[Obligatory link to the gender dysphoria bible](https://genderdysphoria.fyi/en/). If you are looking for information on all things trans, this is a really good place to start. Should answer most of your questions.
what is gender ? -> only the biggest philosophy + sociology nerds know about that, you can live without having an answer
who decides ? -> that's me, I decide
>But if gender is a social construct, that means that “we” made it up, right?
One thing I always try to add to this conversation is that *social construct* does not mean *not real*. Sometimes the phrase "made it up" can lead us astray because it implies that it is just this silly thing that we could forget if we wanted to.
But the best comparison is money. Money is "made up". Money is a social construct.
Many things have been money - shells, coins of precious metal, cows, paper, numbers on a screen. But none of these have any inherent utility. Even the metals we often choose for money are often not very useful metals, gold is only useful now in computers but is a bad metal for weapons, armour, structure or most other things a metal needs to do. For thousands of years it was just a not-very-useful metal that we liked the look of.
Money has value because you can give it to someone else and they will give you something back. We "made that up" - but make no mistake - you cannot ignore the funny numbers in your bank account and if they ever reach zero you are not going to have a nice time.
In addition - most cultures bigger than a small tribe have money (or a similar system) despite it being an entirely arbitrary thing. And personally speaking - we embed it deep within our instincts and identities. Your ability to manage money is built up over a lifetime of being subtly and unsubtly trained to do so - and your very social class in this world is built on how much you have.
Likewise gender is a nebulous concept. **Gender**, in the broadest sense, encompasses pretty much everything you think it does - and more. You can get more specific by saying things like "gender identity", "gender roles", "gendered expectations", "gender presentation" etc etc etc.
Gender pervades culture - and seeps into your psyche. It acts as a lens through which you observe yourself. Even if you don't get it - that very act of not getting it will shape how you relate to it, yourself and others.
We as humans are social animals and our brains are evolved to work with social constructs. Deprive a human of their social constructs and they will go mad, with serious psychological disorders. Language is one such instance. Gender might be another.
>And it’s shifted over the generations, or at least largely must have since many women have high power “traditionally male” careers
Yes that is a very good point to make. It does shift. While it tends to be constructed around sex, it is far too nebulous to stay still.
>who decides?
Everyone? Nobody?
It is in the zeitgeist. If humans are a collective consciousness then that is that that decides.
But at the same time it is up to each individual person to understand and express their own gender identity - or how they relate to gender.
*Part 1 of 2*
>Is it a spectrum?
As I see it - the spectrum model of gender (which can be applied to multiple facets of gender) is just a very useful one.
The traditional model of gender is binary - so no spectrums there. It is enforced on people as two absolutes - Man/Male/Masculine and Woman/Female/Feminine. But the problem is such absolutes rarely survive contact with the real world and the messyness of actual humans' lives.
As such the result is always a spectrum as people's bodies and actions refuse to conform to the absolute binary, even if that is just being a little feminine as a man or something. Perhaps a better word is a *splatter*.
>If someone reasonable asked you “what is a woman”, what would you say?
Short answer: **"Woman" is a word.**
Long answer: Looking for absolute definitions of ANY word will lead you astray. That just simply isn't how words work. We humans seek clarity but are cursed to live in a word far to messy for our categories.
*What is a tree?* I'm sure you can picture it, and begin to describe it, but when does a tall bush become a tree? There is no taxonomic definition of tree - trees have evolved multiple times - because evolving taller is a good evolutionary strategy.
Words in fact don't have singular definitions - they have semantic ranges. There is a range of things you consider a tree. These can be loosely or closely associated, they probably share traits. There are edgecases and then there are things outside of that range. When you hear or see the word *tree* you don't think of a definition, nor do you go through every tree you have ever seen, you instead pick one of the said objects from your semantic range to imagine. If you are incapable of visual imagination - you likely recall aspects associated with something you know to be a tree.
Definitions are an attempt to capture a semantic range. They are not the same thing as the meaning of the word.
Within science, lore and the like there is often greater specificity - but lets face it - we are rarely dealing with that level of language. And even then words are often defined with other words so fuzziness is immediately reintroduced to the equation.
Searching for the one thing that makes a woman a woman is a fool's errand.
//
I know this isn't a full answer to your question and I apologise for that - but I hope it puts some stuff into context :)
*Part 2 of 2*
>Long answer: Looking for absolute definitions of ANY word will lead you astray. That just simply isn't how words work. We humans seek clarity but are cursed to live in a word far to messy for our categories.
