What is "gender"?
We all heard it: gender is a social construct. Philosopher and Queer Theorist Judith Butler even goes as far as describing gender as performative: "gender" is not something that actually exists, but something that is created by every individual's behaviour.
This, however, does not seem to fit with the mainstream idea of "gender identity": an internal feeling or knowledge about the own gender.
So here comes the tricky question: is gender something that is created by society, or is it a natural property of an individual? Is gender nature or nurture?
If gender was only socially constructed, why would have so many people a clear idea of what their gender is to choose to change their bodies, behaviours and appearance so radically - what transgender people do? Still, if gender was something intrinsic, how come different societies have come to have completely different views and expectations on this matter?
Looking forward to reading your thoughts! :)
This, however, does not seem to fit with the mainstream idea of "gender identity": an internal feeling or knowledge about the own gender.
So here comes the tricky question: is gender something that is created by society, or is it a natural property of an individual? Is gender nature or nurture?
If gender was only socially constructed, why would have so many people a clear idea of what their gender is to choose to change their bodies, behaviours and appearance so radically - what transgender people do? Still, if gender was something intrinsic, how come different societies have come to have completely different views and expectations on this matter?
Looking forward to reading your thoughts! :)
Comments (45)
Maybe I just haven't been exposed to such usage.
If people look at that person and think "that's a woman", and they treat that person as they would treat a woman (however that is), then that person has a female gender in the sociological sense, because that sociological sense is all about societal perceptions.
Gender identity is only of importance to those who are trying to shape the perspective of others. My dog doesn't care if I call him a male, female, or a turnip. He will, however, respond as a male dog when she smells a female in heat. She is also unconcerned about what I call her. Neither are concerned with societal labels. That is a people thing.
I would say that it is also important to take into consideration how the perceives their gender as well. It is also complicated if we make assumptions just on the basis of the way a person may look. Perhaps we would need to engage in conversation with the person who appears male, but is wearing a pink leotard, to know their unique story, before we start to apply labels and pronouns on the basis of our assumptions, which are only assumptions.
I have not heard that usage, not even once. At no point have I ever heard a man referred to as a woman because of the roles he performs. Do sociologists do this? Do they go around calling male cleaners female?
Are cleaners female (or lumberjacks male), by definition, in this sociological sense?
EDIT: Of course I have come across gender stereotypes. But this has never led to any confusion about the gender of the person performing that role. People are just horrified that a female is doing such and such male-associated role, or vice versa. It's the mismatch that causes the horror. But if they adopted the sociological use, there would be no mismatch.
If I identified with being a divine power, is it reasonable of me to expect everyone to address me as "Oh most Holy Divine One."? I think not, nor should I ever expect it.
I completely agree that no one should be required to address others by their chosen gender identity, individuals should be free to address others however they want nonetheless this still leaves a very wide scope about what you should and shouldn't do. It would be unreasonable to expect someone to accurately identify a gender identity (in the psychological sense) purely by appearance, however if an individual has explicitly expressed how they wish to be identified this creates at least some kind of informal social expectation on how they should be addressed. Anyone would be free to ignore this expectation and address them by appearance although this may lead to other social consequences.
I read your ideas in the discussion you linked, and I mostly resonate with your ideas. I'd like to ask you more on your ideas on "bearing".
You describe "bearing" as an internal sense related to the own biological sexual characteristics. However, for many gender questioning people I met, this is not that much of a concern. These people started their questioning also from an internal sense of themselves, which, however, was related to how much they identified with social definitions of feminine and masculine behaviour. For other people I met, their questioning had also the aspect of as what gender, in the social sense, they would like to be recognised and treated by others. In both cases, the aspect of their biological sexual characteristics seemed secondary: physical transition was taken into consideration not as an end, but as a means of matching their outside with their inside perception.
I'd be very curious to read your thoughts on this!
Anyway...
Gender comes in the following varieties:
1. Mind Male + Body Male [the traditional male]
2. Mind Male + Body Female
3. Mind Male + Body Ambiguous
4. Mind Female + Body Male
5. Mind Female + Body Female [the traditional female]
6. Mind Female + Body Ambiguous
7. Mind Ambiguous + Body Male
8. Mind Ambiguous + Body Female
9. Mind Ambiguous + Body Ambiguous
There are 9 possible mind-body gender states.
But then I remember reading a philosophy book that asks the question, "does the mind have gender?"
This is not an apt analogy. Narcissists and megalomaniacs are very different from people experiencing gender dysphoria. And complying with their preferences has very different consequences in each case. Its seems simply polite to address someone who feels female and wants to be recognised as such, to do so. And the consequences of doing so seem wholly positive to me. Even if you disbelieve them, and you think they are faking it be cool or something, it's better to give the benefit of the doubt.
EDIT: Well that didn't help. Can anyone give me some examples of the sociological usage of 'male' and 'female' in a few examples sentences. Sorry if I'm being stupid.
