Gender Is More Than A Social Construct

It’s more complicated than you think.

image credit pflagpdx.org

Gender issues have been in the news a lot lately — the political footballs of restroom use and transgender hormone therapy in children are quickly becoming the most controversial topics, but there’s a more important side to the conversation that this sudden spotlight hides in the shadows.

A common, trending ideology is that gender is simply a social construct, and that it couldn’t possibly be anything else. You might have even heard this yourself, or perhaps at a certain level, you believe it must be fundamentally true. It seems reasonable, right? After all, what does pink or blue really have to do with male and female? It doesn’t.

To suggest that there are some elements of gender that are not a social construct, but rather innate to the individual, is to invoke the possibility of a reality in which there are fundamental differences between humans along lines of gender. This would be very challenging to the worldview of many.

Some in the feminist community oppose this notion out of fear that the prevalence and acceptance of transgender persons will challenge the existing narrarative that gender is purely a social construct, which has historically been a very important concept to feminism as a whole.

Yet the best course of action is actually found in not dismissing this concept entirely. It’s not quite wrong, but it’s not right, either. Let me explain why:

Gender is a spectrum, not a binary, and sex characteristics are more varied than many believe — there are those who are born with various combinations of the genetic, mental, and even physical characteristics traditionally associated with male and female. We use the terms assigned male at birth and assigned female at birth because regardless of whether these differences are very noticeably physical or undetectably hidden in the developing mind of a child, we assign either ‘male’ or ‘female’ to the individual.

But this assignment isn’t just about what’s between someone’s legs or what’s between their ears — in fact, it’s an assignment of an entire series of expected behaviors. Which assignment a person has will directly affect not only how they are raised, but also how everyone around them will perceive them — and therefore, prejudice against them — for the rest of their lives.

These are the deadly societally-created gender roles that are so often discussed and reviled — with good reason. They force those assigned as men to repress their emotions to oft-disastrous results, and those assigned as women to do more and earn less for their efforts. These behavioral expectations negatively impact both men and women in a variety of ways. They also especially negatively impact genderfluid and genderqueer people, who have difficulty in being perceived or judged as who they are, as opposed to their outward appearances.

But that doesn’t mean that gender expression, in and of itself, is inherently bad. Here’s the surprising kicker — the complicating piece that means we really, absolutely, genuinely have to take a step back and re-examine how we all think about gender:

There are fundamental differences from human to human in brain composition that are related to gender.

You can see a few examples of this, but perhaps the most prominent ones for our purposes are the differences in the brains of gender non-conforming people.

So where does this leave us? Well..

Are we so sure that everything about gender is socially constructed? As a transgender woman two years into a hormone regimen, I can tell you from personal experience that they make a massive difference in emotional responses from testosterone to estrogen. But I can also tell you that these hormonal changes only seem to help me to align my emotional responses (among other things) with what I felt to be correct. I can only assume that these differences in my brain are the cause of this.

But I also happen to know other transgender women (let alone the vastly different other gender non-conforming folks!) who feel very differently about this same topic.

Gender identity and gender expression is unique to every individual, and ridiculing that individual’s identity or expression because it doesn’t mesh with your worldview is, simply, wrong.

And it doesn’t have to be an ounce more complicated than that.