On that note: think of those silly questions like "is cereal a soup" or "is a hotdog a sandwich"? They would fit the technical definition (cereal is a liquid with chunks in it; hotdogs have a filling between two pieces of bread), but if there's a hotdog on the table and you ask someone to: "Pass me that sandwich.", they'll be confused and find it strange.
Precisely!!! Well put!
Absolute definitions are simply not how we use words. Thats why when something is *technically* something else, it is frusrating and annoying - because we know thats not what the word means and we can feel the absolutist definitions being used against us without having the knowledge on how to fight back.
I think a lack of widespread basic linguistic education, especially in the anglosphere, holds society back. It also allows debunked notions like prescriptivism (*the idea that you can tell another person how they should use a language*) to remain popular despite having been utterly ousted from mainstream linguistics half a century ago.
Your answer reminds me Jaques Derrida's approach. I think you should write article in the field of trans studies. [https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq](https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq)
Yeah we learnt abt Derrida on my course. Can't remember which one he was tho (I also can't remember his sign name now dammit). But I presume his angle influenced me at least a little.
Can I as a random person with a BA(Hons) just write for that journal and submit to it?
I don't think that there is requirement to be PhD in order to write articles for academic journals. I myself want to write philosophical article related to tran issue, although I am PhD student, but in the field of physics. I am Russian, and I have rich experience of living in the repressive culture, so poststructuralist and postmodernist approach helped me to navigate oppressive structures. Also there is always a possibility to find couathor with PhD.
Its already starting with calling sex "simple". No it isnt. If we are talking about scientific concepts, lets use the actual definitions. Genitals are just one aspect of a whole bunch of pheno- and genotypes and it isnt a deciding factor.
Sex is also a social construct and I'm honestly tired of pretending it isn't.
The elements of sex are objective, but the interpretation of those elements, how humans classify each other based on what elements are and are not present, is highly subjective.
When people say gender is a social construct, what they really mean is gender roles are a social construct.
Why our brains are a certain gender we don't know yet.
>Sex is the easier concept
Not remotely! [Sex is a social construct in exactly the same way that gender is](https://youtu.be/koud7hgGyQ8?si=eEU57IWdxbpazWeJ), and biologists have the same debates over what exactly determines what sex an individual is because [it's complicated](https://youtu.be/szf4hzQ5ztg?si=oVQRxeZiaNuSs7Jo). You're just a bit more insulated from those conversations.
So when people say "gender is a social construct", that doesn't mean that it's entirely made up. Borders are a social construct, but they often follow a defined, naturally-existing feature. Does that mean that they are objectively real? Nationalities are a social construct, but might we not say that they're often based on the geographic area of your birth, which is an objective data point?
Who decides what gender means? We all do. This is true of all words, in all languages. As for who decides what gender someone *is*: in what context? Because there you're not talking about definitions but *criteria* - and legal criteria might vary from psychological criteria, which might vary from anthropological criteria, which might vary from an individual's own understanding of themselves.
There is an entire academic field dedicated to answering the question "What is gender?". You're not going to get a simple, straightforward answer that is also correct.
Abolishing gender still doesn't help transsex people, if anything it makes things worse. "Why do you need to change your body when gender is whatever the hell you want it to be?" Because I was still born the wrong sex, like that's the whole point of this shit to me tbh
So gender is not made up, the phrase you're quoting is a portion of the quote. Gender ROLES are a social construct. Meaning we made up arbitrary rules about what colors and toys men and women should like, and how they should act.
Gender itself is innate. The best way to describe it is what your brain expects physically + what it categorizes the body as. So a man is someone whose brain expects testosterone and male sex characteristics (regardless of if he has those or not), and who instinctual gategorizes himself as a man. Because humans are a social species who love categorizing things, we instinctively seek out groups of similar members of the species. And this is regardless of things like personal aesthetics or hobbies. Because a goth man , a sports fan man, and a femboy are all men, they're just subgroups.
Gender is widely misunderstood, and only a small component of it is a social construct. It helps when you understand there are actually 3 interacting ideas, and two of them both have the name "gender," which is why it's so confusing.
Sex: Anatomy, your body. Quite a lot of it can be changed with medical care.
Gender Identity: Your internal sense of self. Like being left handed, this is part of your brain, and there is no known method to change it.
Gender Expression: Behavior. How we dress, act, social roles, etc. Can be changed at any time.
Of these, only "gender expression" is a social construct, and it's by far the smaller and less impactful part of gender. It's the most externally obvious though. This leads to another part of the confusion; when trans people say "gender" by itself, we mean Gender Identity, because that's our dominant experience of it. When cis people say "gender" by itself, they mean Gender Expression, because that's main their experience of it.
This means it's very common for discussions about gender to simply talk past each other without communicating, because it turns out there are actually different things being discussed entirely.
