Gender is socially constructed.

This is a concept that social scientists across a spectrum of fields agree upon, so I’m not opening the floor here for people to start arguing that gender is innate. We define gender as the socially derived expectations, norms, and roles mapped onto a category of individuals based on sex category; we define sex category as one’s biological assignment based on sexual reproductive role. It’s worth noting that some societies have a third gender that is not necessarily mapped onto the biological male/female binary, and also worth noting that there are intersexed people who fall outside that biological binary as well. For the purposes of this post, I am mostly discussing gender in its most commonly-used context, as a socially constructed ideal mapped onto biological males and females.

I hope everyone’s with me so far.

Now, a reader who has been commenting on a different post brought up the question of how one can recognize gender as a social construct and still identify as male or female. This post is kind of a response to that question (though said reader has been highly antagonistic towards us so I hope ze sees this because I’m not posting the link). (Yes, I used ze, I’m not assuming gender here. I’ll get to that in a second.)

Here’s the thing we need to realize: ALL elements of identity are socially constructed. Identity markers are categories created for the purposes of social organization–everything from what we define as family, to gender, to race or ethnicity…these are social constructs, but they still play a role in defining how we see ourselves. So if you define yourself in any way, you necessarily buy into some form of social construct. Psychology tells us that humans defer to categorization in order to understand relationships and qualities-~-the brain works off hierarchies so that recognizing one or two things about a given subject can trigger other thoughts so that conclusions can be drawn without details being needed. All of these social categories are a general result of this need for social organization.

Rejecting a gender category is actually a very difficult process, given the way our society works. This brings us to a concept in gender I have probably under-covered on this blog: gender identity vs gender expression. Gender identity refers to how we see ourselves, but gender expression refers to what we show others. Society “reads” gender on us, and does so in such a way that if we CAN be put into a category, it will put us into that category. Cis gendered people’s sex category, gender identity, and gender expression all match, but trans gendered people have a gender identity opposite that assigned to their sex category, and the process of transforming is a change in gender expression such that society will read the correct gender. Gender non-conforming folk have a gender identity outside the gender binary, which means that gender expression becomes interesting to negotiate, and neither of these necessarily match sex category.

My point here is that gender, while not “innate”, is still fairly ubiquitous in our society. It is in fact one of the earliest labels we assign to a person, from the moment the doctor announces “it’s a boy” or “it’s a girl”, and is one of the most basic dividing categories in human history.

The important thing here is that we can buy into a label or a category without it necessarily having to be innate. Just for example, think about the idea of participating in a religion: religious identity isn’t innate, but it is an important part of many people’s lives. It comes to influence their values, their lifestyles, etc., but it’s not something inherent to them. You’re Catholic because you practice Catholicism, nothing more, but that doesn’t make a Catholic identity insignificant.

Similarly, we can buy into a gender identity and accept a gendered label while still recognizing that it is a socially derived category. In

fact, because society is organized into labeled categories, it makes sense that people attempt to find the labels which most adequately fit their understandings of themselves. The problem comes when individuals are forced to remain in categories they feel do not adequately fit them, and in response, society has created alternative labels-~-for example, “genderqueer” or “gender non-conforming”. These are more amorphous categories, created out of a more recent understanding that if gender is truly socially constructed and not innate, then this artificial binary may not capture everyone.

The problem doesn’t come from people accepting labels or buying into identities: it comes from these categories being ranked and ordered, and from groups imposing particular expectations and rules on other groups on the basis of these identities. Feminism doesn’t necessarily reject the idea of gender, but it does reject the idea that one gender category should be and is prioritized over the other(s). It rejects the idea that society can impose limits and double-standards on women simply because they are women. The problem also comes when people make particular presumptions that everyone within a category is the same; while this is in line with my previous argument about categories and hierarchical information storage, the reality is that there are different ways in which people access their gender identity or sexuality, different ways in which a person can be feminine or identify as female, and all of those should be acceptable. It is when society tells us that our identities are wrong, or that our identities are punishable, that these categories become a harm.

All of that said, at the end of the day, all of us buy into categories that have expectations and assumptions attached to them. If you haven’t read my post “On Being Cisgendered” (which is about gender non-conformance and accepting gender identity), take a look. All of us carry with us ways in which we define ourselves, which are socially constructed. We understand ourselves in relation to the rest of society. And there’s actually nothing innately wrong with that, either.

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Posted in Gender Roles

Tags: Gender, LGBTQ, Masculinity, Rhetoric, The Binary Breakdown, WGSS