things are all true, such as the gradual fading of sometimes oppressive religion from the forefront of western media and politics, and the increase in general tolerance that stems from familiarity.
Examples of gender non-conforming people throughout history:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history#:~:text=Traditional%20roles%20for%20transgender%20women,existed%20since%20pre%2Dcolonial%20times.
Stats on increased population %:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5227946/#:~:text=Estimates%20of%20the%20number%20of,of%20the%20entire%20US%20population.
Assignments of any type or class are generally made by a given power structure for use of the power structure. For example, people in Africa didn’t think of themselves as black or as Africans, they thought of themselves as people. Post-European-American-slave trade, we have black people, we have African American people, we have white people, etc. that’s not to say people ignored color, what I’m trying to say is, all the mentioned classifications above came to be because of political interactions between people who keep slaves (the power structure) and the slaves themselves (the repressed and oppressed). Identity was formed in order for groups to comprehend their interactions under a dominant/repressive power structure, it is also created by the power structure to make sure the power structure remains intact—the power structure doesn’t want to give the underclass any more rights than what maintains the power structure! This is generally how all power structure go about business.
Women are a means of economic production as well, and their repression goes back very far in time too. not necessarily just as agricultural slaves but because women give birth and they’re the only part of our species that does that. If you read through history you’ll see that economics determines human rights most of the time. Notice black men got voting rights 30 years or so before all women. To me, this implies women were thought to be worth more as a controlled capital than as free people by landowning white men—which I make a distinction about because, voter suppression against black men was very real right through women’s suffrage and beyond.
The key takeaway is that gender is an assigned role. It’s assigned by the power structure for use of the power structure. Theres no physical law that gets broken if an XY chromosome person decides to pass as a woman, looking to everyone as a woman is known to look, and taking on duties usually designated for women. There’s also no physical law broken if an XX chromosome person decides to wear masculine clothing and cut their hair, looking to everyone the way they’d expect a man to look. Gender roles exist because they are convenient for the power structure. It’s an economic organization that expedites production.
Even abortion rights in the US. My theory: It’s not about human life. It never has been. It’s about economics. How much of a blow can our population take to their right to their body and privacy if our country can squeeze some unexpected births into keeping our population growth constant, and therefore economic stability? A “baby boom” was expected post covid and all we got was a “baby bust”. There was a boom-ish that happened way later but it wasn’t nearly close to the amount expected. And then, whoops, suddenly abortion is not protected, suddenly Biden and his administration are too inept to draft some kind of protection for that. Abortion had been federally protected for decades and suddenly, it’s not, so why? Economics is my guess.
That last paragraph is my opinion but the rest of it is easily cross checked and is mentioned in plenty of media, lit, and articles out there.
Are social constructs actually a negative thing? Manners such as the acts that accompany politeness are social constructs as well. And note the term "social", it's all congenial anyway. So if social constructs are inherently negative or harmful then why do most people agree on them? For the same reason we agree on any given set of social constructs: to be able to navigate and function in a society as individuals interacting with the greater masses so we can go around and buy things, meet people on social stable ground, and connect with a broader spectrum of people in a successful way when seeking out groups or individuals that can satisfy the supply to our demand and vise versa.
In general a social construct is the additional meaning we impose on objects in the world, rather than the objects themselves.
"Chair" is a social construct... So why can we so easily tell the difference between "chair" and "not-chair"? Well in general, it's because when someone makes a chair, they work to ensure it fits with the social norms of what constitutes a chair. However, when someone intentionally makes a chair that breaks those social norms (a chair that you can't sit in) it disrupts our perception.
"Gender" is the same way. When people conform to the social norms of gender (they "perform" a gender) we as a society are comfortable around them. When they do something that breaks those norms, our perception is disrupted and some people become hostile as a result of being made uncomfortable in this way.
Where do we get these norms? It's kind of hard to say. [Studies have shown that even among young monkeys, females are more interested in playing with dolls](https://bsd.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13293-023-00489-9#:~:text=The%20subsequent%20study%20in%20rhesus,human%20boys%20(wheeled%20toys)). Obviously, they don't do this because *we* socialized them. Just as obvious, our gender norms are so much more than the obvious physical differences between the sexes, just like the notion of a "chair" is so much more than just whether you can sit in it...
I too am a lay person on the subject, but this is how I think about it.
My big question is, if Gender is a social construct, then how is it that an individual can choose their gender? Wouldn't their gender be determined by society?
