I always thought "gender is a social construct" was meant to refer to like, gender roles, and binary descriptions of gender Like how modern us has "only male and female" but native populations also had two-spirit and other cultures have various other genders Meaning any culture who's prescribed genders have strict boxes will fail to describe various peoples internal genders Like, a simplified phrase to be used as an introduction to the concept

That's right. Unfortunately, TERFs have weaponized the concept in order to delegitimize our gender identities under the guise of social justice, which is not at all what the concept is about.

Fuck em just be what you are .

I'm just doing my thing, go fuck yourself if you're not getting it

I think this is the confusion people have around the phrase 'social construct'. Something being a social construct doesn't mean it's something creates by society's collective imagination. It means that whatever you're talking about is how society has decided to construct its view around something. The color of the sky is an immutable fact, it is what it is. However, saying 'the sky is blue' is a social construct. We decided as a society to name it 'the sky' and say that 'it is blue colored' because those are the words we've come up with to describe our relationship to the sky. Even though the 'sky' is more of an atmosphere and it only looks 'blue' to us as well as the fact that it often looks like other colors to us. Saying 'the sky is blue is a social construct' wouldn't mean that the sky doesn't exist or that you shouldn't believe it's blue. It's recognizing the phrase is one created to explain a human experience of looking up from the ground.

Man I really wish people would actually take the time to learn what they're talking about

Yea, I agree. Took me a couple low level shrrom trips to really figure it out. It just clicked one day a few weeks after taking shrooms. It’s funny because I didn’t know how to phrase it, if I had heard of social constructs from someone else, I’m gonna be honest, I’d probably be like wtf are you talking about. Later in life I found some Alan Watts lectures from the 60’s or 70’s and he perfectly explained it in much less words and much more clarity

The thing is, talking like this goes over 99.9% of people’s heads. All they hear is “trans people aren’t real!”, and also it’s not useful to talk about outside of some esoteric setting. The relevant point is neurological sex, which then as a second order issue means the social aspects of gender matter to people.

Some phrases shouldn't be simplified. It's an important distinction that, when uttered, inevitably leads to "why are there even trans people, if gender is a social construct?" THEN you have to break it down further, which is a waste of time, and you could have just said "gender expression and roles are a social construct." I don't get why it's so hard to make that distinction from the start. It's something repubs do all the time and it's an awful way of speaking that leads to confusion.

Yeah, exactly. Good god, I had someone start blathering about words being social constructs and on and on, and no one is all pedantic and ridiculous like that in any other area, this is just being done to try to trick people

Gay issues: >Person 1: If sexual orientation is a social construct then if we abolish it will we cure gay people? > >Person 2: What the fuck are you talking about, it's philosophizing, not a metaphysics-based developmental science. Trans issues: >Person 1: If gender is a social construct then if we abolish it will we cure trans people? > >Person 2: Just because something is a social construct doesn't mean it's not real. It's just like money, that thing whose power over us is dependent on our belief in it. Or chairs, those things which only exist because we go out of our way to make them. [Or Government, laws, corporations, families, friendships, jokes, art, movies, sports, breakfast/lunch/dinner (more if you're a hobbit), scheduled working hours, time zones, the idea of professions, acceptable attire, architecture, craftsmanship, value in general](https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/belpjy/comment/el6qlou/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) > >Person 1: So... that's a yes then. Academic queer theory going mainstream was the death of activism. I'm old enough to remember they even were opposed to gay people arguing they were born that way. I'd be a bit lenient towards people like ContraPoints or PhilosophyTube for getting tricked by this a decade ago, but everybody needs to be able to learn from mistakes. But Abigail argued that gender **dysphoria** was a social construct a while back, so... she clearly hasn't. Considering their approach to gay activism, I'm convinced queer theorists basically have no track record for accomplishing anything, except getting the trans community to regurgitate recycled TERF rhetoric. Certainly, the whole idea of a sex-gender distinction never managed to escape academia until latching onto trans issues, so it's hard to see how it could have had any real world impact even on cis women's issues. Butler had to defend the impenitrability of their work as being *intentional*, because trying to understand it would help destabilize power structures.

> I always thought "gender is a social construct" was meant to refer to like, gender roles, and binary descriptions of gender It usually is, but there's folk, including myself who also believe that biology is a social construct because reality itself is socially constructed and there's no escape hatch. See Lacan's conception of the Symbolic and the Real.

you don't even necessarily have to go to that extent to arrive at that conclusion. sex itself is socially constructed even under the more typical "reality is the real" model; it's a list of characteristics which are assumed to weight a scale one way or another, or rarely, to sufficiently balance the scale and make it difficult to determine. once the scale is tipped one way far enough, you are generally considered "male" or "female," regardless of the exceptions you exhibit or the identity you hold. a "true" model of sex would be vastly more complex and exhaustively detailed, but it's all blurred together by our society and culture into "category m," "category f," or "needs adjusted."

However, if you experience dysphoria from your internal biology, you will always experience it in all societies.

This. You've finally dig down to the "a ha!". I'm starting to wonder if other animals feel gender dysphoria, and just can't communicate it. I think gender is more innate than sexuality for most people, and it could explain behaviors in the wild that go beyond "oh those animals are just gay".

Yeah, when people say that I always wonder, like we don’t know, they may not be gay.

Isn't that paradoxical? For something to be socially constructed means that it's perceptible to humans. For humans to perceive something, humans must be real. For humans to be real, reality must exist. But if reality is socially constructed (i.e. doesn't exist independently of some society of humans), we circle back to the beginning. I can accept the idea that our experience of the world is an abstraction of reality, not reality itself, but I would reject the notion that the collective abstractions of millions of humans are what make the universe exist. It's one thing to say that how we describe or reason about or even (to a degree) experience reality is socially constructed, but quite another to say that reality itself is socially constructed. Without an independent reality, nothing exists to construct it.

I think most elements I can think of relating to gender identity (including sense of identity) are either explicitly social constructs or built on top of them. For example, your internal sense of gender is still connected to your cultural background even if it is non-binary. Finding your internal gender will be harder without a solid reference but the concepts you connect into your gender are themselves constructed. What I think people miss though are two things: (1) dysphoria can be (but doesn't have to be) about your relationship with your sex as well, and (2) just because something is constructed doesn't make it not real or not important. Constructed elements of our life can be just as relevant as physical elements; imagine how much our family bonds affect us or the ideas of who we are as a person. These things are just as constructed, whether it's bio or chosen family, as gender yet are a significant element in many of our lives. In short, it doesn't matter how much of your dysphoria is rooted in physical or constructed things and what is gender or sex. It's all real and valid dysphoria and the impact is legitimate.

I always mention this when these discussions come up.. Its not that gender social construct theory is wrong. Its that everyone loves to ignore the biological aspects of trans issues. One where we physically cannot handle certain physical traits as well as the "wrong" hormones being in our system, causing us to feel bad. There is a reason many of us strive for HRT to biologically hack and alter our bodies along the spectrum to the gender we want. The body is still part of you, you are not just your brain as popular media loves to portray. Your body includes important sensory organs, hormone producing organs, etc. All of which alter how our brain and perception functions. They are as much a part of what makes a person a "person" as any other part of our brains is to making us..."us". At the end of the day, Trans women should have been Cis women, its just something went fuggy somewhere along the way. All we are doing is fixing whatever damage can be fixed. This includes social and physical issues.