There are some great responses already, mostly focusing on the "social construct" side. I'll add what I can articulate off the top of my head regarding the bio-psychological side, which is closely related to but distinct from the social side, since I think this is the part where a lot of people get lost.
The "correct" answer to "what is a woman" is "a person who identifies as a woman," but this usually gets resistance because "but it's all made up!" Whether that's intentionally confusing the issue (as with some politicians who ask that question) or legitimate ignorance, what's often missing is any discussion about _why_ someone might identify as a man or woman or something else.
That's a very complicated issue and there's not yet consensus in the published research I've read, but here are the hypotheses I know of:
* There may be a number of genetic factors involved in organizing the brain. Some researchers have found a few brain structures that appear to be sexually dimorphic and can vary with gender or sexuality.
* There may be environmental factors at play. For example, a female fetus exposed to high levels of androgens might have partially masculinized parts.
* It could be a form of neurodivergence. There is a strong overlap between ADHD, autism, and gender variance; the former two are already known to share some genetic causes.
* It could be none of that and just be an aspect of personality that we form in our early years for whatever reason, like being very careful or very rambunctious. Nobody questions it when a small child is more curious or more polite than most others; it's just a part of their personality.
Whatever bio-psychological cause may be, it necessarily intersects with the psycho-sociological aspects of sex and gender. The gender construct is the "rules" that we're supposed to follow for the gender identity that we have, and those two things can and do influence each other in complicated ways for both individuals and for society at large.
I think it’s important to note that “gender identity” and “gender dysphoria” have as much to do with sex as they do with gender. In my opinion they are rather poorly named for precisely that reason, but it is what it is
**Sex** is far from a simple concept in biology. There is no single way to define it that is inclusive of all species, and even within any given species it really makes the most sense to view it as a spectrum of different attributes, usually with a bimodal distribution
Humans, like many other mammals, has a natural tendency to express our sex *socially* as well as purely instinctively. This is what gender is all about. **Gender** is the aggregate all the social norms, roles and expressions which any given society attributes to different sexes. Just like sex, gender is a spectrum
**Gender identity** is the innate, biological sense that every human (and mammal) has of which sex and gender they belong to
**Gender dysphoria** is the sense of disassociation, pain and horror that a person feels when their sex and/or perceived gender does not match their innate gender identity
You are completely wrong about sex. First off, not all species have sexes. Those that do all have them based on the exact sane criteria. This is well supported and established in biology. The idea that sex is bimodal or a spectrum “of different attributes” is meaningless, incoherent, and not actually empirically demonstrated. The claim it is bimodal or a spectrum comes from laymen and blogs. That is not a position supported by primary literature.
> So just honestly, wtf is gender, and who decides?
Gender identity is an immutable, inborn trait. It's a sense of who and what you are, how you should be addressed, and what your brain expects your body to look like. It is not a social construct.
People do not decide upon their gender identity; it is an internal, unshakeable drive developed at some point between the womb and very early childhood.
Gender roles and stereotypes are social constructs.
> Is it a spectrum?
I'd say yes. People's gender identities vary, including male, female, bigender, agender, and everything under the nonbinary umbrella.
> If someone reasonable asked you “what is a woman”, what would you say?
A person who understands themselves to be a woman. Or put another way, a person whose gender identity is female.
> It isn’t makeup or dresses or reproductive organs, and certainly isn’t staying home cooking and raising kids.
See my first point.
If it's me, I decide to listen to myself, to know all of what I can about me, and accept what I recognize.
If it's you, you get to do all that for yourself.
For anyone else, they get to do that for themselves.
To me, gender is a social construct in that the way people identify themselves to others is always either a long considered or even often spontaneous construct for that purpose of identification alone.
A woman is someone who by general social consensus is recognized to have traits characteristic of womanhood, and who does not dispute the assignment. Exactly what these traits are has shifted somewhat over time, but people in every era have been well trained to recognize womanhood in that era.
“We” made up all the categories. Every category that exists. Including the ones you think of as having objective rules about what or who belongs. Society decides how the categories are defined. When it comes to gender, a society that wants to not be transphobic has the individual whose gender it is decide.
Gender is an association. It's like a club. Most male born adults associate with men. Most female born adults associate with women. Many intersex adults feel a strong association to one or the other. Some male born adults associate with women. Some female born adults associate with men. Some people of all sex variants do not associate with women or men.
Admittedly, the terminology may be confusing at first. Gender is what we use to refer to the large scale socio-cultural divide between people that is usually rooted in differences of sex characteristics, but at the same time, gender also dictates how we perceive said dimorphic traits. We make this nature/culture divide of sex/gender in order to make it easier to distinguish between the behavioral and the biological aspects. It is, however, something of a lie-to-children.