What do you mean by mind male/female/ambiguous? Is this referring to the psychological sense as discussed as in what an individual feels about themselves or socially as in whether they have typically masculine or female qualities or a combination of both?
Mind male = someone who thinks "I'm a male".
Mind female = someone who thinks "I'm a female".
Mind ambiguous = someone who thinks "I'm male AND female"
Body male = someone who has male genitalia
Body female = someone who has female genitalia
Body ambiguous = someone who has both male AND female genitalia
What would a mind male + body female individual be appealing to in thinking that they are male? This would clearly not be on a biological basis unless you would say that they are simply factually mistaken. My understanding is that this would need to appeal to some kind of social construct about the typical qualities associated with sex i.e. a mind male individual does not relate themselves to the qualities typically associated with a body female. Admittedly I am finding it hard to distinguish between the social and psychological senses mentioned earlier.
I am very much supportive of people seeking to improve themselves and have never told anyone that they are incapable of attaining their goals. I have said that they might have to work harder than others, but not to let that stop them. I did have a friend that, for all purposes, identified as being of a different race. He was exceedingly annoying for about 8 months, at which point I showed him a mirror and told him to let it go, he was not of the race he identified with. That was the last time he brought it up or behaved in that manner. I did not think my behaviour was wrong then, nor do I now.
Well, what I've noticed is gender-identity assumes a definite form - I'm male/female as the case may be - at a very young age, much too young for social factors to be relevant I'm afraid. Take this with a pinch of salt though as it's based on anecdotal "evidence".
As for the question that I ended my second to last post with, "does mind have a gender?" I recall writing about it on another thread. Women are, barring a few outliers, generally weaker than men and so that imposes restrictions on the options available to them in any given situation. It, in a sense, forces women or should force women, to, well, think outside the box. Over many generations, if genetic inheritance is true, the divergence between male and female brains should become sharp enough to be noticeable. These physical and mental differences will naturally become part of the social landscape - manifesting as distinct and, some might say, non-overlapping, gender roles that then take on a life of their own in the social sphere. Whether, after gender roles have been firmly established in a social context, they become a mold we impose on the young and whether this produces desired or intended results is, to me, an open question.
I don't think gender dysphoria is confusion. People who identify as the opposite gender from their sex have not made a mistake, as if they need to look in their pants to check if they got it right. They know perfectly well what sex they were born as. It just doesn't feel right in a really profound and important way (as far as I know from my conversations with such people). There's no confusion. Or is there?
Supportive yes, but you can politely point out that they have made a mistake.
Again, we should politely point out their mistake, perhaps.
Yes, as long as it is done sensitively. That's because it's clearly a mistake, at least in most cases.
The point is it's fine to tackle mistakes, but feeling you are not the gender others perceive you as is not a mistake. You can't fix it by getting people to look at their genitals.
It's important to be realistic and not come up with examples that don't really exist. Gender dysphoria is a pretty common thing that people actually have. Is race dysphoria actually a thing? Species dysphoria isn't as far as I know. I guess there are bound to be the odd one or two people who very strongly feel they should have been born as a horse (or whatever), but this is such a rare thing I don't think our intuitions about that should guide what we think about gender dysphoria.
I feel a bit uncomfortable about discussing this as I don't really know what it's like to have gender dysphoria, but I know a number of people who do and it comes up in my work, so I am interested.
However, what happened eventually, and was shown by John Calapinto is that he did not identify as female at all, as sociologists were implying. He had not even looked like a female as he had still become hairy and masculine as a even though he was given female hormones and been bullied for this. He chose to live as a male and had some kind of physical treatment to become more male again, but at the time he wrote the book he had not had surgery to create a prosthetic penis. However, he actually committed suicide a short time after the book was published.
It is worth saying that what emerged was that John was also experiencing many other life difficulties, and his twin brother also committed suicide, although I am not sure if John or his twin, who developed schizophrenia, committed suicide first. However, I think that this whole true story points to the essential nature of gender and gender identity and how it is more than a social construct. This has importance for the whole understanding of intersex conditions as well gender dysphoria.
It's odd, isn't it, that social construct theory came out of structuralism and poststructuralism and yet then proceeds with claims about absolutes. Gender IS a social construct. Umm. Well, maybe now, if that's how we agree to define the word.
The less silly version is: human gender roles are social constructs, which is certainly uncontroversial even if elements of a role optimise on the basis of sex differences, because roles are roles in a society.
Yeah, but what is a social construct? Aren't "social constructs" a nice way of saying "stereotypes"? It's a term used by the socialist left that enables them to enforce the use of stereotypes without appearing to be stereotyping.
When a man says that they feel like a woman when they wear a dress, they are reinforcing the stereotype that to be defined as a woman, you need to wear a dress. You can wear a dress and still be a man, or wear pants and still be a woman, because what clothes you wear isn't what defines a man or a woman.
I'm not sure how got this from Pfhorrest's post. The social roles in questions aren't occupational; they're gender roles. male/female is the distinction in question, and it combines with other distinctions:
Age: Man/Woman vs. Boy Girl
Family: Father/Mother/Son/Daughter vs. Man/Woman/Boy/Girl
Occupation: Waiter/Waitress (vs. the generalised occupational profile)
And so on.