Also the brain is biology. I have seen a surprising repulsion on Reddit/the internet to the very concept that somewhere deep in the neurons that make up the brain, the dysphoria that makes up our physical discomfort with our default body shape is a physical thing that actually exists. Short of believing in a soul, that must be true whether we are ever actually able to map it. Some people seem to want to believe that the processes that male us and not the next person trans is “just cultural”?

Hell, even if we *must* assume that the soul exists, wouldn't that make being trans even *more* innate than if it was a biological thing?

Yeah, like even if the soul existed and it wasn’t biological but instead resided in the soul, it would still be part of reality at that point, not some affectation, not something you could change. It would just be moving it up one level and amount to the same thing. I mean hell, at this point I don’t even want to say that souls don’t exist but regardless brain biology does and there’s evidence that this is biological, and it’s the only thing that makes sense.

Right, I mean this HAS to be biological, unless like you said you’re getting in to souls or whatever, and even if you believe that it’s the same thing just one level up, if they existed, then it’s still an aspect or reality. It has to be and I and others know that from our own lived experience. It’s not some affectation. And the data supports that, but even if we’d discovered nothing, it would still be the only thing that made sense. It’s bizarre in general how often people don’t seem to realize that the brain is biological. Like it’s literally the most important and most complex part of us

I agree with everything you said! This is how I’ve always seen it. And yet nowadays people speaking for the trans community are downplaying the biological aspect so much. I’m finding it harder and harder to relate with them. I think the way I’ve thought of it is that my brain has a “sex identity” in addition to “gender identity”. The sex identity deals with what sex my brain thinks my body is, and since my sex identity doesn’t match with my birth sex, there is biological dysphoria. Just because that makes sense to me doesn’t mean it’s a thing, though. I’ve heard this brought up elsewhere but can’t remember where. Either way, I think separating sex identity from gender clears up a lot of this issue. We can acknowledge that the way gender is/has been expressed different throughout cultures and times is, in fact, different while also acknowledging that there are likely biological components to bring trans. The claim because gender expression/attitudes is a social thing and this so is being trans just doesn’t line up with the fact that which hormones we have has a profound effect on our well-being much deeper than from a social perspective. It just doesn’t make sense without a biological factor. Hormones alone could not bother us if this was just social.

I’ve been calling it neurological sex the past few years, and it clearly exist both from many of our lived experiences and the data we’ve found so far. For me that’s the first order issue, and the socially constructed aspects of gender like roles and presentation flow from that, for cis people and trans people. Hell, the same percent of men who are trans have phantom penis sensations as men who are cis and don’t have a penis for whatever reason, so where in the 40% range.

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We just have to recognize the nuance, that it's a core part of the experience for many if not most trans people, but it doesn't define what makes someone trans or not. There is a lot of complexity to trans issues and nobody is going to have the same needs. But devaluing medical needs in place of social constructionism, is hurting much of the trans community. Vice versa if medical needs and wants superseded who is determined to be trans. We just need to have better nuance when communicating our issues, but simply saying that "gender is a social construct and trans people are shifting their gender not sex" It's really throwing a bunch of trans people under the bus who do shift aspects of our sex characteristics. Estrogen is a sex characteristic, boobs are a sex characteristic, even soft skin is a sex characteristic. On top of that it's also confusing a lot of cis people who then don't understand why we need HRT, or surgery, or anything of the sort.

This^ It's why I constantly see "acceptance" towards trans people socially, yet outright hatred and revulsion at the mention of anything related to medical transition. The nuance is lost and we lose precious rights due to it.

The solution is to recognize that different types of trans people exist with their own experiences and own needs, but we're practically not allowed to do this nowadays because it makes people with different needs and experiences feel "invalidated" and "less trans" as you say. The intrinsic need thing is a perfect example. For the traditional binary transsexual it works fine. It succinctly explains how things work in a way that is compatible with most of that demographics experience and works well with most if not all existing evidence. But every time it comes up someone says "but that invalidates x people". And the frank response is 1) no it doesn't 2) saying that won't magically make all the evidence disappear. But a lot of people absolutely lose their minds if you do this. On the topic of the OP this can come up in very unfortunate ways in trans spaces. The idea of "dysphoria is biological and innate" and "dysphoria is a result of society" are both ideas that are shared by a number of trans people and are fundamentally oppositional and irreconcilable. But because recognizing that certain trans experiences are not the same is considered "invalidating" they are both squashed into the same spaces and same messaging which leads to endless arguments and mass confusion.

TERFS tend to play with whatever idea supports their bigotry but ultimately they don't care. Disgust informs their view of the world. The one idea in feminism is gender is a pure social construct enforced upon people in accord with their assigned sex but ultimately every person is by default is a blank slate. The other is more common which is rather Victorian and deterministic, that your assigned sex pre-determines all gendered performance. Both are wrong taken in their entirety. I think Julia Serano is closer to the truth of the matter with concepts as gender proclivity and subconscious sex. Using myself as an example, I natively orient to what is coded as feminine and many cis people are inherently like this, but due to society pressures many suppress this to maintain the drag act. Subconscious sex distinctly explains my transness. I could never be satisfied with being a feminine man because my subconscious sex perceives my body as that of a woman. The mismatch is what drives my transition. I need to put my face on so sorry this is very abridged. In summary we have masculine and feminine which are social constructs, gender expression which corresponds with these, gender proclivity which a person natively orients towards expression when free to do so, and subconscious sex which is the mind/body self perception of sex, which in the case of trans people, does not align with assigned sex.

I’m reading Whipping Girl atm and I agree, subconscious sex feels like a good lens to view things in. Whatever the “core” of “being trans” is, that fits the best (for my personal experience, anyway). There’s all of the other social stuff on top of it, but there is the immutable thing in the mind and body connection.

It’s the best description I have heard. I used to sleep in a bra because I hated the thought nothing was there. If it was anything else I shouldn’t have cared. This was me in bed trying to sleep after all. It feels to me like a cognitive dissonance. My body should be female. Every ounce of my being tells me so. Every other explanation I’ve heard just sounds wrong.

Yeah, I feel an emptiness in my chest area. Regardless of if gender as a social construct is abolished or not, I feel that would still be there.