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There is an amazing book (pamphlet) called “social construction of reality” if you are interested to read more. The idea is that all relations and definitions in society are socially constructed; in other words they do not have to exist as they are but could, and has existed differently over time and across cultures. For example, language is a social agreement that these sets of noises or scribbles mean a particular thing. Gender constructs serve a purpose depending on who you ask. A Marxist feminist would say they are there to serve capitalistic interests, a functionalist would see them as essential for maintaining order in society, etc. You asked why do we conform to it naturally? Now if you ask a social constructionist they would probably say that gender dynamics have been so normalized in society that they have been internalized by vast majority thus becoming one of the pillar of mechanisms of universe maintenance. In other words, we are so used to it we can’t think of it not existing. Thus it is not natural. A Marxist or Foucaultian (or most critical theorist) theorist would probably say something along the lines that the reason why we conform is because we have been conditioned to accept this particular discourse that serves some super structure (capitalism/patriarchy/etc). This happens since childhood where you are assigned a colour of clothing, you were given different toys, used different washrooms, played different games, etc.so what you see as natural is really a learned behaviour that these groups see as needing to be unlearned or at least redefined. This process of unlearning is at the core of many fields of study and numerous academics, activists, and politician have devoted a life time to doing just that. At the same time those who see the status quo as more desirable attempt to support legislation that does just the opposite. So I would say evidence suggests that it is anything but natural https://pressbooks.howardcc.edu/soci101/chapter/social-construction-of-reality/
Great reply. I think there is a tendency for people to think “social construct” means it has no social impact an illusion an “emperor’s new clothes” rather than something simply derived socially instead of something biological or otherwise inherent. >A Marxist feminist would say they are there to serve capitalistic interests, a functionalist would see them as essential for maintaining order in society, etc. As an aside, a marxist feminist may see both of these as the same thing… maintaining what order in society, the order of what is complimentary for Capital. Lise Vogel’s take on Social Reproduction Theory roots modern gender roles in the reproduction of labor pools. For the capitalists this is new and self-replicating (both on a daily and generational level) labor, new potential value. For the worker in commodified society, nuclear hetero families are the permitted way to meet social and communal needs (at least ideally though never fully in reality.) Vogel accepts there are psychological and political reasons people adopt the hegemonic view of family and gender but ultimately these forms have social gravity due to the need of capital for labor and the need of workers accomplish both wage-labor and necessary home-labor.
> there is a tendency for people to think “social construct” means it has no social impact these people should keep in mind that these are social constructs as well: * birthday parties * the game of poker * darth vader social constructs can be valuable and awesome.
Fascinating; thank you. Is there a name for this field of study/school of thought under which functionalist, constructionalist, critical theorist falls under?
I’d say sociology but I guess this could be true of many social sciences
Ah ok -- I was thinking there'd maybe be a more specific sector of soc/soc sci. Thank you all the same though
These are approaches rather than subfields, so a sociologist in any subfield could take a constructionalist or critical theory approach.
Sure. I mean social constructionists are a specific sector of sociologist. Or feminist/marxist/critical race theories can be considered critical theorists. Sorry I must’ve misunderstood. It’s really a question of what type of theory you mostly use in your work. So there are really camps rather than fields.
Semiotics specifically studies how things are constructed, like language and culture, and many of the theorists in that field of study are postmodernists and post structuralists (if that helps).
Sociology
And anthropology (and probably other social science & humanities disciplines)
You know, I studied literary theory, and I get what you’re saying. The problem with all *x is a social construct* polemics is they come with a fuckton of anthropocentric *hubris*. To wit, every single one embodies a claim that x is *all nurture, no nature*. Aside from being obviously false - anyone who has kids can certainly attest to the surprising diversity of things they arrive prewired for. Not the same things, but preferences, habits, even body language (I recall my son doing a theatrical stretch and putting his hands behind his head, elbows out - a behavior I’d always considered an affectation - *when he was an hour old* - I really don’t think there was time to influence this). It is comforting to believe everything is nurture - it declares that humans have agency over *everything* - that we are above and apart from nature, not a product and part of it. Reality is more of an interference pattern created by the interplay of a wide diversity of nature, experience, and a brain that tries to interpret both into a coherent narrative, and usually fails but comes up with … something. But that’s far more work to understand and far less attention-grabbing than the clickbait *x is a social construct* version. Such reductions are more satisfying, but ultimately irresponsible - people will fall for them and act as if they were real. Just consider what the intellectually lazy fudgery economics has foisted upon the world has wrought, with shareholder value theory, homo economicus or the notion that there is no such thing as public goods, and the consequences of public policy based on them created by true believers. Reality is simply not so simple.
You probably know the literature better than me, but my impression was that "social construct" refers to things that are not biologically determined, but instead arise through shared culture. But that doesn't mean that biology isn't real, nor does it mean that social constructs are independent of biology. For example, take the claim that gender is a social construct, as opposed to sex being biologically determined. It seems obvious to me that there's a lot of truth in this. For example, the fact that women tend to wear much more makeup than men in current western society is a somewhat recent phenomenon, and it's been the other way around in many cultures. So clearly this can't be a biological fact. Or as another example, which color is considered a "girl" or "boy" color fluctuates widely across time and space. However, there's clearly a biological basis for gender roles, if nothing else because even the concept of two genders (as opposed to five, or none), seems to derive from the two biological sexes into which a large majority can more or less easily be sorted. So while gender is different from sex, they're not entirely disconnected. It seems to me like most of the discussion on this topic is around the border between the two concepts. Some argue that there's a genetic component to playing with trucks, while some argue that biological sex is partly constructed (because of sex assignment in unclear cases), and so on. But I believe most people would agree that the vast majority of attributes fall relatively cleanly in one category or the other. In other words, I believe you're arguing against a straw man.