"Gender" tends to refer to two distinct adjective pairs: male/female vs. masculine/feminine.
And gender expectations aren't generally strict. In fact, if a male person only has masculine traits, people tend to think of him as hyper-masculine rather than as the norm, and when it occurs in adolescents we tend to think of it as "a phase". There may be strict elements, though, depending on where and when.
It's my impression that the current discourse about being trans doesn't reject the mainstream construct, but treats it as insufficient. Most trans activists, for example, would be fine with a four-way distinction "male/female" and "cis/trans", while also being aware that this might not help genderfluid or agender people. The problem is that a social world traditionally structured for cis people isn't really equipped for the trans distinction (see public bathrooms or locker rooms), and in practise treating a trans woman like a trans woman isn't always possible because the mindset isn't widespread enough yet.
Finally, remember what I said above about strictness and hyper-masculinity/feminity? Well that's an area that tends to affect trans people differently than it does cis people. A cis-woman who is "too masculine" is a "deficient woman". A trans-woman cannot be "too masculine" under the same mindset; she - no HE - is mistankenly, deludely, or dishonestly claiming to be a man. What gender construct you buy into and apply (automatically and unreflectively for the most part) heavily influences the social reality you see.
The term "social construct" doesn't only have one meaning in sociology, but if nothing's changed the most common usage tends to come from phenomenology. Husserl - Scheler - Schütz. I think the most-cited text could have been Berger/Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality when I graduated in sociology in the early 2000s, but I'm not sure. It's definitely a defining text, though. It's not really that important here, and it's also not the whole academic picture. I'm just mentioning it in case your interest runs deep enough so you have a place to start your research, should you want to.
I would be interested if you wanted to start a thread talking about the philosophy of social constructs more generally, since it's an area I'm lacking in formal education and a discussion of it would be informative.
I'm particularly interested in something that seems to be implicitly believed by many of the kind of people who usually talk about social constructs, but not explicitly claimed so far as I'm aware: that not only are some things merely socially constructed, but everything is, there is no objective reality at all, and (most to the point I'm curious about) that all talk about things being some way or another is therefore implicitly an attempt to shape the behavior of other people to some end, in effect reducing all purportedly factual claims to normative ones.
That is to say, in claiming that all of reality is merely a social construct, such constructivism seems to reframe every apparent attempt to "merely describe reality" as actually an attempt to change how people behave, which is the function of normative claims. In other words, that no apparent assertion of fact is value-neutral: that in asserting that something or another is real or factual, you are always advancing some agenda or another, and the morality of one agenda or another can thus serve as reason to accept or reject the "reality" of claims that would further or hinder them.
I'm interested in that because it looks to me like the flip side of the same conflation of "is" and "ought" committed by scientism: where scientism supposes that a prescriptive claim can be supported by a descriptive claim, constructivism seems to suppose that all descriptive claims have prescriptive implications.
Thanks for your help Dawnstorm. I still struggling to get the concepts straight (no pun intended). I'm stuck on the logical relations between the concepts.
Just here you said that a male might have just masculine traits. Could a female have just masculine traits? Or does the definition of 'female' preclude that?
Just to go back to absolute basics for me, I'd like to disambiguate the term 'gender' as follows:
1) 'Gender' can mean biological sex, as defined by chromosomes or genitalia or whatever. Perhaps hormone levels, I don't know, but it's biological stuff that defines it. So that concept is reasonably clear in my mind.
2) 'Gender' can mean how one feels from the inside out. This is Pfhorrest's concept of 'bearing'. I think this is a useful coinage as it reduces confusion between different senses of 'gender'. This concept is also pretty clear in my mind. And this is the way the concept seems to be primarily used by the people I talk to in my work.
3) There seems to be a further concept of gender. This is what I don't really understand, unless this concept is identical with the concept of gender stereotypes, or societal expectations of what a certain biological male or female should choose in terms of career, values, hobbies, friends, what books they should read and what clothes they wear etc. This corresponds fittingly to one pair of opposites you mentioned: feminine/masculine. But it does not correspond to the other pair of opposites you mentioned: male/female. This is because in normal usage, the adoption of certain masculine or feminine gender stereotypical behaviours is NOT sufficient to make one a male or female. This can be proven (I suggest) by conceiving of a man (sense 1) who only does feminine things. This does not make him a woman, it does not change his gender. We merely say of him that he is a man doing feminine things. If he FURTHER says that he identifies as a woman, and that feels right to him (in the sense 2 of 'bearing') then this does change his gender. We then, if we are polite, refer to her and consider her a woman. It is senses 1 and 2 that determine a person's gender, and sense 3 only adds masculinity and femininity to that. So what I'm questioning is that sense 3 is not really about the male/female opposition, and wholly about the masculine/feminine opposition.