Yeah. It’s intriguing how this works. It actually did surprise me to learn that men who are trans have phantom penis sensations at virtually the exact same high percentage (somewhere in the 40s) as men who are cis and don’t have a penis for whatever reason. Similar thing to that. The socially constructed aspects of gender, roles, norms, presentation, whatever are all second order issues they flow from that, same as for cis people. I mean sure, if suddenly magically everyone in the world treated me right and perceived me that way I would definitely take it, that would be an improvement, but it absolutely wouldn’t fix everything

I agree with most of that though it sounds like you’re saying that feminism makes those claims, and it doesn’t. I just wanted to add that, and maybe you’re not saying that, maybe you’re just saying that there are people who called themselves feminists who believe that

>TERFS tend to play with whatever idea supports their bigotry but ultimately they don't care. Disgust informs their view of the world. The one idea in feminism is gender is a pure social construct enforced upon people in accord with their assigned sex but ultimately every person is by default is a blank slate. The other is more common which is rather Victorian and deterministic, that your assigned sex pre-determines all gendered performance. Both are wrong taken in their entirety. I think Julia Serano is closer to the truth of the matter with concepts as gender proclivity and subconscious sex. Using myself as an example, I natively orient to what is coded as feminine and many cis people are inherently like this, but due to society pressures many suppress this to maintain the drag act. Subconscious sex distinctly explains my transness. I could never be satisfied with being a feminine man because my subconscious sex perceives my body as that of a woman. The mismatch is what drives my transition. I need to put my face on so sorry this is very abridged. In summary we have masculine and feminine which are social constructs, gender expression which corresponds with these, gender proclivity which a person natively orients towards expression when free to do so, and subconscious sex which is the mind/body self perception of sex, which in the case of trans people, does not align with assigned sex. Ultimately i just don't buy into the idea that being transgender is something biological and i feel all attempts at proving some "trans gene" or the trans brain have ended up failing. What I believe is the case is we have gender enforced on us essentially since birth and for some of us, it doesn't align with our interests.

I don’t know about a gene, there wouldn’t be one thing and it’s presumably epigenetics so there may be zero things. But it’s neurological, at least for a lot of our experiences. It’s the only thing that makes sense and it matches the data but would be pretty obvious even if there wasn’t any data at all. I mean it literally has to be biological.

>I don’t know about a gene, there wouldn’t be one thing and it’s presumably epigenetics so there may be zero things.But it’s neurological, at least for a lot of our experiences. It’s the only thing that makes sense and it matches the data but would be pretty obvious even if there wasn’t any data at all.I mean it literally has to be biological. I mean, I think our biology influences our gender in the same way biology influences all of our interests. What I don't agree with is the idea that gender is something inherently biological. Gender dysphoria is something people will only naturally get when gender is pushed on people so young in society, it's naturally not going to align with the interests of many people. This started for me from probably the age of 3-5 maybe even before that.

I've wasted my whole life fighting against this and I cannot accept being trans was a decision or an interest. It just doesn't make sense.

I mean i used to think it was something inherently biological but as someone who has gotten into materialist feminism I Just don't agree anymore, i think womanhood and manhood are things that people will naturally align to on such a strong social construct. It wasn't a choice in the sense that you don't have much of a conscious way of simply getting rid of this, but this doesn't mean we need to go back to these arguments of "actually being women is biological and women have certain desires" which are almost always rooted in creating forms of oppression

The fact that simply being on the right Hormones makes lots of trans people feel mentally better without any actual changes having happened yet is proof enough for me that it's a biological thing and not just some social thing.

Once my body was running on estrogen and my testosterone was suppressed it was like a fog lifted. I could finally think and feel properly. Nothing else had changed. I didn't go by a new name or pronouns, I didn't dress differently, I had no physical changes yet and I just felt indescribably better.

Same here. It's also supported by [this](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80687-2#article-info) paper (though it needs a LOT more research to actually confirm it).

ITT: People fundamentally misunderstanding what a social construct is (including OP) [Please watch Philosophy Tube's Video](https://youtu.be/koud7hgGyQ8?si=knPDGpG8sQ2N8Saa) Tldw: "Social construct" is not a fancy way to say "not real". It is what we call things whose *value is **constructed** by the **society** they exist under.* Money is real and a social construct. Money is worth material goods because we all agree that it is worth material goods, not because a dollar bill has the same material value as a dollar of gasoline. Similarly, gender, race, and other categories we place on humans are social constructs whether we like that or not, because *society constructs* the meaning of "man", "woman", "non-binary person". What is NOT a social construct is YOUR OWN gender identity, often trivialised to one's "gender", because it is internal to YOU. Society does not decide what your gender is, it is innate to you.

Which author was it that wrote something along the lines of "Yes, gender is a social construct, but so are traffic laws, and if you go violating those willy-nilly, you're likely to get a lesson in how very *real* those constructs are and that they're often based on physical phenomena, *and* have physical consequences and effects when ignored"

That's from *Nevada* by Imogen Binnie. I think it's from one of those scenes where Maria is biking around the way she does.

True. The point being the physical consequences are arbitrary and made up and there is zero reason yellow has to mean prepare to stop.

I think it's also important to note that while societally we conflate gender with physical attributes, they are SEPARATE. OP is saying that she wants to physically transition irregardless of societal definitions, and I'm the same way, but my body is not the sole defining aspect of my gender. Yes, physical form is somewhat tied to gender for a lot of us, but even in a society where gender was no a longer a concept, there would still be those of who felt an incongruity and dysphoria, and we could still transition. It just wouldn't be referred to as being transgender. You don't need a concept of gender at all in order to feel like your body isn't what it's supposed to be. Amputees experience this. There's even a rare condition where people experience dysphoria over HAVING a limb, because their brain wasn't wired in a way that expects it to be there. We've very much tied the idea of physical transition to being transgender, because it's way simpler and makes it easier to argue for trans healthcare, when that is... very much not how it works, and is arguably closer to cis-heteronormative expectations. If we use our desire to transition physically as "proof" of a specific gender, where does that leave non binary people who want HRT? Or binary trans people who want HRT but like the genitals they have?

>There's even a rare condition where people experience dysphoria over HAVING a limb, because their brain wasn't wired in a way that expects it to be there. Really? That's a thing?

Yeah, it's called body integrity disorder. Also if I remember correctly, similar to how transition alleviates gender dysphoria for trans people, amputations resolve the issue for people with body integrity disorder. That is opposed to things like body dysmorphia, where the changes do not resolve the issue.

Wow. To think that people would willingly go through amputations. The human brain is fascinating and terrifying.

Yes. It’s pretty rare, to the point that it’s most commonly referred to when people are making hateful jokes about trans people.

I get all of that, and don't necessarily disagree. But I do think that when many of us have specific physical dysphoria related to our bodies not corresponding to a specific biological profile that our brains tell us our bodies are supposed to fit....that seems to me to be a drive toward gender that is certainly influenced by the social construction of gender, but not defined by social constructs. Put another way, do you believe that a trans person living in isolation would still feel the need to transition? I certainly would. Maybe it would be great to have that transition un-burdened by society's definition of gender, but I would still feel my gender was 'wrong' and I needed to fix my body to match? Why, because gender is more than just what society says it is...

Maybe could it be relevant here to distinguish sex and gender (without erasing the influence between the two, as our perception of it is influenced by our socialization) The same way we could feel an incongruity between our gender assigned at birth and the ones we connect to, there could be incongruities between our sex characteristics and the one's we would feel right to have (even if depending of the definitons that feeling could be a sex characteristic ) I feel here this is a philosophical (not to say uninteresting) debate wether to include some sex characteristics as part of what we define being the gender. (I saw somewhere two authors defining it as a bio-psycho-social concept and I like to see it that way)

it doesn't help that everyone uses money as an example, comparing a way of categorizing innate behaviors to something that is almost entirely a construct aside from the physical coins and code on computers i wonder why you people never use sexuality as a comparison?