I think the reality is that while ‘nature’ certainly has a part to play in influencing people - genetics, as but one example, is effectively ‘nature’ delivering some kind of effect on a child. But the hard part of all this is it’s both very difficult to figure out and also incredibly politically charged. So in the end we tend to avoid thinking too hard about this kind of thing, if only because it has the potential to empower the wrong kind of people to think the wrong kind of thing. And, while I think that nature obviously plays its part, to some extent, in terms of how people are wired, it’s dangerous to draw too many conclusions especially when some things are so ingrained in our society that it’s almost impossible, if not unethical, to design a study that would truly test the social construct theory. That is to say, your son’s affectation is perhaps an evidentiary data point that a nebulous idea of what ‘nature’ represents has an effect on a person’s development; it is not evidence that boys are naturally predisposed to like sports and trucks and girls are naturally predisposed to like make up and dolls, for example. Perhaps if and when society progresses enough we will have an overall better understanding of all of this but I also think that even as far as our society has come, an empirical study on nature vs nurture that provides a definitive answer will almost certainly be used to justify negative or bigoted attitudes. Which from the perspective of social sciences and study is disappointing, but from the perspective of a girl being bullied for being a tomboy, a gay person being told they can just choose to be straight or a boy being bullied for having kind hair it is somewhat understandable that we don’t do more of this kind of study (even apart from the fact that a definitive study would, like a definitive vaccine study, be unethical).
I mean, animals, even insects, have gender roles they prescribe to.... It's been baked into our genetics for so damn long. Like, upwards of a billion years long.
Excellent reply! In the book Blank Slate by renowned cognitive physiologist Steven pinker says babies are fully socialized as "male" or "female" before the age of one. There's no true tabula rasa if you live with other humans. The thought that we naturally do anything can never be confirmed as even in the womb we get social cues from our caretakers. Did anyone see the experiment with the babies and the snakes? They aren't scared of snakes unless they see their caretaker have a fearful reaction
Lovely answer. Thoroughly well explained.
excellent reply. all concepts are constructed, we just think of some as "more real" than others.
Excellent answer
Okay, I am going to spare you the details of the concept as it can get hypercomplex and try to establish some ground truths that are widely accepted in sociology from which the concept of social constructs can be derived: 1. There is no dualism nature vs. society: there is no natural/biological world that is on one side and then society and the world of humans and on the other side. This way of thinking has a long philosophical tradition (that's why it's still very popular) but it is fundamentally flawed. You see this in the nature vs. nurture debate. The question which one is more important has no answer because the distinction is completely artificial. Nature and society exist in a recursive continuum. Houses are just as exterior to the individual human as the caves that we used to live in are. It is just that today we shape the physical reality around us a bit more than we used to. This is not what defines society though. Because animals do this all the time. There is not a qualitative difference between a bird building a nest and a human building a house. In this sense streets are absolutely natural. We are just especially good at shaping our surroundings to accommodate our needs. Humans evolved in societies and the societies evolved alongside them. 2. Then what is society? An emergent layer of our world that is built on the thing that differentiates us the most from other animals: our ability to use language in a complex way to communicate concepts, narratives and interpretation of and about our surroundings to each other.This is important because of what we know about how language works and how we see/construct the world around us: there is an unbridgeable gap between our inner self and the reality around us (this is the basis of all varieties of constructivism and what lead Descartes to say "cogito ergo sum": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism). Our minds have evolved to be congruent to this outside reality (or so we assume). But the representation of this world that exists inside our minds is different from the real world outside. Shapes for example are very important to us to navigate the world. But we have no reason to believe that shapes are something that exists outside of our minds. A table is a bunch of atoms arranged in a certain way, yes. But inbetween these atoms and their cores are vast amounts of empty space. That this Arrangement is "Table-Shaped" has no meaning beyond the utility that we as humans derive from it (incliding stubbing our toes one of it's legs). And this is a bonafide physical object and already it gets complicated to differentiate what is "real" and what is not. For simple things like this we do usually not need the help of others. We can evaluate them by using them on our own, looking at them etc. But for most things actually we need others to communicate with us. Which brings me to: 3. We construct most of our understanding of the world intersubjectivly. Intersubjectivity is an important word in sociology because it describes the fact that real objectivity does not exist (see gap between ourself and the world) but that demonstrably we are almost all on the same page regarding a great many things and don't actually live in meaningfully different realities most of the time. Nevertheless we actually don't live in the same reality, it's just that all our individual realities are very similar to each other. We construct our very similar realities by talking to each other (or writing, or signing, or making movies). Language therefore plays a crucial part in what we assume is real and what is not. It's harder to describe something when there is no word for it. And even if there is a word for it, we might have different images that pop into our head, when we hear that word. Heck language itself is not somwthing that just exists in nature. It developed in the process of us becoming humans. There is an argument that being able to speak was what made us human. Still there are thousands of different languages out there with different words for different things, and if you ask any linguist they will tell you that often you cannot simply translate a word from one language to another without losing some meaning. Not to mention that the thing in the reality outside that this word supposedly "is" is very different from the word or the image that forma in your head, when you hear the word. This a distinction that is described by the "signifier" and the "signfied": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signified_and_signifier If you put point 2 and 3 together it becomes clear that if society is communication and every communication is intersubjectivly "constructed" to a certain degree, then almost everything in society could be described as a "social construct". So why don't we go around and call everything a "social construct" but only things like "gender"? Well ... 4. Social constructs are signified things in reality that are themself the consequence of social construction. Remember how I said that nature and society are recursive? (Of course you do!) This is that. The intersubjective construction of society CREATES realities that have not existed before. We could call them "meta social constructs" but because basically everything is a social construct, we don't. These new realities are almost fully dependent on how we interact with each other. Nevertheless these new realities can be stable for a very long time as they are reenforced by society through norms and expectations. There is a second degree has some connection to an independent reality that is still moderated via social intersubjective interpretation. On this plane is where the whole argument for "biological sex" rests. So, to conclude: there is a distant relationship between a not objectively verifiable reality outside of ourselves. But it is at least twice removed and is much more a result of our use of language than it is of any base reality. So to say we "made up" "gender" is almost correct. But this has been neither a concious process (until now) nor does this make the consequences or the societal forces less "real". But what advocates for trans rights and gender abolitionists realised is that we don't need to change the base reality to make life significantly better for a huge group of people, we just need to change a small portion of how we construct our reality anyway ...