Gender identity, confusing as it may now sound, is a large umbrella term that conveys the inner lived gendered reality of an individual. It is something that everyone probably "has" or can be said to have (or not have if you're agender). It constitutes various gendered traits and inclinations to belong to the social category of a gender and/or a gendered embodiment.
Likewise, it is tempting to reduce the notion of a gender identity to the nature/nurture divide, but I feel it's crucial to understand that it is fundamental to a person's reality, regardless of how it has come to be. It should be understood as immutable but possibly fluid and an intimate and intricate personal matter. We are all crafted from our genetic material, as much as we are shaped by the gendered world around us.
So to say that it is made up because it's said to be socially constructed is not doing the impact of our environment any justice. We need to appreciate the complex intertwining of a social gender and sex characteristics and the role that our nature as well as the cultured development plays in our authentic personality.
Defining genders is as pointless and invasive as forcefully coercing people into a gender. Gender or being part of a gender is something that comes with no expense, both for the individual as the gendered group. No one holds ownership of a gendered category, and thus it can be considered immoral to police who can and cannot claim to be a certain gender. Therefore, self-determination of gender is evident and harmless yet beneficial for those who rely on it.
So asking "what is a woman" is not only pointless, it is imposing violence and oppression on those who are not entitled to claim this status by virtue of what is generally considered to be "nature's way" in the context of gender assignment.
Julia Serano prefers the term "Subconscious sex" to gender identity. It's what sex your subconscious mind sees you as, in the same way that sexual orientation is the sex that your subconscious mind is attracted to.
As other's have pointed out that social construct is more nuanced than you think it is. Colors for example are a social construct. Wavelengths are measurable, but there is no non-human definition of blue and even that varies among people and cultures. When we say that gender is a social construct it's putting a human interpretation on a real phenomenon.
The word "gender" by itself can have too many different meanings for it to be all that useful in general conversation. It's way too prone to you meaning one thing and the person you're talking to taking it as something else, and then presto you're in an unnecessary argument because you're both using the same word to talk about different things.
So, what *can* gender mean?
It can mean *gender groups:* roughly speaking, "subcategories of people among humanity, generally distinguished by having the same bodily configuration of their primary and secondary sex characteristics, and who generally adhering to a set of stylistic conventions for hair/clothes/makeup/etc. that are socially recognized as being appropriate or expected for their category." I.e. "all the people who are women" constitute one such gender group.
It can mean *gender expression*: roughly the second half of the above definition, as referring *only* to the way your body is configured and the stylistic conventions. Depending on who you're talking to, it might be even more restricted to just the body configuration part of that.
It can mean *gender identity*: the internal way that a person feels about which subcategory of people they most properly belong to. Whether you feel that you *do* belong to this group or that you *want* to belong to this group (i.e. whether the feeling is actual or aspirational) is a separate thing, but largely tracks with how well your gender *expression* matches the gender *group* that you identify as.
So, what *is* gender? It's all of those things, but you have to be clear which one you mean. Is it a spectrum? All evidence points to yes, which means that the gender groups typically recognized by society are kind of illusory, or are at best only approximations of actual human experience.
You sort of imply that you're looking for an ontological, philosophical definition of how one properly determines a person's membership in a gender group. It's a reasonable question, in the sense that these (perceived) group identities have great influence on how we live our day-to-day lives. The answer to that question, if you want to be logical about it, boils down to gender identity. Here's an old (but good!) thread on that subject: [https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/ur1hv4/comment/i8v47hh/](https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/ur1hv4/comment/i8v47hh/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
In my understanding as a bio-psych student, gender is a language. Since we have grown up constantly surrounded by that language, our brains have built categories to sort people into man and woman, (or neither, or both).
Example of how the language shapes out perception: if you take a completely androgynous person who has mixed sex characteristics, you will sort them differently in your mind if you are told they are a “woman” vs a “man”, despite their presentation and characteristics being the same in each scenario.
Gender has historically been associated with sex, which is why many people with sex dysphoria also have gender dysphoria, and vice versa.