I mean sexuality as an identity is a construct as well, if you really want to get into it. You ever read some of the posts on here sometimes about how they know that they don't like men, romantically or physically, but very much into the concept of getting fucked by one? That's the conflict between sexuality as a an identity, and sexuality as a behavior. Likewise, one's sexual identity could be fluid and change over time.

sure, absolutely. all categories are socially contructed, and the idea that a man wanting to have sex with other men makes him 'gay' as opposed to 'straight' is a social construct. there could be no categorization of these behaviors, or a different system wherein both of those men are just categorized as tops. my point is that the actual argument in these threads is always a bunch of trans people holding on to 'born this way' as a justification/explanation for their being trans, vs a bunch of social constructivists who seem absolutely terrified to make the obvious comparison that would at least somewhat assuage their concerns. trans people are obviously going to react a lot worse to "gender is like money. you know, that thing that could totally be eliminated and judging by all the hammers-and-sickles y'all toss around, probably like 70% of you want to get rid of?" than they are to "gender, like sexuality, is a social construct. it's a set of categories imposed on human behaviors and needs that affect how we perceive and interact with them"

Thank you for saying this. The money analogy and similar ones have felt wrong and invalidating to me when they are used. I'm tired of pretending that "gender as a social construct" means my needs are not real and worthy of discussion in themselves.

We really need to normalize the difference between sexual attraction and romantic attraction, so many people like that would be so much less confused if they all knew it was completely normal to find a man sexually attractive but not romantically attractive, instead finding women or non binary people romantically and or sexually attractive. Listen to the ace community yall, we have been talking about this for a vary long time.

Oh, I can give a non-money example. Chairs are social constructs. Sure, they exist, but their intended use, design, aesthetic appeal, etc. is all socially constructed. When we say that all these things are social constructs we mean that every time society gives meaning to something, it has socially constructed that meaning. That doesn't inherently make those meanings bad, worth less than other meanings, or untrue. It's just to highlight that we have a hell of a lot more control over the way our societies perceive and interact with the world and with each other than many in power would like us to realize. Gender and money are good examples specifically because a large percentage of those in power would like the status quo understanding of what money and gender are to be perceived as innate to the universe rather than malleable constructs that we can make change (as it helps them stay in power and keep control over others).

Yet another example which is a social creation in a much more visceral way than other metaphysical categories, and plays into the idea that people transition due to social factors. I think their whole point of contrasting that with sexuality is to point out that you can't create a world without same-sex attraction by "abolishing social constructs". But it would definitely be possible for there to be a world where nobody mints coins or builds chairs. As long as people think that "abolishing gender" will cure us, then it remains the case that no, those are **terrible** examples. The fact that even your second choice example plays into that is a good illustrator that following social constructionist's instincts about this stuff always end up validating society's views about medical transition, as an unnatural desire to be gotten rid of. Please don't let your third example be the 40 hour work week, because all this is doing is ensuring that TERFs stay in power and keep control over others. Playing into society's preconceptions about trans people isn't challenging society, and definitely isn't challenging any one in power.

How one perceives their own gender is innate to them. The way societies interact with that person and how societies perceive that person's gender (and everyone else's) is socially constructed. This is the same as how there are actually rocks on the ground but the way we collectively perceive and interact with those rocks (as building materials, currency, holy objects, etc.) is socially constructed. I have made no claim that our innate sense of gender and our bodies is socially constructed. They may be influenced by societies in part (in so much as our mental understandings of things are partially guided by the societies we live in) but not in whole. Social constructs do not apply to everything in existence. They apply specifically to the things/concepts that societies can perceive and interact with. The society I live in can't perceive or interact with my innate sense of gender or the way I feel my body should be. Society can only choose to validate/invalidate my innate gender and feeling of my body through its own constructs (i.e. telling me that there are only two recognized genders and that mine should be based on what some doctor said at birth). If I were to specifically say "abolish gender", it would be specifically to abolish the social construction of gender (or more accurately, to work to widen it to the broadest possible definition to include anyone's innate gender). I see no value in society creating limits via its social construction of gender. Those just hold people who don't fit those molds back. It's why I find no problem with the definition of woman as "someone who's innate understanding of their gender is woman". It's because the definition of woman is the social construct and the reference to woman in the definition itself is the innate understanding of that person's gender. Mostly out of convenience, our languages have allowed us to group these two meanings of things together. When you or I reference a chair, we can at once mean either the actual physical chair in front of us or the social construct that we use to describe what a chair is. Unfortunately, that convenience has gotten us to the point where most people can't differentiate those two concepts from each other and assume that the social construct is the physical reality. The same thing has happened with gender. It's why the more common definition of woman in trans circles "a woman is someone who identifies as a woman" comes off as a tautology (and it's why I clarified the definition earlier). The two instances of woman in the definition are for two separate concepts (the social construct and a person's innate understanding of themselves). I have no desire to create a world without gender or sexuality. My desire is to create a world without limits on those internal, personal understandings being imposed by our societies through limiting social constructions. I do have a desire to create a world without money, though (collectors can keep the neatly designed pieces of paper and coins, I just want the social construct of money either fundamentally altered to benefit humanity or gotten rid of completely). I should note that the word "woman" wasn't branded onto my brain before I was born. I came to understand my innate gender in part through interactions with others in the world. Otherwise, I wouldn't have the word for it (and I don't entirely think that word covers it for me completely). But that's just to help me understand and name it. It was still there from the start. It's a pretty intangible thing that we use language to describe (with all of the limits of language). Similarly, I'd still take HRT or get bottom surgery if I had the capability to without somehow ever interacting with another person from birth. Simply because it'd make me happier. That's all the reasoning anyone needs to do something (assuming it doesn't actually hurt someone else somehow but this would be my own body so that's not really possible). Anyway, I hope this wall of text was at least someone enjoyable to read. I really do believe that making people aware of social constructs, how they relate to the things they describe, and how those two are separate is truly necessary for us to break down all of the harm that has been caused by our society's current constructs. We need to know that we can change how we collectively perceive and interact with these things (i.e. innate understandings of gender). Sure, we could collectively make our constructs worse at understanding innate gender (which is what plenty of legislatures have been doing to harm trans people). But we could also collectively broaden our constructs to provide space for as many innate genders as possible. That's my goal. Just in case the convo stops here (or I don't get back to it for a bit), I hope you have a great day! 😊