No doubt I am still very confused, but does that make my confusion clearer? Can you help me any further with this?
[I am aware of other genders than just male and female, I'm just trying to keep it simple to ease conceptual clarity.]
In orthodox terminology, it looks like (1) is sex and (2) and (3) are different ways of thinking about gender. (2) is an internalist account. (3) is an externalist account.
My trouble with (2) the internalist account is that I struggle to get a grip on its content, independent of (3). I have been reading Wittgenstein's PI (half way through) so I'm thinking in terms of how words get their meanings. If Wittgenstein is right, the meaning of a word like 'woman' can't be some private experience or state.
Suppose someone says that they are a woman. Yet in their appearance and behaviour, they display the characteristics of a man. That is, their appearance and behaviour attract our application of the word 'man’, given how we have been trained to use that word. What do we do, now? If we insist that meanings must consists in something like patterns of public usage, we cannot say that the meaning of ‘woman’ is an inner feeling of some kind.
I suspect that the best response here is to say that there is public stuff which can form the basis of a sensical language game for gender terms like ‘woman’. Someone who sincerely says that they are man will have characteristic features that we can track in some sense.
Perhaps a very minimal meaning might be: being attracted to and identifying with things tagged masculine (here we see the appeal to (3): (2) only makes sense in relation to (3)). Even if they don’t act that way, this may be because of repression and training to conform to their ‘assigned gender’. Perhaps over time they would begin to act and look more that way. But even if they did not, we might say that a man may simply be someone who, regardless of appearance, behaves their affinity with manly things.
Note that because there is no essence to 'woman' as a gender term, we are 'allowed' to imaginatively extend its application in ways that might violate certain features we thought (wrongly, because there are no essences) were essential. And there can be quite a lot of variation among these ways. The point is that whatever the meaning of 'woman' is, it must be found in (evolving, messy) public language games. Publicly invisible self-identification is insufficient. If someone said they were a woman, but we could find nothing in their manifest behaviour or appearance to indicate that we should extend the term 'woman' to them, we would be tempted to say that they were making a mistake - that they had failed to understand what 'woman' meant.
There are people who were born into bodies that they feel uncomfortable (dysphoric) about, people who find the idea of having a different body makes them feel good (euphoric). When the difference between those two body images is about sex, we call that “gender” dysphoria or euphoria.
It’s perfectly easy to communicate the fact of these feelings in public language terms that don’t involve saying “I am a man/woman” — we communicate our feelings about all kinds of things, such as who we find sexually attractive, all the time — and it’s perfectly reasonable that people should want those feelings respected and to be allowed to take actions on them as they deem appropriate without condemnation or censure.
But mixing that up with gender the social construct and insisting that others use language contrary to the way they have learned it to respect those feelings just creates unnecessary conflict. I imagine that if instead of saying “I am a woman” when someone is uncomfortable with having a penis and more comfortable with having a vagina, people said “I want to be a woman” or “I like being a woman” or something else that made it clear that what they’re communicating is something about their state of mind, there would be a lot less pushback against them.
There would still be some of course, just like men who unambiguously communicate that they like having sex with other men still get some pushback from bigots anyway. But why create more tension with people who would otherwise be allies just over this comparatively trivial linguistic and ontological issue?
And this is a reply. What are we attempting to convey here?
I'm unlikely to make a thread, as I'm a slow reader and thinker, and if something's my thread I'd feel compelled to reply to everyone who replies to me, and that would probably take up more time than I can manage. I'm not primarily a philosophyer, to boot, and I'm coming from the sociological side, and that means that I'm additionally not very confident I even can lay out the underlying philosophy. For example, phenomenological constructivism takes off from Husserl, but I'm familiar with Husserl via his sociological reception, which is already a bias.
Some of the questions you have, though, I think are pertinent to this thread, especially when it comes to the difference between "gender" and "sex" when it comes to the "male/female" pair (rather than the "masculine"/"feminine" pair), which I'm going to address in my reply to bert1.
I can address a few basics, here:
Quoting Pfhorrest
This here is difficult to untangle, because I'm not sure who you're referring to. But generally that's part and parcel in the topic. They're sociologists. Sociology is a pretty young academic discipline, and there's a sort of we-can-say-things-about-this-too attitude common here. They're competing with economists, psychologists and so on. Philosophy isn't a competitor, but more a sort of grounding. The origins of sociology lie in Comtean positivism, and constructivist schools tend to openly disagree, but not all who disagree with positivism are necessarily constructivists.
I'm not sure I'd say constructivists reduce all factual claims to normative ones, but there's definitely a trend in that direction. It's definitely strong, for example, in the Frankfurt school, who take the phenomenological perspective and modify it via communication, which they frame through Marx's historic-materialist dialectic. The idea is that every individual constructs a worldview for themselves, which is the basis for everything they do, but they don't develop that in isolation. I'm going to say this again in my reply to bert1, and use the example of gender and sex, so I'm not going to go into much detail here. (Expect a new post, since this post is likely going to be too long otherwise. Does this forum have a wordlimit per post? I've run up against that on other forums...)
