I claimed that the WHO article communicates a social constructionist view of gender (i.e. that gender is a social construct). This is based on how the WHO article specifically says:
Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other. As a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time.
Emphasis is mine.
Furthermore, gender (as a social construct) is differentiated from sex, which is treated as biologically real, again from the WHO article:
Gender interacts with but is different from sex, which refers to the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons, such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive organs.
I am failing to see what doesn’t track about my interpretation of this WHO page, which part of my interpretation do you think I am mistaken about?
I feel like picking on an overview that explicitly acknowledges intersex individuals for not addressing the social construction of sex, while simultaneously being critical of it for addressing the social construction of gender is a bit nit-picky
Hm, I don’t yet see the connection you are making between intersex individuals and sex? Are you saying that the acknowledgement of intersex individuals implies sex is a social construct? The article explicitly says sex is the biological and physiological characteristics, and contrasts it with gender as a social category.
Perhaps I am being nit-picky (I’ve been told I can be this way, lol), but I don’t intend to be critical or harsh as much as just very clear about what the WHO article is communicating - which is the typical sex/gender distinction that I am trying to point out doesn’t work.
I really feel like there’s this persistent conflation of gender categories and gender identity in your interpretation of what others are expressing, and an insistence that talking about social constructs is an endorsement of social constructionism as a whole.
It seems like we agree that the roles and attitudes we ascribe to gender categories are not objective, but socially constructed.
“Gender” is regularly used to refer to both the category and the individuals identity as being to some degree a member of that category, and it’s expected that people know which is being referred to by context.
I’ve been thinking about this. You want to distinguish gender, as social roles and categories, from gender identity and point out that gender is clearly a social construct but gender identity is not.
Sure, the biology determines the gender identity (read: subconscious sex), but it also plays a role in behavior and physiology in a way that can’t be cleanly separated from social roles, attitudes, categories, etc. Just to state the obvious, sexual traits have a bimodal distribution in a way that shows up in the binary quality of the social categories - it’s not really a coincidence that the biology displays broad sexual dimorphism and the social categories reflect this, even if the biology is much more nuanced and complicated than our social categories imply. My point here is that the social categories are not entirely separate from the biology, there are obvious ways the biology influences the categories.
Furthermore, the gender identity is a way that the biology has consequences on gender as social categories and vice versa, since gender identity seems to orient the person’s gender and those social categories can either accord or conflict with that person’s gender identity. David Reimer, a cis man, being raised as a girl felt conflict with being raised that way - he was rowdy and showed certain proclivities that boys commonly do, despite being raised as a girl. Trans people have similar experiences where their innate tendencies accord with the gender category they were not being raised as. Somehow a person knows they should be a man or a woman, despite those being social categories.
I don’t think the gender vs gender identity distinction solves the problem I am describing though it is an interesting argument. There are still biological components that play a role in what we call “gender” that we cannot claim only comes from socialization, even if some aspects of the social categories clearly are due to arbitrary socialization (like girls being drawn to pink and boys being drawn to blue).
Meanwhile, we tend to think about the biology wrong too, we fail to see the way the biology itself is communicated and understood through scientific concepts which are created to be useful to a particular end, and are not perfect accounts of the underlying reality it is trying to describe. Our biological concepts are useful fictions in many ways, and in that sense the supposed objectivity of “biological sex” melts into the same arbitrariness of a social construct. Sex is not as objective as we would have thought, and gender is not as arbitrary as we might think. In fact the sex/gender distinction doesn’t makes sense when we know the gender category a person lives as comes from the biology and the sex characteristics are oversimplified models.
In your example involving race, I don’t think that’s a good comparison. In your example the person is saying words that generally minimize the importance of race while attempting to convey that they’re not prejudiced. Critically, everyone agrees to what the words are referring to.
In the “gender is a social construct” case, I don’t think there’s agreement about what the word “gender” is referring to. The speaker means gender category, and the listener keeps understanding it as gender identity.
I used this example precisely because it illustrates a case where the person is accidentally racist, and where the racist doesn’t understand the nuance and racist side-effects of their supposedly progressive color-blindness. I think this is exactly like “gender is a social construct”, since it has accidental transphobic outcomes that are not commonly understood and certainly aren’t what people usually are trying to support.
You don’t have to think gender is gender identity to think “gender is a social construct” is problematic, hopefully I have managed to communicate the reasons why above.
I claimed that the WHO article communicates a social constructionist view of gender (i.e. that gender is a social construct). This is based on how the WHO article specifically says:
Emphasis is mine.
Furthermore, gender (as a social construct) is differentiated from sex, which is treated as biologically real, again from the WHO article:
I am failing to see what doesn’t track about my interpretation of this WHO page, which part of my interpretation do you think I am mistaken about?
Hm, I don’t yet see the connection you are making between intersex individuals and sex? Are you saying that the acknowledgement of intersex individuals implies sex is a social construct? The article explicitly says sex is the biological and physiological characteristics, and contrasts it with gender as a social category.
Perhaps I am being nit-picky (I’ve been told I can be this way, lol), but I don’t intend to be critical or harsh as much as just very clear about what the WHO article is communicating - which is the typical sex/gender distinction that I am trying to point out doesn’t work.
I’ve been thinking about this. You want to distinguish gender, as social roles and categories, from gender identity and point out that gender is clearly a social construct but gender identity is not.
Sure, the biology determines the gender identity (read: subconscious sex), but it also plays a role in behavior and physiology in a way that can’t be cleanly separated from social roles, attitudes, categories, etc. Just to state the obvious, sexual traits have a bimodal distribution in a way that shows up in the binary quality of the social categories - it’s not really a coincidence that the biology displays broad sexual dimorphism and the social categories reflect this, even if the biology is much more nuanced and complicated than our social categories imply. My point here is that the social categories are not entirely separate from the biology, there are obvious ways the biology influences the categories.
Furthermore, the gender identity is a way that the biology has consequences on gender as social categories and vice versa, since gender identity seems to orient the person’s gender and those social categories can either accord or conflict with that person’s gender identity. David Reimer, a cis man, being raised as a girl felt conflict with being raised that way - he was rowdy and showed certain proclivities that boys commonly do, despite being raised as a girl. Trans people have similar experiences where their innate tendencies accord with the gender category they were not being raised as. Somehow a person knows they should be a man or a woman, despite those being social categories.
I don’t think the gender vs gender identity distinction solves the problem I am describing though it is an interesting argument. There are still biological components that play a role in what we call “gender” that we cannot claim only comes from socialization, even if some aspects of the social categories clearly are due to arbitrary socialization (like girls being drawn to pink and boys being drawn to blue).
Meanwhile, we tend to think about the biology wrong too, we fail to see the way the biology itself is communicated and understood through scientific concepts which are created to be useful to a particular end, and are not perfect accounts of the underlying reality it is trying to describe. Our biological concepts are useful fictions in many ways, and in that sense the supposed objectivity of “biological sex” melts into the same arbitrariness of a social construct. Sex is not as objective as we would have thought, and gender is not as arbitrary as we might think. In fact the sex/gender distinction doesn’t makes sense when we know the gender category a person lives as comes from the biology and the sex characteristics are oversimplified models.
I used this example precisely because it illustrates a case where the person is accidentally racist, and where the racist doesn’t understand the nuance and racist side-effects of their supposedly progressive color-blindness. I think this is exactly like “gender is a social construct”, since it has accidental transphobic outcomes that are not commonly understood and certainly aren’t what people usually are trying to support.
You don’t have to think gender is gender identity to think “gender is a social construct” is problematic, hopefully I have managed to communicate the reasons why above.