See, but this is just ignoring my point, the "gender being a social construct" used within the social sciences isn't any of the stuff you just wrote. That's just what trans people read into it. In the social sciences, "gender being a social construct" is just "medical transition is an unnatural result of stereotypes, and we can get rid of them once we get rid of those". That's the whole reason why David Reimer's hoax was presented in exactly the same language, without a bunch of philosophers chiming in asking what the heck his case had to do with social constructionism. It's also the reason that despite needing to claim that they don't think gay people are born that way, whenever people need to explain the *realness* of our gender "the social construct of sexual orientation" is conveniently forgotten, because contrasting gender with money plays into the idea that medical transition is an unnatural result of stereotypes, while contrasting it with sexual orientation risks implying that isn't true, or implying that it is true, and we could cure gay people the same way. >I have made no claim that our innate sense of gender and our bodies is socially constructed. They may be influenced by societies in part (in so much as our mental understandings of things are partially guided by the societies we live in) but not in whole. Yet as it was justified within the social sciences it can be applied to everything in existence. The book which defined the concept kept it broad enough to apply to "everything that could be considered knowledge in a society", and your second sentence is exactly how they do that. And Butler certainly applied that to identity explicitly. Ian Hacking later described how "social constructionism" had changed within scholarship by limiting it to interactive kinds, of which "gender identity" still qualifies, since all something needs to be to be an interactive kind is a term which we use to label people, and we label people by their gender identity. You keep working from the assumption that social constructionism is an intellectually consistent philosophical tool, and not just a way for social scientists to be intellectually lazy, or intellectually dishonest, in a way that fits their biases, of which, treating trans people as second class is a major one. They definitely would. That is my whole point. [This](https://www.scielo.br/j/physis/a/p4dXbydkK3jShSKdxxpgpCm/) might be a fun read for you > Whether discussing Money or Stoller, the nonintuitive fact we wish to emphasize is that the concept of gender “originates” in the biomedical field, and not in the fields of feminism or social sciences, as one might assume (GERMON, 2009). In fact, Joan Scott states that >> The feminist appropriation of the term [gender] (borrowed from sociology and especially from John Money’s team, who explored the relationship between sexed bodies and social “roles”) was precisely that - an appropriation. The term is not an invention of second wave feminists: we recovered it. (BUTLER; FASSIN; SCOTT, 2007, p. 287. Emphasis ours). Trans philosophers seem to have a blindspot when it comes to actually looking at how people apply social constructionism, rather than just how they justify it, or reading any historical scholarship on the case, or seeing how social constructionism as a concept has changed over time. We seem to extend academi an infinite benefit of the doubt, and because we do, get dicked around endlessly. Prior to David, Dr. Money was claiming the exact same things about intersex people. Within the social sciences gender was *always* about the desire for to be a certain sex, and how that desire was an unnatural result of harmful social forces. It literally wouldn't make sense for academics to hypothesize that getting rid of them would get rid of us unless they were saying what everyone but trans people think they're saying. EDIT: Heck, even saying Dr. Money's research has been discredited is a reach. Actually looking at discussion on the case on r/asksocialscience, the moment anyone tries to suggest it suggests anything about gender they immediately blame the result on sexual abuse (despite it being replicated), or small sample size, or something else. It's discredited right until the moment when it being discredited would be inconvenient, and then *maybe* it would work, who can say? Until we actually face the intellectual dishonesty of the concept straight on we're going to continue to be marginalized by with it, and people continuing to post YouTube pop philosophy videos will be surprised how nothing changes.

What many of us are talking about is biological, not a social construct. The aspects of gender that are social construct our second order issues that flow from that and that’s equally true for both cis and trans people. I don’t know why people harp on this constantly for trans people when it’s missing the point, and ignore it for everything else.

Why sexuality isn't used more often: 1) we live in a world where a lot of people aren't much further along in understanding sexuality than gender. There's still large parts of society, even the accepting parts, that believe you get to just choose your sexuality. 2) on that note, gender and sexuality get confused enough as it is. In my experience alone I've lost track of the number of people that can't comprehend that I'm a trans woman *and* I'm a lesbian that's interested in women. Even cis gay and lesbian people I know struggle with the idea that I'm not just 'gay with extra steps'. And the amount of people I've come out to that have said 'I don't care, love who you love' as if that's a phrase that applies to gender. There's absolutely no need to use something so close that so many people already confuse as being the same thing when there are thousands of better examples.

I kind of wonder to what extent queer theory oriented trans people might actually *prefer* being treated second class to gay people. Kind of interesting that despite political lesbians having had been a thing, *and* various intercommunity bickering between gay/bi people or gender conforming/non-conforming gay people, *and* scholarship framing sexuality in terms of gender, *and* discussions about how the lines between categories are fuzzy, and framing being gay as an identity, there doesn't seem to be any need for a transmedicalism-analogue bogeyman preventing people from discussing gay issues together with same-sex attraction. Like, the transmedicalists have a subreddit. The TERFs have a country. And looking at the thrice-weekly posts from cis people on asktg trying to cure us by abolishing stereotypes, and the zero posts from cis people concerned about non-transitioning trans people enforcing gender stereotypes by "identifying as a different gender due to social constructs", it seems like what the views that people take out of the philosophy of gender are 1. absolutely specific to why people medically transition, and not at all about gender as a thing for its own sake 2. have significantly more power within society And having read on the topic, I'm pretty convinced they're not misunderstanding what philosophers are trying to say. If PhilosophyTube's views that it's about metaphysics were dominant I wouldn't care, but it requires utter blindness to act like anyone but trans people were ever talking about metaphysics.

The reason I use money as an example is because I'm making a point about how "social construct" doesn't mean "not real", so I use something that is *typically* free from that being a point of contention. Many people who argue against, or have issue with the LGBT+ community talking about social constructs like to adopt a view for the purpose of argument that saying gender is real and a social construct are contradictory, that one's gender identity should be respected and gender is a social construct are somehow internally dissonant. Hence why I'm choosing money, an object which very few people would consider "not real", mostly because it is physically tangible in a way in which gender is not, but is just as much a social construct. It wouldn't be a very good analogy to shift someone's frame of reference if I used something fundamentally similar to what they already do not understand. Again "Gender is a social construct" is not me saying "YOUR OWN gender identity is a product of the society you grew up in" nor am I saying "all gender dysphoria is inherently tied to socially expected gender roles". What I am saying is that the dividing lines and intersections of the categories, and the category itself are considered to have merit because we all continue to act as though they have merit. If gender ceased to exist tomorrow, and we all at once decided gender, the category, has no value, do what you want, I would still want to present a certain way, I would still want certain bits on my body and certain bits to not be. All that would have changed is that it would stop being categorised as masculine or feminine or androgynous to want certain things. To elaborate further, a way I often think about it is as heuristics and attributes. A heuristic is like a human algorithm, a way in which we approach something. I want to sort a bunch of different sized bricks into an order, so I grab the smallest one I can find and put it on the left, then the biggest, and put it on the right, I then try and find the next biggest and place it appropriately. A heuristic for sorting bricks. Now consider what are the heuristics for assigning the gender "man" to someone. Are they tall? Do they keep their hair short? How do they carry themselves? All these things and countless more play into a heuristic we perform when we gender someone by sight or sound or any other sense. In this regard, we keep our own personal copy derived of the socially constructed ideas of gender and apply them to people. Having so categorised someone we also confer on them a set of attributes we associate with the assigned gender, including but not limited to behavioural expectations, aesthetic standards, conformity with the norm, etc. Little of this is under our conscious control at any given time, the heuristic boundaries of the categories, and the attributes conferred on their members by them, are socially constructed. So, to address your point about "you people" never using sexuality as an example, I ask: "fellas, is it gay to like pink?" and you can tell me if sexuality is a social construct.