Basically, the important sociological concepts here are:
Max Weber's "verstehende Soziologie" (Again, I'm not sure how this is translated into English. Wikipedia uses the header "verstehen" on the English page, so maybe they don't even translate that? The basic meaning of "verstehen" is to understand. Weber is talking about subjectively intended meaning, but he's also talking about constructing, methodologically, "ideal types" against which you compare empirical action.)
Schütz's Husserlian analyisis of everyday life.
Marx's historic materialism.
George Herbert Mead's social psychology (and maybe William Thomas' "definition of the situation").
There's a bit of pick-and-mix going on, and I'm not sure I've captured all of the important stuff. (I'm trying to figure out, for example, if there's some anthropological lineage as well, for example. Or maybe Mannheim's sociology of knowledge? A lot of this is one way road towards sociology, though, and probably not too interesting for philosophers?) I've never really tried to map "constructivism" in sociology before, so that's hard for me as well. Take nothing I say at face value. I'm out of the loop for too long, and I've never really been an expert to begin with.
What are all of the masculine traits? What are all the feminine traits? Once you have them listed, you will see that some traits stem from biology and others from society. You will then notice that the ones that stem from society are actually not masculine or feminine, rather they are human traits. It makes no sense to attribute those traits as masculine or feminine. Actually doing so is engaging in stereotyping precisely because they are human traits and not masculine or feminine traits.
I think the problem here is that it's not clear what it means to have "traits". Phenomenological constructivism says people construct a world view, and within that you make sense of the world in a way that fits what you do. So what you have to ask yourself is how how it would be possible for someone to have only "masculine" traits to be constructed as female within this world view.
Stuff you take for granted is only going to enter awareness when it becomes problematic. My initial hunch is that if you see someone who "only has masculine traits", you're likely going to just assume male, as some sort of "background radiation" of meaning.
But even more importantly: by the time we notica "feminine" trait about a "man", we've already categorised the "man" as "man", and that's why a "feminine" trait is remarkable enough to enter awareness and even focus as feminine in the first place.
However, for a sociologist, the question is primarily empirical. If you do think of someone as female, but when you try to assign traits you can't think of a single stereotypically masculine one, why is that? That would be a very interesting situation that could lead to refine the particular theory.
Note that we think of, say, a penis as a male attribute, not a masculine one. That's a social coding of some sort, part of what we think of fundamental. The thing is, though, that usually genitals are not on display, and not all people wear clothes that make the genral contours plain in view, yet, for the most part we slot people into male/female with no hesitation. We're probably wrong about that categorisation now and than without ever noticing, because attention is fleeting when it comes to passes-by. And we only notice that we're constantly assigning gender, because the process sometimes fails, and we take a second look to figure that stuff out. So the stuff that comes up in discourse about whether or not the trans condition is real, like genitals or DNA, are probably not the traits we primarily use in day-to-day life to make those judgments. They're tie breakers that work as long as worldviews are compatible.
So let's start with your (2): how people feel inside. Children acquire their worldview while living with their parents and peers (and their wider social circle beyond that). At some point they probably acquire a sense of what it means to be boy or a girl. But they've been gendered in other worldviews before that: and if you've just gone along with how people who gendered you in their world view treat you then your behaviour is going to be compatible with that worldview at the time you acquire the distinction in question, and the distinction is just one among many largely unproblematic facts about the world you take in. That does not mean that you can't sometimes "buck the trend". You can be a boy and play with dolls, for example. Depending on your parents views on propriety, you're going to run into different amounts of "trouble", the lightest probably being a short moment of surprise, or maybe even none at all. The degree to which a boying playing with a doll is noteworthy, is the degree to which the act is stereotpically feminine. You don't get an affirmative reaction to a girl playing with a doll in the same way, unless you've been "worried" that she's not "sufficiently" feminine. But all of this occurs on a baseline of maleness and femaleness. And that's your (1).
Appearance matters quite a lot when it comes to gender assignment, and if we're not sure we have couple of more privacy-intrusive methods to check: genitalia, DNA, etc. Biology. But the way we look at biological sex is heavily influenced by our interest in the topic. The categories we use to describe sex are inevitably gendered.
Trans people are, compared to cis people, very rare. They know they're transe because of how they feel inside, but that's hard to communicate, because other, much more common world views don't include that sort of discrepancies. So to figure out what to look at when it comes to biology you'd need to listen to them, but to listen to them you'd need to take them seriously, and accept that your failiur to understand is your failure to understand, and not, say, a delusion of the person who feels something - to you - incomprehensible. Someone who responds to "I'm a trans-man, you're a cis-man," with "that's stupid; you're obviously a woman," isn't likely to be in favour of funding research as to the biology of trans people.