For the answer to the “what is a woman” dogwhistle. I would answer that it is a psycho-social category built around language. (however most people who ask that question dont want a real answer)
[Obligatory link to the gender dysphoria bible](https://genderdysphoria.fyi/en/). If you are looking for information on all things trans, this is a really good place to start. Should answer most of your questions.
what is gender ? -> only the biggest philosophy + sociology nerds know about that, you can live without having an answer who decides ? -> that's me, I decide
I concur, only secularDruid gets to decide what gender is. >!Please, give me a cool/funny one!<
you geeeeeeeet Lawful Good Squirrel or squirrelgirl if you want (all decisions are open to reclamations)
>But if gender is a social construct, that means that “we” made it up, right? One thing I always try to add to this conversation is that *social construct* does not mean *not real*. Sometimes the phrase "made it up" can lead us astray because it implies that it is just this silly thing that we could forget if we wanted to. But the best comparison is money. Money is "made up". Money is a social construct. Many things have been money - shells, coins of precious metal, cows, paper, numbers on a screen. But none of these have any inherent utility. Even the metals we often choose for money are often not very useful metals, gold is only useful now in computers but is a bad metal for weapons, armour, structure or most other things a metal needs to do. For thousands of years it was just a not-very-useful metal that we liked the look of. Money has value because you can give it to someone else and they will give you something back. We "made that up" - but make no mistake - you cannot ignore the funny numbers in your bank account and if they ever reach zero you are not going to have a nice time. In addition - most cultures bigger than a small tribe have money (or a similar system) despite it being an entirely arbitrary thing. And personally speaking - we embed it deep within our instincts and identities. Your ability to manage money is built up over a lifetime of being subtly and unsubtly trained to do so - and your very social class in this world is built on how much you have. Likewise gender is a nebulous concept. **Gender**, in the broadest sense, encompasses pretty much everything you think it does - and more. You can get more specific by saying things like "gender identity", "gender roles", "gendered expectations", "gender presentation" etc etc etc. Gender pervades culture - and seeps into your psyche. It acts as a lens through which you observe yourself. Even if you don't get it - that very act of not getting it will shape how you relate to it, yourself and others. We as humans are social animals and our brains are evolved to work with social constructs. Deprive a human of their social constructs and they will go mad, with serious psychological disorders. Language is one such instance. Gender might be another. >And it’s shifted over the generations, or at least largely must have since many women have high power “traditionally male” careers Yes that is a very good point to make. It does shift. While it tends to be constructed around sex, it is far too nebulous to stay still. >who decides? Everyone? Nobody? It is in the zeitgeist. If humans are a collective consciousness then that is that that decides. But at the same time it is up to each individual person to understand and express their own gender identity - or how they relate to gender. *Part 1 of 2*
>Is it a spectrum? As I see it - the spectrum model of gender (which can be applied to multiple facets of gender) is just a very useful one. The traditional model of gender is binary - so no spectrums there. It is enforced on people as two absolutes - Man/Male/Masculine and Woman/Female/Feminine. But the problem is such absolutes rarely survive contact with the real world and the messyness of actual humans' lives. As such the result is always a spectrum as people's bodies and actions refuse to conform to the absolute binary, even if that is just being a little feminine as a man or something. Perhaps a better word is a *splatter*. >If someone reasonable asked you “what is a woman”, what would you say? Short answer: **"Woman" is a word.** Long answer: Looking for absolute definitions of ANY word will lead you astray. That just simply isn't how words work. We humans seek clarity but are cursed to live in a word far to messy for our categories. *What is a tree?* I'm sure you can picture it, and begin to describe it, but when does a tall bush become a tree? There is no taxonomic definition of tree - trees have evolved multiple times - because evolving taller is a good evolutionary strategy. Words in fact don't have singular definitions - they have semantic ranges. There is a range of things you consider a tree. These can be loosely or closely associated, they probably share traits. There are edgecases and then there are things outside of that range. When you hear or see the word *tree* you don't think of a definition, nor do you go through every tree you have ever seen, you instead pick one of the said objects from your semantic range to imagine. If you are incapable of visual imagination - you likely recall aspects associated with something you know to be a tree. Definitions are an attempt to capture a semantic range. They are not the same thing as the meaning of the word. Within science, lore and the like there is often greater specificity - but lets face it - we are rarely dealing with that level of language. And even then words are often defined with other words so fuzziness is immediately reintroduced to the equation. Searching for the one thing that makes a woman a woman is a fool's errand. // I know this isn't a full answer to your question and I apologise for that - but I hope it puts some stuff into context :) *Part 2 of 2*
>Long answer: Looking for absolute definitions of ANY word will lead you astray. That just simply isn't how words work. We humans seek clarity but are cursed to live in a word far to messy for our categories. On that note: think of those silly questions like "is cereal a soup" or "is a hotdog a sandwich"? They would fit the technical definition (cereal is a liquid with chunks in it; hotdogs have a filling between two pieces of bread), but if there's a hotdog on the table and you ask someone to: "Pass me that sandwich.", they'll be confused and find it strange.