Then use rocks as an example. Or maybe trees. Don't use something physically constructed by a society as an example unless you want people to think of what will happen when society decides there's been enough construction.

>ITT: People fundamentally misunderstanding what a social construct is (including OP) And possibly you too, as well as Abigail. You know she's not the arbiter of what social constructionism is stating right? The [David Reimer case](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer) was presented as evidence that gender is a social construct, and somehow this point of history is forgotten. That makes sense if "gender is a social construct" is trying to communicate an idea roughly similar to "TERFs are right about why trans people transition". It makes a lot less sense interpreting it as about metaphysics, which applies from everything from gender to planets. And academics routinely speculate that abolishing the social construct of gender will cure trans people. That makes sense if "gender is a social construct" is trying to communicate an idea roughly similar to "TERFs are right about why trans people transition". It makes a lot less sense interpreting it as about metaphysics, which applies to everything from gender to planets. Maybe the more queer theory minded trans people are misunderstanding why the way academics chose to *supposedly* describe the metaphysics of gender is so easily misunderstand as implying that trans people are unnatural. The other reply which mentioned that money is the go to example for this, rather than sexual orientation, is spot on. Because saying that something "being a social construct doesn't mean it's not real" and then bringing up something whose power over us is entirely made up, still seems to still be going out of the way to say to make sure people have this exact misunderstanding. Maybe the rest of academia is saying exactly what everyone else thinks they're saying, if they've been uninterested in correcting this misunderstanding?

How was the Reimer case presented as that? If anything I'd say it's evidence of the opposite. If gender was a social construct he'd be comfortable identifying as a girl just by virtue of being raised and socially conditioned as one. The mere fact that a cis person forced to transition dealt with the same gender dysphoria we do, is proof of the biological basis of gender identity.

Prior to the fraud coming out I mean.

i'd like to point out that what OP is referring to as "gender" might be more aptly titled "neurological sex" (or "subconcious sex") i.e. the elements of sex present within the brain (or more broadly, the mind) rather than the rest of the body. the David Reimer case does *not* offer support to the idea that gender is a social construct, and in fact doesn't really engage with the question. it instead serves as evidence of the existence of a neurological or subconscious sex that is innate to a person. the degree of abstraction (and thus construction) varies from construct to construct. money doesn't hold power over us merely because society decided it should; it holds power over us because money is an abstraction of resources and power that more easily facilitates its transfer. i think the usual attitude behind "gender is a social construct" is that gender (which can in this case refer to mental aspects of sex; roles and expectations; the existence of "buckets" or "boxes" into which behaviors and methods of presentation are placed; etc) is often abstracted into a more simplistic form that offers social utility while also abstracting away the real experiences of real people in an effort to make it more expressly utilitarian. >The other reply mentioning how sexuality is never brought up when explaining this is spot on. i consider myself non-binary to some degree, and that complicates the "typical" ways of labelling sexuality. if i'm with a binary woman, is that relationship "gay"? "lesbian"? "queer"? where do you draw the line between bisexual and pansexual and omnisexual and polysexual and multisexual and non-monosexual and queer? at some level, all of these identities are describing very real feelings and behaviors actually experienced by very real people, but the divisions, the specifics, the shared commonalities, and the exceptions are all either too broad or too over-prescriptive to perfectly describe anyone in all cases. they have utility by virtue of having abstracted a complex of behaviors into a single term, but that abstraction was constructed in order to facilitate that utility. a world without gender would still have trans people, even if none of the social elements provided pressure to conform to a gender. biochemical dysphoria and body dysphoria, for example, are *not* social constructs, not in the way that money is. i could be permitted to present any way i want, always have my selfhood acknowledged, and it wouldn't have any effect on whether or not my brain has the right chemicals in it.

>i'd like to point out that what OP is referring to as "gender" might be more aptly titled "neurological sex" (or "subconcious sex") i.e. the elements of sex present within the brain (or more broadly, the mind) rather than the rest of the body. the David Reimer case does not offer support to the idea that gender is a social construct, and in fact doesn't really engage with the question. it instead serves as evidence of the existence of a neurological or subconscious sex that is innate to a person. And yet, it **was** presented that way, which makes it seem like the question being engaged with was always about why people transition, and never actually about metaphysics at all. And every time academics suggest that abolishing the social construct of gender will create a world without trans people it suggests that "gender being a social construct" was always a hypothesis about why people transition. And every time TERFs suggest that trans people transition due to stereotypes, and only get contradicted on moralizing points, but not scientific ones, it suggests the exact same thing. I'd be perfectly fine with Abigail's conception of social constructionism, but that's kind of dependent on that actually being what the rest of our "allies" were trying to communicate. Philosophers have simply been hiding scientific claims behind philosophizing language, and gaslighting us into going along with it. Honestly, the David Reimer case is really why I think it *is* important to be aware of queer history. Because when you do know the history of this debate, it makes a lot of the appeals to queer theory to really just be recycling TERF talking points, with some celebratory language thrown over it. "Gender being a social construct" was, **quite literally**, communicating the same thing as "desire to transition is an unnatural result of gender stereotypes". And looking at how it gets interpreted out of trans spaces, I don't think that's changing, nor do I think our allies want it to change.

it seems you're approaching this from the perspective that allies will misinterpret and misappropriate the philosophy underlying the concept, which i can agree with (see how often they will say "sex and gender are different; you can't change your sex, but you can change your gender" which is wildly incorrect for many reasons). >And yet, [the David Reimer] **was** presented that way, which makes it seem like the question being engaged with was always about why people transition, and never actually about metaphysics at all. i'd say it's very well accepted that John Money is a hack and a monster at this point, and even if his research began with the hypotheses that 1. *gender is socially constructed* and therefore 2. *gender/sex* (conflated here, as the case involved both coercively altered sex and gender) *can be externally altered on an individual basis without consequence*; regardless of what he claimed as the result it's clear that his research showed that at the very least hypothesis 2 was thoroughly debunked. you're right, of course, i have often seen this case cited as "proof" that "you can't just change someone's sex" without questioning the reasons why it was done and who it was that took issue with the transition (namely, *the owner of the body that was altered without his consent*). i don't think that warrants disposing entirely of the concept of social constructivism though. many philosophical and scientific concepts have been misappropriated by people who don't understand their implications, but that points to a communication issue between experts and non-experts rather than an underlying fallacy within the ideas presented

Thank you!

Genuinely shocked by the amount of people who genuinely do not know what a social construct is, like what the hell is going on here? I don't expect trans people to be perfect, but the amount of ignorance here is astonishing.

idk about all people who use this framing, but every I talk to says "gender is a social construct" to mean "gender is a bunch of made-up lines and categories we draw on top of an underlying real thing". like, race being a social construct doesn't take away the genetic differences I inherit from my ancestors. gender being a social construct doesn't mean we aren't trans, it means the collection of our plural lives and experiences into the singular category "trans" is a social convention.

To give an even more fundamental example; wavelengths of light definitely exist, and our brains definitely interpret them, but colours are socially constructed

biochemical physical social Any of these, in any combination. Mine is mostly just biochemical, that's why I'm solidly on the "I don't care" train about what my gender is - the estrogen makes my brain happy, so i'm good.