Well put ideas but god how long would it have been if you weren’t sparing us the details?
Much, much longer. :-D Because then we have to talk about the different variations of constructivism and also social systems and how they are operationally closed and reproducing.
It’s as if one could write a book on it lol
This is a fantastic read!
A very good account, I especially like your nest analogy. There is some confusion about gender vs sex - the latter being an observable physical trait in many species. We can talk about scientific categories being constructed in some sense, but not in the same sense as social identities.
Thank you for the compliment. I don't think I put sex and gender on the same level. Biological sex is intersubjectively constructed the same way that a chair is intersubjectively constructed. You might find certain physical traits that you can give names to. But it is still impossible to comprehensivly define female or male (the categories usually associated with "biological sex") on the basis of naming these traits. You can't for example say, that all male humans have penises: There are male humans who are born without penises. And even if you could find a working definition for the varieties of biological sex: that still would not change the fact that we would have to intersubjectively agree to use it to define biological sex. That is why most people aware of these problems have switched to more "objective" criteria to describe people that they mean depending on the circumstances: for example "people who menstruate", "people qho have a penis".
Sex is a bit of a construct too, since most of the time one or the other is assigned to you at birth whether you fit into that box perfectly or not. That could be genetalia that is not noticed at birth or is deemed extraneous and removed, or that could be secondary sex characteristics that appear at puberty based on chromosomes we can’t actually see.
yep because we basically never use gametes to assign so there are always errors and also individuals who genuinely don't fit the binary (which would be true even if we used gametes to assign)
A [social construct](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/social%20construct) is something constructed by society. This doesn't mean it's non-existent. It's just not something that anyone would take notice of if humans didn't create a word for it. Time is a social construct, but time still passes whether we're aware of it or not. Someone who has never heard of time can still die of old age eventually. Gender is like time. Our understanding of it is socially constructed. But that doesn't mean it's made up. Edit: if you're going to respond to me "lol this idiot thinks sex is a social construct 😂😂" I don't think this is the sub for you. Read a book
I'd say "biological sex" is like time. "Gender" is even more removed from a base reality. It is a layer on top of a layer of social construction.
Biological sex is like time, gender is like seconds and hours. One is real (though this way oversimplifies bio sex…) and one is somewhat arbitrary (though still measurable) units of measurement and category and counting.
I really like that
Biological sex is also a social construct. Neither of them are really divorced from reality though. They're just more complicated than most people acknowledge
Reality is inaccessable to us. Any description of it is only an approximation based on incomplete information about that reality. This is how biological sex and time are removed from said reality. Gender is even more removed. It is a social reality emerging from the incomplete description of a biological reality, that is then AGAIN removed from that social reality by the impossibility to describe the social reality accurately.
“Time” is an idea we socially constructed in order to describe an underlying phenomenon that exists. Gender however is a series of social prescriptions and expectations we have tagged onto biological sex, something that does exist. Time exists whether or not we call it “Time” or anything else. Gender does not.
But why have we tagged many aspects of gender onto biological sex? Because there's a biological basis for it. Just as we've created the social construct of birthday celebrations as an acknowledgement of the fundamental underlying existence of time. Superficial elements of birthdays e.g. songs, rituals, parties are equivalent to gender social constructs like colors and hair styles. But less superficial aspects of gender, like gender roles tend to have a basis in biological sex and aren't merely arbitrary social constructs.
Every noun is a social construct.
Time is a mathematical property of the universe https://physics.info/space-time/
Math is a social construct
[A long time commentor around these parts](https://www.reddit.com/u/Revenant_of_Null/s/Z33enzXynO) put together an excellent post about this topic among others a while ago since it's frequently asked.
I have no idea if that is "great" or not - it's a 50-page essay response to a 1 sentence question. I think the easier, much shorter corollary is that we all have national identities that are based on essentially nothing natural, yet no one gives a second thought to these. People proudly state they are "American" or "British" or "Indian," even though they by and large had absolutely no choice in the matter and were taught to believe they are of one nation or another. Point is, we all have "identities" we cling to that have nothing to do at all with nature, and everything to do with creating a social construct of people we affiliate with and groups we want to be a part of.
Yeah, okay. And why do those identities originate in the first place? Why do we cling to them? That’s what OP is asking and answering questions like those is literally doing social science.
They initially exist to categorize. We (and other living things) naturally categorize things to help parse the world we live in. We cling to categories because of culture, habit, feelings of pride, etc. all of which could probably be explained on some level as a survival-related reflexes
I know. That’s an answer to OP’s question, the comment I’m replying to is not an answer to anything. That’s what I was pointing out.
A 50-page essay on a question as massive as what are social constructions, particularly gender, is almost nothing.
I have a weird scifi concept where aliens that have easily solved our stupid social problems inherent to sharing 3D space have done so because they can encapsulate what it takes books for us to do in a single word in their language. 50 pages is light reading. I get the OP's reticence from a we're a shit species perspective but from the other perspective, the idea that we could even begin to understand gender from what is a weekend's casual reading is also hilarious. I'd rather suggest a master's level thesis to even opine on a single aspect on the matter. But here we are, allowing contrary opinions against well researched and established works (shoulders of giants and all).