It's not that what what we know about sex is wrong, it's because sex is gendered through a cis bias, that we the categories we have to describe sex are insufficient for the needs of trans people. I've looked into then recent research at some point, and thought that was interesting, but I'm not enough of a bilogist to understand that sort of stuff easily, and I haven't retained much. But there's definitely a gendered compenent to how we research sex and what we look at. So when you conclude here the following:
Quoting bert1
I'd say that we (cis-people) are used to use (1) to legitimise our gender, but it's really (1), too. But because we're the majority it stands largely unchallenged and doesn't often our awareness. A trans person (and a genderfluid and agender person) would be more aware of (3), simply because they keep clashing against the mainstream. The main struggle is not to be agreed with; it's to be understood in the first place, or even to get people to realise that they're misunderstood. And it's difficult to talk about because the gendering of sex also heavily influences our vocabulary. That's how we get the new prefix "cis-". But it's difficult to promote the term when cis-people generally don't have the experience that pushes the entire problem-area into awareness. There's a whole baseline of how some people relate to their body that we can't intuit. The same is true, presumably, for trans-people: what is it like to blind to that area? The difference is that nearly everyone they meet will fall into that category, from childhood on. I've heard time and again what a relief it is to find other people with a similar experience.
Gender then is the entire constellation. What and how many constellations do we find meaningful? What do we attribute to biology, etc. A social construct tends to only enter awareness if it's problematic, and the mainstream gender conception becomes problematic when we ponder trans people, intersex people, other constellation in other species (write a SF story about sentient slime molds, for example), other orderings of the same biological matter of facts in other cultures or sub-cultures etc. A social constructivist would abstract (3) from a set of compatible world-views, I think. (It's even more complex, because gender is only part of any given worldview, and worldviews might otherwise be largely compatible.)
I'm probably not explaining this very well, since I'm... unsure myself. It's been more than 20 years since I read any of the literature. I left university in my late 20ies and I'm now nearly 50. And it's really hard to understand in the place, because sort of have to imagine a world-as-is beneath a world-as-experienced, while also maintaining that you can't really do that.
Think about animated films for example: Robots, Cars, Brave Little Toasters... they're all gendered, without, logically, having a sex. We create the illusion of "sex" with very few signals, without actually assuming the underlying biology (since none of those have an underlying biology). How does that work? Gender is a sort of narrative we use to explain sex: without gender, sex esists, but is meaningless. Does that make more sense?
And yet people do it all the time. People "create" sense. Whether you think it's silly or not, it's part of social reality in some way or another. It's hard to get out of the mindset, a bit like being stuck in a metaphorical spiderweb.
I definitely agree that the biological factors are more conclusive, but to get a precise picture I'd need to describe a body as completely as possible before making the categorisation. That's not what we usually do, and once we have that wealth of details, who knows whether man/woman would still feel like a sufficent set of categories.
Anyway I'll chew over your response and reply again. I'm also behind with replying to Pfhorrest in another couple of threads.
Gender is a category of noun. That’s the only definition that matters nowadays given the heated debate over the topic of gender identity. I don’t even think Butler is wrong. But I refuse to use such a contentious term, and stick to “sex” to describe flesh-and-blood individuals.
"People do it all the time" is not a good argument. People used to believe the Earth was the center of the universe. Did that make it right? There is such a thing as mass delusions.
Another way of looking at it is that in a society where you are imprisoned for not wearing clothes, hetero and homo sexuals will need ways of identifying mates, and it is predictable that the society would develop a means of identifying the sexes. That is what a gender as a social construction is - rules for the sexes to abide by so that they be easily identified in a society where there are rules for covering your body. In a society where there are no clothes, what would gender be, or what use would gender have? As a matter of fact, these preferences that humans have and expect of the sexes is what biologists call sexual selection, not gender.
Quoting Dawnstorm
The biological factors are more conclusive because they are the constant across all societies, while the social constructions (the rules for he sexes to abide by) can vary from society to society. If the rules are arbitrary, does that mean trans-people feelings about their "bearing" is arbitrary? In a society where there are no rules about what sex wears which clothes, or a society where clothes don't exist, what would the "bearing" of a trans-person be like?
Biological sex is based on a combination of traits:
- chromosomes (in humans, XY is male, XX female)
- genitals (penis vs. vagina)
- gonads (testes vs. ovaries)
- hormones (males have higher relative levels of testosterone than women, while women have higher levels of estrogen)
- secondary sex characteristics that aren’t connected with the reproductive system but distinguish the sexes, and usually appear at puberty (breasts, facial hair, size of larynx, subcutaneous fat, etc.)
Using genitals and gonads alone, more than 99.9% of people fall into two non-overlapping classes—male and female—and the other traits almost always occur with these. If you did a principal components analysis using the combination of all five traits, you’d find two widely separated clusters with very few people in between. Those clusters are biological realities, just as horses and donkeys are biological realities, even though they can produce hybrids (sterile mules) that fall morphologically in between.