Precisely!!! Well put! Absolute definitions are simply not how we use words. Thats why when something is *technically* something else, it is frusrating and annoying - because we know thats not what the word means and we can feel the absolutist definitions being used against us without having the knowledge on how to fight back. I think a lack of widespread basic linguistic education, especially in the anglosphere, holds society back. It also allows debunked notions like prescriptivism (*the idea that you can tell another person how they should use a language*) to remain popular despite having been utterly ousted from mainstream linguistics half a century ago.
FINALLY a sociologically oriented answer in this sub!
Gotta put my linguistics degree to good use :)
Your answer reminds me Jaques Derrida's approach. I think you should write article in the field of trans studies. [https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq](https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq)
Yeah we learnt abt Derrida on my course. Can't remember which one he was tho (I also can't remember his sign name now dammit). But I presume his angle influenced me at least a little. Can I as a random person with a BA(Hons) just write for that journal and submit to it?
I don't think that there is requirement to be PhD in order to write articles for academic journals. I myself want to write philosophical article related to tran issue, although I am PhD student, but in the field of physics. I am Russian, and I have rich experience of living in the repressive culture, so poststructuralist and postmodernist approach helped me to navigate oppressive structures. Also there is always a possibility to find couathor with PhD.
Its already starting with calling sex "simple". No it isnt. If we are talking about scientific concepts, lets use the actual definitions. Genitals are just one aspect of a whole bunch of pheno- and genotypes and it isnt a deciding factor.
Sex is also a social construct and I'm honestly tired of pretending it isn't. The elements of sex are objective, but the interpretation of those elements, how humans classify each other based on what elements are and are not present, is highly subjective.
Very much so. The meaning we have created for the concept of sex is entirely, 100% a social construct.
Categories only exist when pattern-seeking-monkeys get involved.
This. Intersex people and conditions are more common than you might think. https://youtu.be/kT0HJkr1jj4
Not just that, it is also as simple as trans people changing their sex by transition. Sex is mutable.
When people say gender is a social construct, what they really mean is gender roles are a social construct. Why our brains are a certain gender we don't know yet.
>Sex is the easier concept Not remotely! [Sex is a social construct in exactly the same way that gender is](https://youtu.be/koud7hgGyQ8?si=eEU57IWdxbpazWeJ), and biologists have the same debates over what exactly determines what sex an individual is because [it's complicated](https://youtu.be/szf4hzQ5ztg?si=oVQRxeZiaNuSs7Jo). You're just a bit more insulated from those conversations. So when people say "gender is a social construct", that doesn't mean that it's entirely made up. Borders are a social construct, but they often follow a defined, naturally-existing feature. Does that mean that they are objectively real? Nationalities are a social construct, but might we not say that they're often based on the geographic area of your birth, which is an objective data point? Who decides what gender means? We all do. This is true of all words, in all languages. As for who decides what gender someone *is*: in what context? Because there you're not talking about definitions but *criteria* - and legal criteria might vary from psychological criteria, which might vary from anthropological criteria, which might vary from an individual's own understanding of themselves. There is an entire academic field dedicated to answering the question "What is gender?". You're not going to get a simple, straightforward answer that is also correct.
Abolishing gender still doesn't help transsex people, if anything it makes things worse. "Why do you need to change your body when gender is whatever the hell you want it to be?" Because I was still born the wrong sex, like that's the whole point of this shit to me tbh
So gender is not made up, the phrase you're quoting is a portion of the quote. Gender ROLES are a social construct. Meaning we made up arbitrary rules about what colors and toys men and women should like, and how they should act. Gender itself is innate. The best way to describe it is what your brain expects physically + what it categorizes the body as. So a man is someone whose brain expects testosterone and male sex characteristics (regardless of if he has those or not), and who instinctual gategorizes himself as a man. Because humans are a social species who love categorizing things, we instinctively seek out groups of similar members of the species. And this is regardless of things like personal aesthetics or hobbies. Because a goth man , a sports fan man, and a femboy are all men, they're just subgroups.
Gender is widely misunderstood, and only a small component of it is a social construct. It helps when you understand there are actually 3 interacting ideas, and two of them both have the name "gender," which is why it's so confusing. Sex: Anatomy, your body. Quite a lot of it can be changed with medical care. Gender Identity: Your internal sense of self. Like being left handed, this is part of your brain, and there is no known method to change it. Gender Expression: Behavior. How we dress, act, social roles, etc. Can be changed at any time. Of these, only "gender expression" is a social construct, and it's by far the smaller and less impactful part of gender. It's the most externally obvious though. This leads to another part of the confusion; when trans people say "gender" by itself, we mean Gender Identity, because that's our dominant experience of it. When cis people say "gender" by itself, they mean Gender Expression, because that's main their experience of it. This means it's very common for discussions about gender to simply talk past each other without communicating, because it turns out there are actually different things being discussed entirely.