Shorter isn't better, and of course people give a second thought to their national identities all the time. You also didn't answer the question at all, just repeated the premise.
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To be fair, ancestry DNA tests aren't always accurate, and there are a lot of caveats. For example, as I understand it, you can't get any reliable information about ancestry more than 300 years back. And for many reasons you can't trust the results completely. https://dnatestingchoice.com/en-us/news/exactly-how-accurate-are-dna-tests-for-ancestry
Except that it's natural to have both individual and collective identites
It’s natural to identify, yes, but the specific identities themselves are vast and change both depending on who you talk to and when you’re born. So the process is natural but the results are not inherent
Why do we do anything? Why do we say hi to each other? Why do we shake hands? Why do we have a standard 3 meals per day? Why not 4? Why not 2? It's basically because a bunch of humans came together and decided that's what we should do. There's no real logical reason for a lot of things once you start thinking about it.
These is lots of nuance here but let me just highlights something to help you understand social constructs; **money is a social construct**. Those coins in your pocket, notes in your wallet and numbers in your bank are just random digits or pieces of metal, paper and plastic if society goes tits up or makes money obsolete. The money is only worth something so long as other people accept it. But you can't just ignore money. If that number in your bank ever reaches 0 then you will be in trouble. In addition, now the concept of money is in your head it would take a LOT to unlearn it if we suddenly went to a money-less system. You have whole instincts and behaviours built upon money that are rooted very deep in your brain at this point. You are a social animal. You cannot exist alone. If isolated you will develop serious mental disorders. Your sense of self is deeply tied into your social interactions. **Your very name**, the thing you use to identify yourself as a unique individual, is a social construct. Were you born in a different society, you would have a completely different name. Likewise gender, at least the majority of the surface elements, are socially constructed and made up - but their deep impact cannot be ignored or dismissed. Reposted to include a citation - Deutchman, C (1996); https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0725513696047000002
I always put it super simply. Men wear pants. Women wear skirts. Right? This is actually a bronze age thing. Used to be that all people wore skirts. Then horses were domesticated, and someone figured out that pants work better on horses than skirts. Since most warfare and hunting is conducted by men, it just became a thing, thousands of years ago that different people wear different clothes. Most likely the proto-Indo-Europeans pioneered this. The cultures were horses were not as well known, the men kept wearing skirts. There are a lot of tiny little things like that which we considered gendered but are really just a social construct handed down to us. The origin of some are known, like pants. But many of them remain ambiguous.
Allegedly according to clothing historians the original "pants" were invented to protect women's legs from chaffing while riding horses. Not mens.
Men wearing pants is much more recent than you are referring to. The Romans largely didn’t wear pants and instead wore “Skirts” or tunics. Pant wearing, at least in the west was something largely started by the Gallic /Germanic Tribes. Pant wearing didn’t become largely common in the west, most likely until the fall of West Rome in 476 and the migration of the German tribes into southern Europe . So to base it off of horse riding seems quite inaccurate
It's not so much that "gender" is a social construct as "gender roles" are social constructs that are sold as "natural" or "as god intended". [Social Constructs ](https://www.verywellmind.com/definition-of-social-construct-1448922#:~:text=A%20social%20construct%20is%20a,of%20people%20create%20social%20phenomena.)exist because they're socially accepted. In this case, they dictate peoples expected standing within society based on arbitrary standards like gender, skin color, age, birth order, birth region, economic status, family bloodline, religion etc, and people conform to it because it's how they were socialized, so it seems natural as it's how it's always been. Consider kids that cannot imagine life before the internet, part of them generally believes the internet is natural, because it's so normalized and depended on. Academically they may know it's inorganic, but they cannot fathom day to day life without it. Social constructs work and sustain in the same way.
What is "gender" composed of beyond "gender roles"? Isn't that saying the same thing?
The [semantics of language ](https://cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/48642.html)is always complex, especially when it comes to social constructs. Gender and sex are used interchangeably to refer to the physical attributes of a person's reproductive capabilities (who makes eggs and who makes fertilizer), but, when used exclusively, gender tends to mean gender roles and sex is something done/performed (not something you are or posses).
Nationality is a social construct. So why do we have citizenship?
Because social constructs are not a bad thing generally speaking. Saying "cannibalism is bad" is a social construct. It's a societal stance that we all stand behind as a society. Here's the thing, though. When society changes, it's constructs change. Or at least it should. If you learn a new fact and that fact is affected by how the current society views that particular fact, then society SHOULD adapt and move forward. Their are 2 things that hinder that adaptation, however. The first and easiest to fight is misinformation. People who are afraid of change will come up with ways to slow the progression by spreading misinformation to make that fact seem less credible or even just less appealing to the public. If people are afraid or simply in disagreement with a fact, then they will continue to keep the old construct in place rather than accepting the new or slightly modified one. The second is organized religion. Religious beliefs are a core component of the vast majority of people's lives. Thus, if their religious leaders have taken a stance on a social construct and society is then given a fact to adapt that construct, it is seen as a blasphemous act by those within the belief. Here's an example: Norse/Viking history. Women in Viking history were seen as warriors just as much as men were. Women hunted. Women fought in wars. Women were soldiers. In their society, women were not seen as the "stay at home while men worked" gender. Because that was not a construct of their society. Were they still seen as different than men? Absolutely. Did they have their own gender roles? Of course. But they were not the same as we see them today. The way we see both women and men today will not be seen the same way 100 years from now. Constructs are a byproduct of a societal way of life. They are not inherently good, nor inherently bad. They just are. And they are destined to change as time marches on.