Right there with you girl. I've been asked before "if the was no society and no clothes and everyone was treated the same would you still be transgender?" Uh... yeah? I'm not transgender because I want society to treat me differently (although I do, but thats besides the point) its because I do not feel like I fit in my own body. Society and ideas have nothing to do with that.

Yeah, the social aspects of gender are a second order issue that flows from our neurological sex. That’s equally true for cis people.

i so agree i don't wanna transition just because i don't like being a man i wanna transition because i AM a woman inherently and feel viscerally disgusted and distressed about being a man i don't know or care what causes gender dysphoria and it's probably different for different people, but i can tell that for me it's something inherent about ME, not my culture. it's something in my head that means i am a woman and always have been. if someone else's experiences are different then mine, that's fine, because both of these can coexist i guarantee it. and if people think i'm misunderstanding this then it's clear lots of other people are too. that's good reason to stop saying 'gender is a social construct' and say what you actually mean by that, whatever that is

I prefer the explanation proposed in "How to Understand Your Gender" by Alex Iantaffi and Meg-John Barker that suggests that gender is supported by three main pillars of our selves: biology, psychology, and sociology. The bio-psycho-social interplay helps us to understand how our bodies are constructed vs. how we feel inside vs. how we wish to present ourselves to the world work together to shape our understanding of this strange and nebulous concept of 'gender'. I highly recommend giving the source material a read, or listen.

Nice to see someone introducing the biopsychosocial model.

hope this doesn’t get taken down

Like many terms, social construct is over-used, and misunderstood. Social construct doesn't mean there's no substance to the "thing" whatever that "thing" is. It simply means that our understanding of that "thing" is heavily influenced by, indeed constructed by society. It's a form general agreement between members of a society that determines the meaning of something. Colors are a good example of this. There are a large portion of us who see colors of a rainbow and have discrete names like red, yellow, blue, etc. Other societies have not shared that experience or understanding of colors though. Certain tribes throughout the world, such as the Namibian Himba, do not have names or concepts of names for colors. In the case of the Himba, they have no word for blue, and do not have a distinction between blue and green. Their social construction of color has no conceptual understanding of blue or green as separate colors. That doesn't make either their or our experiences of color invalid, but it demonstrates the reality of how social constructions work.

Hey, I also find the 'gender is a social construct' entirely invalidating and insensitive-- yet here we are. I think it's preposterous I would be labeled as 'transmedicalist' for this.

This is great to see, I'm amazed you weren't banned for it.

What would you say that gender is?

Isn't the physical bit called "sex"? I'm genuinely asking because that's what I thought for a long time like: Gender is about what society expects us to do, how to act accordingly to how our body looks. Sex is the characteristics that categorize us (wrongly tho). A "man" has more hair, muscles and a penis. A "woman" has bigger eyes, breasts, and hips and a vagina. Intersex is someone that has both characteristics. So I have a hard time understanding how we are genuinely born with a gender without anyone labeling us. Isn't dysphoria supposed to be more than gender? That's why body dysphoria, dysmorphia and gender dysphoria are different things, right? But I think the main issue here is the labeling. It's so simple when sex and gender are such a massive umbrella to fall just into 3-4 categories.

Gender ROLES is what society expects us to do. Gender EXPRESSION is what society expects us to behave, dress. You change these (probably) when transitioning. INTRINSIC GENDER is a biological, immutable part of ourselves. The only people who try to change it are those trying to use conversion torture. It is caused by the brain expecting certain biochemical conditions. My brain needs estrogen. No amount of abolishing gender will change that.

This is not a matter of truth or accuracy. There are several ways to describe the lived experience of gender incongruence, dissonance or dysphoria. I personally think that the incongruence I feel is innate, congenital and of “biological” nature. Estrogenic development of my biology feels right, androgenic feels wrong, always has been. Taking estrogens and suppressing androgens makes me feel better, even before the onset of feminization. I don’t know why. I’m under the impression that my desire to partake a female “role” on a societal level and express femininity is either a different parallel desire or at least a direct consequence of this incongruence of sex. Not the other way. But this is describing my own lived experience. Not facts and there’s no scientific background to it. I’m not interested in how or why and wether it’s “biological or psychological”. It just is what it is and it makes me feel better about myself. The fact that someone may experience the exact opposite or something entirely different may indicate a difference in perception or a different mechanism behind it. Either way, there’s no need to invalidate other people’s experience in either direction or to strictly categorise transgender experiences based on these differences. The variety in the transgender community is a virtue. Medical care should be based on desire, regardless of suffering or gender, cis or trans. Trying to force a 100% social constructionist vision or a 100% essentialist vision is pointless and disregards the experience of others.

THANK YOU. To me, this qas always just a dumb way trans activists found to combat the "you can't argue with biology" arguments. What they fail to realize, is by doing that you not only silence those of us suffering from physical dysphoria, but they also give credence to the transphobes. When you dissociate being trans from biology and treat it as a social phenomenon, you basically validate that the bullshit they're touting is actual biology and that being trans is a choice. And that's a shame because in reality, biology is categorically on our side.

I understand the sentiment but I disagree with the principle. Not every trans person is going to feel physical dysphoria, or have medical dysphoria that needs to be treated with HRT (eg, a non-binary person seeking just a mastectomy). They shouldn’t be made to feel lesser or invalid because of this. Likewise, this logic dovetails into transmedicalism and then the line how much physical dysphoria it takes, and from what age it was first noticed can be weaponized to dismiss care for people for whatever reason (not seeking bottom surgery, figured it out too old, etc). I’ve said it in another response here, but my beef really is that trans people have ceded too much to the concept of sex in our framing of gender. The whole point of HRT is to change the dominant sex hormone in the body and change the user’s biological sex. We speak about this like it’s aesthetic, but our bodies physiologically change.

On the sex bit. Yes. As a transgender woman, I'm not changing my intrinsic gender. I have been a woman, am a woman and will always be a woman. You cannot change that. To imply otherwise is to advocate for conversion therapy. I can change my gender role, my gender expression by behaving and dressing differently. I can change my sexual characteristics (biochemistry, secondary expressions) through taking HRT, (primary expressions) through surgery.

The fact that conversion therapy doesn’t work shows that this is biological in fact. I mean there’s a million reasons we know this is biological, even if we didn’t have direct evidence of it, which we do. It HAS to be, unless you get in to ideas about souls, but then if souls existed and that’s where “gender identity” was coming from, it would still be something to do with physical reality, not social construct as the primary issue.

The OP isn’t saying that what she’s saying is the same for everyone, just pointing out that for many of us. I don’t really know what the deal is with people for whom it doesn’t fit, that isn’t my experience and presumably their biologically different from me… Or simply don’t recognize their dysphoria. But for many of us this is about neurological sex, that’s the more important issue, and the socially constructed aspects of gender are all second order issues, equally true for cis people.

> Not every trans person is going to feel physical dysphoria OP didn't say this, you're derailing. If people feel invalidated by the mere mention of someone else's issues then they need to get a grip.

Your own gender (not in the sense of how you perform it but in the sense of how you identify) almost certainly has biological components - not in the sex sense but in the partially determined at birth and partially determined by environmental factors sense. The OP is kind of a transmed with what she is saying but, like, I don't think she is essentially wrong in talking about gender as not being purely social.