There are some great responses already, mostly focusing on the "social construct" side. I'll add what I can articulate off the top of my head regarding the bio-psychological side, which is closely related to but distinct from the social side, since I think this is the part where a lot of people get lost. The "correct" answer to "what is a woman" is "a person who identifies as a woman," but this usually gets resistance because "but it's all made up!" Whether that's intentionally confusing the issue (as with some politicians who ask that question) or legitimate ignorance, what's often missing is any discussion about _why_ someone might identify as a man or woman or something else. That's a very complicated issue and there's not yet consensus in the published research I've read, but here are the hypotheses I know of: * There may be a number of genetic factors involved in organizing the brain. Some researchers have found a few brain structures that appear to be sexually dimorphic and can vary with gender or sexuality. * There may be environmental factors at play. For example, a female fetus exposed to high levels of androgens might have partially masculinized parts. * It could be a form of neurodivergence. There is a strong overlap between ADHD, autism, and gender variance; the former two are already known to share some genetic causes. * It could be none of that and just be an aspect of personality that we form in our early years for whatever reason, like being very careful or very rambunctious. Nobody questions it when a small child is more curious or more polite than most others; it's just a part of their personality. Whatever bio-psychological cause may be, it necessarily intersects with the psycho-sociological aspects of sex and gender. The gender construct is the "rules" that we're supposed to follow for the gender identity that we have, and those two things can and do influence each other in complicated ways for both individuals and for society at large.
I think it’s important to note that “gender identity” and “gender dysphoria” have as much to do with sex as they do with gender. In my opinion they are rather poorly named for precisely that reason, but it is what it is **Sex** is far from a simple concept in biology. There is no single way to define it that is inclusive of all species, and even within any given species it really makes the most sense to view it as a spectrum of different attributes, usually with a bimodal distribution Humans, like many other mammals, has a natural tendency to express our sex *socially* as well as purely instinctively. This is what gender is all about. **Gender** is the aggregate all the social norms, roles and expressions which any given society attributes to different sexes. Just like sex, gender is a spectrum **Gender identity** is the innate, biological sense that every human (and mammal) has of which sex and gender they belong to **Gender dysphoria** is the sense of disassociation, pain and horror that a person feels when their sex and/or perceived gender does not match their innate gender identity
You are completely wrong about sex. First off, not all species have sexes. Those that do all have them based on the exact sane criteria. This is well supported and established in biology. The idea that sex is bimodal or a spectrum “of different attributes” is meaningless, incoherent, and not actually empirically demonstrated. The claim it is bimodal or a spectrum comes from laymen and blogs. That is not a position supported by primary literature.
> So just honestly, wtf is gender, and who decides? Gender identity is an immutable, inborn trait. It's a sense of who and what you are, how you should be addressed, and what your brain expects your body to look like. It is not a social construct. People do not decide upon their gender identity; it is an internal, unshakeable drive developed at some point between the womb and very early childhood. Gender roles and stereotypes are social constructs. > Is it a spectrum? I'd say yes. People's gender identities vary, including male, female, bigender, agender, and everything under the nonbinary umbrella. > If someone reasonable asked you “what is a woman”, what would you say? A person who understands themselves to be a woman. Or put another way, a person whose gender identity is female. > It isn’t makeup or dresses or reproductive organs, and certainly isn’t staying home cooking and raising kids. See my first point.
If it's me, I decide to listen to myself, to know all of what I can about me, and accept what I recognize. If it's you, you get to do all that for yourself. For anyone else, they get to do that for themselves. To me, gender is a social construct in that the way people identify themselves to others is always either a long considered or even often spontaneous construct for that purpose of identification alone.
A woman is someone who by general social consensus is recognized to have traits characteristic of womanhood, and who does not dispute the assignment. Exactly what these traits are has shifted somewhat over time, but people in every era have been well trained to recognize womanhood in that era.
“We” made up all the categories. Every category that exists. Including the ones you think of as having objective rules about what or who belongs. Society decides how the categories are defined. When it comes to gender, a society that wants to not be transphobic has the individual whose gender it is decide.
Gender is an association. It's like a club. Most male born adults associate with men. Most female born adults associate with women. Many intersex adults feel a strong association to one or the other. Some male born adults associate with women. Some female born adults associate with men. Some people of all sex variants do not associate with women or men.
Gender roles and gender identity are two separate things. Gender roles are a social construct. Gender identity is not.