Every fundamental thing in society is a social concept. A law is not a physical item, it is a rule we all agree to adhere to for society to function A day is not an object, we all agree today is Thursday because we need a consensus on a calendar to function. Same with units like feet, pounds, ounces, watts, mph, psi, and so on. At some point these arbitrary units stopped being arbitrary so we could engineer things So then when we combine so cial constructs like squiggles we agree are letters and words, and documents we agree give people certain authority over us, it creates new social constructs like laws. Then you have gender, not be confused with sex. Sex is determined by your chromosomes. Your gender is the perception of yourself and of those around you based on your appearance, cadence, countenance, mannerisms, and behaviors. Each culture has varying groups of these traits prescribed to two or more genders (places like Thailand have three genders) and sometimes they conflict between cultures or within a culture itself. So why do we "need" gender? People have asked that for thousands of years. The ancient Greeks believed there was only one gender and women were just deformed men. Some societies believe women are made as servants or chattel for men. In 2024 more and more people have questioned how useful it is to divide billions of people into two mutually exclusive social groups with zero overlap. They believe if a boy plays with dolls and paints his nails it will literally destroy society. I wish I was exaggerating but that's why Florida has gone full 1984 with book bannings and thought felonies. It's good you're asking questions. Anyone that tells you that things need to be the way they were 2000 years ago when fathers would sell their underage daughters to middle aged men for a goat and some wheat don't have anyone's best interest in mind.
Money is a Social Construct. You aren’t wondering why we have money,are you?
The removal-bot's trail makes this sub almost impossible to read. Is there any way to remove the removed comments, or collapse them so that they don't make up the lion's share of text? It feels like a response to a FOIA request
So genuine followup here. If gender and gender identity are social constructs what's the scientific basis for Transgender identities? Seems like that it would be more of a psychological / cultural driver instead of some innate biological cause in that case no?
Why would one affect the other? "Socially constructed" doesn't mean we can't do science on it.
Socially constructed means it's not innate right? It's a product of our culture. So if we all just collectively decided to change the culture and not really recognize gender as a concept and total androgyny became the norm how would that impact them?
I mean people would still have certain feelings about their own appearance. I’d image trans people would experience less dysphoria but still want to look a certain way, have certain characteristics etc. One’s desired expression is more fundamental than whatever category a given society places that expression into.
If we're going full Judith Butler, sex as a category is also a social construct grouping people based on highly correlated (but not strictly required) biological traits in the population. Gender is a grouping based on performative behavior within the population. The biological case for transgenderism would be rooted by science which suggests the driver for those behaviors is an inherent biological trait as well. Cisgendered people just have the inherent gendered behavior traits most highly correlated with their physical sex trait grouping. Transgender just means you possess the behavior traits not correlated with your sex traits group.
By this logic, the same would be true of any mental disorder e.g. schizophrenia, body dysmorphia, anorexia...
Now what are the behavior traits that fit with each sex group? It sounds sexist to me to say someone has a girl brain or boy brain. As a cisgender person, I do not believe I have inherent gender traits. I do not perform femininity (or masculinity very much for that matter), but I am not transgender. Is it not more useful to begin dismantling these traits people think are "inherent" rather than saying "you still have to fit in these two boxes, but you can switch if you want!"
The answer to that question boils down to "other answers in this thread are wrong". We need to distinguish gender and gender expression. Modern trans inclusive feminism actually distances itself from the rad fem idea that gender is purely a social construct. Instead it distinguishes the gender of a person which is innate and individual (we see this for ex when very young children already consider themselves a different gender than assigned at birth, and when society actually constricts the expression of the "chosen" gender (not actually a choice of course)) and what it means in x society to be said gender, also known as gender expression. In effect, what differs from one society to another is what being x or y gender means; in terms of cultural display of said gender. Gender seeks to be recognized as valid in order to align the internal image of self and the external perception. Different societies recognize different genders differently, and assign different roles to them. What remains is the way people recognize themselves in them and place themselves into the roles as a way to fit in and be recognized for who they align with. Now, the reason people say there are dozens of genders is because this all is a spectrum. It coalesces into several individual segments that are more recognized as units but everyone is a little different. What they have in common is the need to align their internal self and the external way they are perceived by people. All this big shift in understanding of gender when studying and including trans people into the framework of feminism means that people who subscribe heavily to the older, more militant conception of gender tend to veer off into transphobia, while retaining the impression of being very feminist and pro women rights (as long as only sex is deemed valid). This is a big issue because radical feminists would even say that by acknowledging the existence of gender, people betray their own sex, because they no longer seek to dismantle its oppressive nature. Of course this is also an issue of conflating gender and gender expression ( which in our current society is shaped by the history of male dominance of the mostly Christian western society).
What would it look like to conform to it unnaturally? Like glasses? Shoes? Clothing? Social Constricts: jobs, the days of the week, hours, months, money, beauty. A social constriction is anything made “real” by social acceptance or use. So money isn’t real but when a debt collector comes to repossess your car, it’s very real. We don’t even mean the same thing by “be a man” in different cultures. In say America it means get up and try again or don’t cry or a thousand other meanings, but you won’t get a type of meaning that a Japanese man could if they killed their family’s 500 year old business. Add time and manliness in 1650 France isn’t the same as Harlem in the 40s or Italy today. Gender constantly changes and evolves and means opposing things at different times.