That's a question I'm not confident on. It's really a philosophyical question, and I'm not sure how far you have to answer that question to use the theory. It might look a lot like idealism, but I think that's more methodological if anything. In fact, I think the underlying is issue is more epistemological than anything: Sociologists purportedly look at what people do, and constructivists think you can't look at what people do without also looking at what they think they do (that's the Max Weber angle I mentioned but didn't explain in my reply to Pfhorrest). As such sex is a topic for biologists, not sociologists, but biologists researching sex is a topic for sociologists, and that's why sex is gendered while also being real.
Two constructivists/constructionists argue. How many opinions are involved? Somewhere between one and, oh let's take a guess, seven. The participants aren't sure. Sure, that's a joke, but it does reveal something about the mindset: if you construct your world view and your own one is all you have, how does communication work? How do you spot differences?
An example of a proposed methodology would be Ethnomethodology: the idea to describe to your own culture as if it were alien to you. One particular method is the breaching experiment: you pick an element your culture takes for granted and breach that element: the idea is to figure out the nature of the difficulties that arise. Wikipedia should give a good overview (because it's also brief and contains examples). A constructivist will often be aware that them studying society is part of the topic they're studying. (I'm not entirely sure whether Ethnomethodologists actually view themselves as constuctivitsts or not, but they do share a lot of assumptions.)
So my hunch is that the ontology isn't really a major focus of the research; I can imagine both idealist and materialist mothodologists. Also note they're often coming from phenomenology, which feels like something inbetween. I really need to say at this point that I'm not confident on this topic; I'm not that familiar with philosophy.
Quoting Harry Hindu
It's not supposed to be an argument. It's supposed to highlight the topic. Bilogoists study sex, sociologists study bioloigists studying sex and as such many of them assume that sex is gendered, because they're part of soiciety (as they are themselves, which many of them are aware of).
Quoting Harry Hindu
I'm not sure if the "Using...alone" construction suggests that if you add more stuff in (like, say, hormones) things would get more clear. My own hunch is that the more details you add the more useful classes you could get. The key word here is "useful". A sociologist (of a certain kind) reads such a word and automatically asks "for whom" and "how".
Quoting Harry Hindu
Yes, they're a biological reality. And at least for a naturalist biologigists looking at such clusters are a biological reality, too, but a much more complicated one. If you have a way to replace sociology with a biological method that's both efficient and comprehensible to human brains, I'd be interest to hear about it.
I'm not a sociologist. I studied sociology at university, but didn't keep up with it after graduating. These days I know more about linguistics, which was a side topic, than about sociology, which is sort of embarrassing. I just think any term out there is only useful in limited contexts. That's why "significant other" has a meaning in day to day life that's completely different from its technical term.
I don't suggest that it's useful for biologists to use the term "gender". It might be, but that's for biologists to figure out, and I'm not one, not even hobby-wise. I do suggest its useful for sociologists to use the term gender when they talk about biologists studying sex.
As for social politics: it very nearly doesn't matter what terms you use, since they'll always be tied up more with interests in the end, than they would have been if purely motivated by curiosity (not that academic usage is ever only purely motivated by curiosity). I'm fine with using gender here, simply because I'm used to it.
I do think biological research framed by the cis/trans distinction is interesting, though, even though it doesn't impact me personally. There was some around last time I checked, but I didn't understand at least half of it. If it were more mainstream, we'd probably get more expert talk about it in terms I could understand.
Part of the worldview you construct includes
your construction of the worldview of others. If their worldview is radically different than yours, there will be only superficial basis for communication. We live among multiple worlds , even within our own immediate family, offering us various levels of effective communicative understanding. We spot differences whoever out anticipations of the others’ behavior are invalidated by something g they do which puzzles us , which forces us eventually to re-construct within our worldview so as to anticipate more effectively. A worldview is nothing but an integrated system of anticipations.
They are similar but I think not the same. Idealism says that what you perceive is what is real. Constructivism, as I understand it, is more like ontological relativism: what you believe is what is real.
It's analogous to the difference between hedonism and relativism in moral philosophy, I think. The former says that whatever feels good (hedonistically) is morally good, the latter says whatever people think is good is morally good. Likewise, idealism says whatever looks true (empirically) is really true, while constructivism says that whatever people think is true is really true.
And sociologists understand that in order for a species to procreate and continue to exist, its members need to distinguish males from females. Sociologists need to be able to do that to.
Quoting Dawnstorm The same way that female peacocks use male peacock traits to select the best mate and father of its offspring.
I already stated that how it is used is to distinguish males from females in a society where it is the law to cover your body. Gender as a social construction is sexual selection - the preferences we have for specific traits in a mate.
Sociology is just one characteristic of biology and stems from our physiology. Searching for mates and mating is a biological process.
I think you're probably right. But I suspect some trans people will strongly object (not that I know that). When it comes to identity people can be quite firm about what they want to say of themselves, insisting that "No, I mean what I say, I am a woman." I could be wrong though.
OK, I've read you post a couple more times. I'm still struggling with it, not sure why!
Are you saying that it's not just gender-the-social-construct that is socially constructed, but also the concept of sex and even the first person phenomenology of the gender dysphoric (or even euphoric) person?