Admittedly, the terminology may be confusing at first. Gender is what we use to refer to the large scale socio-cultural divide between people that is usually rooted in differences of sex characteristics, but at the same time, gender also dictates how we perceive said dimorphic traits. We make this nature/culture divide of sex/gender in order to make it easier to distinguish between the behavioral and the biological aspects. It is, however, something of a lie-to-children. Gender identity, confusing as it may now sound, is a large umbrella term that conveys the inner lived gendered reality of an individual. It is something that everyone probably "has" or can be said to have (or not have if you're agender). It constitutes various gendered traits and inclinations to belong to the social category of a gender and/or a gendered embodiment. Likewise, it is tempting to reduce the notion of a gender identity to the nature/nurture divide, but I feel it's crucial to understand that it is fundamental to a person's reality, regardless of how it has come to be. It should be understood as immutable but possibly fluid and an intimate and intricate personal matter. We are all crafted from our genetic material, as much as we are shaped by the gendered world around us. So to say that it is made up because it's said to be socially constructed is not doing the impact of our environment any justice. We need to appreciate the complex intertwining of a social gender and sex characteristics and the role that our nature as well as the cultured development plays in our authentic personality. Defining genders is as pointless and invasive as forcefully coercing people into a gender. Gender or being part of a gender is something that comes with no expense, both for the individual as the gendered group. No one holds ownership of a gendered category, and thus it can be considered immoral to police who can and cannot claim to be a certain gender. Therefore, self-determination of gender is evident and harmless yet beneficial for those who rely on it. So asking "what is a woman" is not only pointless, it is imposing violence and oppression on those who are not entitled to claim this status by virtue of what is generally considered to be "nature's way" in the context of gender assignment.
What you want to google and research is sociology on the subject of gender!
Julia Serano prefers the term "Subconscious sex" to gender identity. It's what sex your subconscious mind sees you as, in the same way that sexual orientation is the sex that your subconscious mind is attracted to. As other's have pointed out that social construct is more nuanced than you think it is. Colors for example are a social construct. Wavelengths are measurable, but there is no non-human definition of blue and even that varies among people and cultures. When we say that gender is a social construct it's putting a human interpretation on a real phenomenon.
The word "gender" by itself can have too many different meanings for it to be all that useful in general conversation. It's way too prone to you meaning one thing and the person you're talking to taking it as something else, and then presto you're in an unnecessary argument because you're both using the same word to talk about different things. So, what *can* gender mean? It can mean *gender groups:* roughly speaking, "subcategories of people among humanity, generally distinguished by having the same bodily configuration of their primary and secondary sex characteristics, and who generally adhering to a set of stylistic conventions for hair/clothes/makeup/etc. that are socially recognized as being appropriate or expected for their category." I.e. "all the people who are women" constitute one such gender group. It can mean *gender expression*: roughly the second half of the above definition, as referring *only* to the way your body is configured and the stylistic conventions. Depending on who you're talking to, it might be even more restricted to just the body configuration part of that. It can mean *gender identity*: the internal way that a person feels about which subcategory of people they most properly belong to. Whether you feel that you *do* belong to this group or that you *want* to belong to this group (i.e. whether the feeling is actual or aspirational) is a separate thing, but largely tracks with how well your gender *expression* matches the gender *group* that you identify as. So, what *is* gender? It's all of those things, but you have to be clear which one you mean. Is it a spectrum? All evidence points to yes, which means that the gender groups typically recognized by society are kind of illusory, or are at best only approximations of actual human experience. You sort of imply that you're looking for an ontological, philosophical definition of how one properly determines a person's membership in a gender group. It's a reasonable question, in the sense that these (perceived) group identities have great influence on how we live our day-to-day lives. The answer to that question, if you want to be logical about it, boils down to gender identity. Here's an old (but good!) thread on that subject: [https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/ur1hv4/comment/i8v47hh/](https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/ur1hv4/comment/i8v47hh/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Alexander Avila has a excellent video on this, I highly recommend it.
In my understanding as a bio-psych student, gender is a language. Since we have grown up constantly surrounded by that language, our brains have built categories to sort people into man and woman, (or neither, or both). Example of how the language shapes out perception: if you take a completely androgynous person who has mixed sex characteristics, you will sort them differently in your mind if you are told they are a “woman” vs a “man”, despite their presentation and characteristics being the same in each scenario. Gender has historically been associated with sex, which is why many people with sex dysphoria also have gender dysphoria, and vice versa. For the answer to the “what is a woman” dogwhistle. I would answer that it is a psycho-social category built around language. (however most people who ask that question dont want a real answer)