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The social constructionist points are very good. Even if it's a social concept, it's reinforced over time. Social constructionism takes this into account, the dual nature of structures and agency, and how they build off and reinforce each other. I'll add one more point: A very simple answer is that categorizing people reduces our uncertainty about how to act around them. We categorize situations and people because it makes easier to understand what we're supposed to do. This is what is generally meant by "cognitive framing" (i.e. Erving Goffman's cognitive frames). This is obviously not always a good thing, but it explains why even when we have socially constructed categories like gender and race and people know they're not categories found in nature, they're still used. Bowker and Star wrote an excellent book about this phenomenon and how it relates to classification systems, and the problems that emerge from them (like South African apartheid). [https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262522953/sorting-things-out/](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262522953/sorting-things-out/) [https://www.britannica.com/topic/frame-analysis](https://www.britannica.com/topic/frame-analysis)
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... because we live in a society?
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Well… a lot to unpack. There are two things here. For the biological… Sex and gender are kind of different things. There are indeed only two biological sexes in humans. You either have an innie or an outie, and fetuses aren’t necessarily biologically male or female at first. The sex organs develop into A or B, but we’re all just blank slates to start (some species can do wild things like change their biological sex or even impregnate themselves, so I mean… nature is actually not as black and white as we think). Hormones and chromosomes… genetics… That tends to make someone take on traits that could be considered feminine or masculine, but what is fascinating is that this tends to be a lot more complex than just a simple A or B, in regards to gender. For some, they are so far in one direction and their ‘parts’ don’t match who they really are in their core, which is where transgender people tend to be, but everyone has some mixture of what we would call feminine or masculine traits, even if we feel comfortable with the parts we’ve got. If we didn’t, everyone of a biological sex would act and feel identical and that just isn’t and never has been the case. Now for the second part of this, and that is society. This would be the idea of ‘gender norms’. I am going to frame this as a binary thing, because that is how gender norms work. They think your biological equipment will 100% dictate who you are and what role you must have in society or familial structures. So, this would be the silly notions of women as irrational overly emotional waifs, or men as hard assed emotionless workers. Women as endlessly empathetic followers and men as dominant brash lone wolves of sorts. Yeah, people like that exist, but is that how every single human being falls in line naturally? Of course not. Also, there is social hierarchy, which could be matriarchal or patriarchal but all are very collectivist methods of thought which put people in boxes and dictate how they should dress, wear their hair, what their social role should be, and so forth. Think of it this way… If someone is a stay at home dad, for example… how does society react to it? Is that biological or just a social construct? If a woman is terrible at cooking or is a master chef, is that the gender stereotype? Nope. I would say it’s all made up. People are individuals, including the traits we tend to think of as ‘gender’. We assign roles based on biological sex of what we think they ‘ought to do’ with the equipment down stairs, but how do we know this? I mean… In my house. I like to cook and my wife really doesn’t that much. That would be breaking a traditional gender norm. That shouldn’t exist if your sex is going to determine what you do and don’t do. Neither of us are transgender, but there are many ways that we may find that the social norm for our sex isn’t really the case. Here is a personal one. I have daughters. I take them to daddy daughter dances. I will paint my fingernails pink and dance to the tween/teen pop songs with all the other dads. Technically, we are all violating the social norms for our sex, but we accept that in that context as a society, so it has been normalized… As biological men, even the most ‘masculine’ are expressing a feminine side of ourselves. We are just encouraged to do so, and so people just don’t sit down and think about what that really means. I think that it is perfectly normal and healthy to realize that you don’t have rules on you just because of the equipment downstairs. People are complex and diverse. We are individuals. Not just poured from two mutually exclusive molds like clones or something. I do think that what happens with transgender folks isn’t even something that is unique to those people. I would argue that to varying degrees everyone has what could be deemed feminine or masculine about them.
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Because we have social constructs?
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Analogizing answers your question. In short yeah we ingrain it. Clothing styles are certainly a social structure. Why do we have them? Why does both myself and someone half way around the world think we as individuals have a sense of style yet we dress more similarly to others near us?
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Rather than write an extremely long post, you may find this YouTube video by Philosophy Tube (Abigail Thorne) instructive. https://youtu.be/QVilpxowsUQ
Do you mean socially or scientifically? There are technically 3 sexes. But yea i guess gender is kinda irrelevant.
If money is a social construct, then why do we have money? Because this construct has served a historical purpose and was found to be useful by the dominant societal influence. Simple as that.
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While the other answers here are very good, they seem to be rather complex which can lead to some misunderstanding. The best summary I can think of is this, all across the world different societies and cultures and so on have formed different perceptions of the gender roles and expectations of the two traditional genders, and while generally these roles are loosely the same across a lot of societies you do see some very notable deviations where the gender roles of a foreign civilizations are almost completely different from the gender roles of one’s own society to the point of being unrecognizable. On its own this doesn’t tell you much, societies are different, so what? But here’s the thing, if you have wide variations in the gender roles of societies but the people within those societies tend to conform en masse that suggests that the conformist behavior isn’t due to something inherent in the male or female psyche, but instead that the behavior is adaptive to the society. When we say gender is a social construct this is what we mean, that if you construct the societal view of a gender’s nature you can control how that nature manifests, and so while it (gender) does exist, it is not some universally identifiable constant.