If so, is this simply an a fortiori move from "Everything is socially constructed, gender is a thing, so that's socially constructed too." I get the feeling it's more interesting than that. For it to be more interesting, I'd like you to contrast gender with a concept that is not socially constructed (or at least not as socially constructed), so I can see the difference. I'm being awfully demanding here, you don't have to do anything obviously, and this might be quite a lot of work for you. You've already been very helpful. So this is a general invitation for anyone who things gender is socially constructed, to contrast it with a concept that isn't.
It's not that everything is socially constructed; it's that all meaning is socially constructed, but there is a difference in what ways that matters. Take gravity. Just like sex, we also only look at gravity in terms of what interests us. Yet, we don't have a split terminology here, like we have with sex/gender. I mean, the difference between weight and mass is something that only phycists really ponder (and those interested in the discipline, and those who use it to build stuff). It's a distinction that's far less useful in day-to-day life than in specific contexts. Sex is different, in that it's meaning in the form of gender is very pervasive in society, so before we become scientists we've already taken it all into account when looking at sex scientifically. That's not different from gravity, but there's likely less resistance here, because the difference between mass and weight and is not unequally distributed between people, so we all share largely the same realtionship to the "meaning of gravity".
Sex has many constellations, though, if you consider all aspects, such as physognomy, hormones, DNA, etc. Take DNA: you might decide, when you do research, that DNA is foundational. That is certain constellations are male, others female, and the rarer ones are mix. But in daily life we don't perceive DNA. When we assign gender we go by more visible stuff. We don't ask people for DNA tests to prove their sex. In most contexts it's just not practical. So: in what contexts would it be practical to look at DNA? When sex is ambigous. Basically, in cases of intersex or trans configurations, we could use DNA tests as "tie breakers".
Does this work? Well enough for people who feel no conflict with the gender they themselves were assigned for birth (even in those very rare cases where a DNA test might give them a surprise). That is: using a DNA test to determine gender might be a tie-breaker, but it's also - implicitly - a way of saying "That's your problem." You can probably explain sex in terms of the male/female dichotomy for those ambiguous cases, too, but it requires more effort, and is not as accessible to laymen (like, say, the difference between weight and mass).
A gender division between male and female makes sense if you research the devision of labour between the two sexes in the context of reproduction. What biologoical constellations can still breed? But if we take the results of this sort of research as foundational for social organisation, we cause problems for people who can't or don't want to breed. There might be physical regularities we're missing because the gender divide is instinctive to a majority of people (and non-instinctive for some, who don't have an alternative way to make sense of their bodies, because their parents and peers don't provide one). There are questions such as "Is the brain gendered," in the sense that some brains might send warning signals when it's business as usual. A while ago I found research in that direction, but everything I could find was funded by organisations that support trans rights. And, well, who else would?
I can't think of a similar social conflict for gravity. All we really care about on Earth is weight, and the rest is for experts in specicalised context (engineering, astronomy...) The standard concept of gravity disadvantages no-one, so we can easily stick with it.
Then there are social constructs that rely on social artefacts to exist: money, marriage, even objects like tables. We make those things based on meaning they have. A tree stump is not a table, but if we use it like one it has some of its attributes. Sex and gravity are not like tables. Sexual reproduction works the way it works regardless what social constructs we build around it. Gender is more dependent on sex then sex on gender. However, we do modify our bodies on occasion. When a trans person transitions, we're processing the body towards a gendered ideal. The resulting sexual constellation is due to human interferance. That's not so unlike the creation of an artifact, say a table. We modify what's there so that it's more useful to us.
Now at that point, it's social life that becomes important. Gender terms are not emotinally neutral, and everyday people are not biologists. So, when people say "I'm a man," or "I'm a woman", they're usually ignorant of the specifics of their body, though they have baseline feeling that's base of what those distinctions feel like. That's also where it gets mixed up with interpretative norms (socially constructed) and their applications.
So, for example, if we take the trans condition seriously we can ask questions: is it one condition? Is it different for trans males and trans females? What do trans men and cis men have in common and how do they differ? We can only ask these questions because of lived experience, and lived experience occurs in a social context.
I'm not sure I'm making myself clear here. This is complex, and I'm not an expert. I'd have known more around two decades ago. Basically what I'm saying is that both "gender" and "gravity" are social constructs, but they work in different ways with regards to the relation of the underlying reality to the socially consturcted reality taken for granted by many people to the point of near invisibility. Gender is about the framing of sex. We're not talking about the framing of gravity in the same way, because on earth g is a constant. If two categories of gender worked equally well for all people, we wouldn't talk about the framing of sex either. Everything is filtered through worldviews, but some things are cognitively distant enough, or universal enough (it's not always clear what the difference is) so that this has little practical effect. A hypothesis here might be that when it comes to sex, people cis-people might think sex is one of those things, while trans people don't. Lack of evidence can come from a lack of physical substratus, or from a social lack of interest and thus a lack of targeted research.
Does any of this make sense? I'm running up against my limits.