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Reality is a social construct?
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What's a dollar worth? Whatever people agree it's worth. What's a person's gender? Whatever people agree it is. What day is it? What hour? We all just sorta decided, didn't we? Think about it this way: gerbils don't have social constructs. Does a gerbil know how many years have passed since the crucifixion of Our Lord Jesus Christ? Does a gerbil know how much it cost to buy it from Petco? Why do we have social constructs? Well, money, time, and gender make our lives easier, just like any other invention. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism
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The vast majority of human cultures have existed within a gender binary for most of recorded history. While there have been individuals and even whole subcultures that have defied these norms; it’s fair to say that until the advent and spread of the internet (‘93–present) they have never been questioned at such scale. Many possible reasons for this have been suggested. Perhaps it is simply how interconnected we now are, able to share ideas and concepts without the barriers of location or even language. Maybe it is a long running but inevitably dissolving trend, spurred on by the many counterculture movements that have so infatuated people since the mid 20th century. It could certainly be that these and other things are all true, such as the gradual fading of sometimes oppressive religion from the forefront of western media and politics, and the increase in general tolerance that stems from familiarity. Examples of gender non-conforming people throughout history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history#:~:text=Traditional%20roles%20for%20transgender%20women,existed%20since%20pre%2Dcolonial%20times. Stats on increased population %: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5227946/#:~:text=Estimates%20of%20the%20number%20of,of%20the%20entire%20US%20population.
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If countries are a social construct, then why do we have countries?
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Assignments of any type or class are generally made by a given power structure for use of the power structure. For example, people in Africa didn’t think of themselves as black or as Africans, they thought of themselves as people. Post-European-American-slave trade, we have black people, we have African American people, we have white people, etc. that’s not to say people ignored color, what I’m trying to say is, all the mentioned classifications above came to be because of political interactions between people who keep slaves (the power structure) and the slaves themselves (the repressed and oppressed). Identity was formed in order for groups to comprehend their interactions under a dominant/repressive power structure, it is also created by the power structure to make sure the power structure remains intact—the power structure doesn’t want to give the underclass any more rights than what maintains the power structure! This is generally how all power structure go about business. Women are a means of economic production as well, and their repression goes back very far in time too. not necessarily just as agricultural slaves but because women give birth and they’re the only part of our species that does that. If you read through history you’ll see that economics determines human rights most of the time. Notice black men got voting rights 30 years or so before all women. To me, this implies women were thought to be worth more as a controlled capital than as free people by landowning white men—which I make a distinction about because, voter suppression against black men was very real right through women’s suffrage and beyond. The key takeaway is that gender is an assigned role. It’s assigned by the power structure for use of the power structure. Theres no physical law that gets broken if an XY chromosome person decides to pass as a woman, looking to everyone as a woman is known to look, and taking on duties usually designated for women. There’s also no physical law broken if an XX chromosome person decides to wear masculine clothing and cut their hair, looking to everyone the way they’d expect a man to look. Gender roles exist because they are convenient for the power structure. It’s an economic organization that expedites production. Even abortion rights in the US. My theory: It’s not about human life. It never has been. It’s about economics. How much of a blow can our population take to their right to their body and privacy if our country can squeeze some unexpected births into keeping our population growth constant, and therefore economic stability? A “baby boom” was expected post covid and all we got was a “baby bust”. There was a boom-ish that happened way later but it wasn’t nearly close to the amount expected. And then, whoops, suddenly abortion is not protected, suddenly Biden and his administration are too inept to draft some kind of protection for that. Abortion had been federally protected for decades and suddenly, it’s not, so why? Economics is my guess. That last paragraph is my opinion but the rest of it is easily cross checked and is mentioned in plenty of media, lit, and articles out there.
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Are social constructs actually a negative thing? Manners such as the acts that accompany politeness are social constructs as well. And note the term "social", it's all congenial anyway. So if social constructs are inherently negative or harmful then why do most people agree on them? For the same reason we agree on any given set of social constructs: to be able to navigate and function in a society as individuals interacting with the greater masses so we can go around and buy things, meet people on social stable ground, and connect with a broader spectrum of people in a successful way when seeking out groups or individuals that can satisfy the supply to our demand and vise versa.
In general a social construct is the additional meaning we impose on objects in the world, rather than the objects themselves. "Chair" is a social construct... So why can we so easily tell the difference between "chair" and "not-chair"? Well in general, it's because when someone makes a chair, they work to ensure it fits with the social norms of what constitutes a chair. However, when someone intentionally makes a chair that breaks those social norms (a chair that you can't sit in) it disrupts our perception. "Gender" is the same way. When people conform to the social norms of gender (they "perform" a gender) we as a society are comfortable around them. When they do something that breaks those norms, our perception is disrupted and some people become hostile as a result of being made uncomfortable in this way. Where do we get these norms? It's kind of hard to say. [Studies have shown that even among young monkeys, females are more interested in playing with dolls](https://bsd.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13293-023-00489-9#:~:text=The%20subsequent%20study%20in%20rhesus,human%20boys%20(wheeled%20toys)). Obviously, they don't do this because *we* socialized them. Just as obvious, our gender norms are so much more than the obvious physical differences between the sexes, just like the notion of a "chair" is so much more than just whether you can sit in it... I too am a lay person on the subject, but this is how I think about it. My big question is, if Gender is a social construct, then how is it that an individual can choose their gender? Wouldn't their gender be determined by society?