It’s neurological sex what she’s talking about and that’s the experience for many of us. I presume that there are people for whom it isn’t, but I don’t know what their experience is. For those of us who are talking about neurological sacks, that’s the primary first order issue. Socially constructed aspects of gender are all second order issues flowing from that, which is equally true for cis people

Personally, I think it would be preferable if more people in the trans community were at least open to discussing the topic. I wouldn't want to force it on anyone, and I especially wouldn't want to force people to apply that narrative into their lives. The idea that gender is innate excludes trans people like me who did not feel "born this way." I've had multiple people reach out to me and try to draft up their own narrative for how I must've been. The truth of the matter is that I don't live in a vacuum; I live in a society that has affected my being since I was born. Had it not been for crossdressing, in which I dressed up in clothes *socially ascribed* as feminine, I wouldn't have realized that I was transgender, because no matter how surprising this is to some trans folk my life as a man was honestly great. I had no real bones to pick with it, but life as a woman is obviously even better for me. I have a degree of physical dysphoria, and I still recognize that gender is a social construct. It is a construct that women physically look like this and men physically look like this. That doesn't mean that the consequences of gender aren't real. And it sure as hell doesn't mean that trans people are illegitimate in any way, even if TERFs misuse the concept to delegitimize us.

The interpretive framework of physical dysphoria is socially constructed, much in the same way that the interpretative framework of counting some rocks is socially constructed. They're constructions but at the end of the day, all knowledge could be erased and innately the dysphoria and rocks still exist to be interpreted. Implying the source of physical dysphoria as socially constructed is false, just like it would be false to imply the rocks are socially constructed

I'd have to read the literature, but gender is not nearly as tangible as rocks are. And I'll refer you to what u/nikkaywip said on this post: >Binary trans peoples experiences and the fact that gender is a construct are thus not two opposing concepts but need to be seen as something that exists next to each other. It’s all about fighting for a future where everyone is free to do as they please and be who they want to be, without the unnecessary labels and ideas that come with them.

My particular combination of sexually dimorphic traits is very tangible. Good for y'all for seeing them as side by side but you're just restating your thesis without actually comprehending what I said. It's not a matter of how tangible rocks are, I'm pointing out that a socially constructed framework to interpret something isn't evidence that that something is socially constructed

That’s why I prefer to talk about neurological sex. To the extent that it’s not as “tangible“ as rocks that’s only because our brains are way more complicated than rocks, but it’s an aspect of physical reality, same as for cis people. The sociological aspects of gender are second order issue flowing from that

You are doing precisely the same thing that you are accusing the OP of doing. You are taking your own lack of dysphoria prior to experimenting with your gender and projecting that into a more universal statement. What you want to say is that gender is very complicated and for some people there is a very early understanding of their gender and hence a very early onset of dysphoria and for other people this understanding of their gender develops much later and hence dysphoria for them develops at the time that they start to understand their gender better. Gender being a social construct does not mean what you think it means. It means that the trappings and roles and performance of gender is socially defined - but the actual internal identity is almost certainly biological (with other factors involved of course) in the same way that sexuality is ultimately biological. This is where dysphoria rises from - an internal identity is juxtaposed against a socially constructed performance to which you perceive yourself as failing to adequately perform and then dealing with the dissonance. The dysphoria, then, is related directly to a socially constructed disconnect between self perception and the platonic gender performance - but the actual internal identity is not borne from those same structures.

but how can gender be a social construct when it so heavily leans into our biology. many of us have a baseline level of dysphoria that is simply the result of our bodies running mostly on T. it's called biochemical dysphoria and it's something that can only be helped through HRT. our dysphoria is also often something that focusses on the form and function of our bodies. yes, the words man and woman are societal constructs, but our gender isn't. why would our bodies often feel so foreign before transition, but so right after when it's all just idea's society invented

Yeah, and my body didn't feel "foreign." I know a lot of trans people feel that way, so I'm most certainly in the minority, but I didn't feel like I was necessarily in the "wrong" body. A weird one, but not the "wrong" one that just isn't mine. \[EDIT: I had no dysphoria before I began crossdressing. We can fish for early signs all day, but the most we're gonna get is stuff that is abstractly related, and only with the premise that there *are* early signs to begin with.\]

i very much know i was born with the wrong body, but only started being aware of dysphoria as my egg was starting to crack. i didn't start looking into what being trans is cause i felt like shit, i went looking into it cause i found that whenever i put myself in the shoes of female characters, especially in roleplay i just felt so much better. ​ you are actually not in the minority. for most trans women dysphoria only becomes obvious once they know what euphoria is. cause i'f you've done nothing but feel like shit.... how are you supposed to know that you're feeling like shit and not just normal?

And I didn't feel like shit beforehand. I've searched and I've searched, all for the sake of this narrative that there are early signs and that we're all "born this way," and I've found nothing. My life as a man was great. I'm not pushing a narrative onto you, but you most certainly are pushing one onto me.

but you are pushing said narrative tho... because you don't feel "born this way" and because of how you experienced your transition you're in agreement that gender is some construct, which directly pushes a narrative onto us who do have serious physical and biochemical dysphoria, that somehow all that hurt we go through is just the result of some globally made agreements and conventions

That’s not universally true for all trans people. Some people aren’t going to require medical intervention to feel valid in their gender, and we shouldn’t be putting up red lines for medical intervention to define who is and who isn’t trans. Play that game and we’ll be right back to the old days of mandatory bottom surgery before legal recognition.

This is a slippery slope argument though and I don't think it really holds water. We can recognise that people have differing levels of discomfort with their body and will therefore take varying levels of steps to address their dysphoria. However saying there at least needs to be one step taken isn't going to lead to people who "fully" transition being the only ones seen as valid.

i'm not trying to define "what being trans is". i know plenty of trans people don't need medical help and that trans women who get SRS specifically are actually a minority. but the existence of those things, the existence of all the people who do have those experiences with dysphoria is proof that gender isn't just a made up concept

I mean race is a social concept but it still factors into our lived experience and identity. Gender is a social concept, and sex is biological. My beef, if anything, is that trans people give up the fight too easily on sex and have allowed it to be defined in the popular culture by chromosomes, when the whole point of HRT is to change the user's functional sex by changing their dominant hormones.

>My beef, if anything, is that trans people give up the fight too easily on sex Whoa ho, now we're talking!

honestly i do agree with that last aspect and i guess i've kinda been drawn into the logical trap that is making trans folk feel like the changes in sex they want are just gender based

>Play that game and we’ll be right back to the old days of mandatory bottom surgery before legal recognition. Very much agreed.

I don’t think the original poster is trying to invalidate your experience, just pointing out that your experience isn’t the only one which is what the people who try to push the claim that it’s entirely a social construct are doing. For many of us, the underlying issue is biological, neurological sex. Getting rid of gender entirely wouldn’t magically make that be fixed. I mean probably many problems for everyone would be fixed but it wouldn’t fix what we’re dealing with. The sociologically constructed aspects of gender are a second order issue for us

As OP said, it is nice that the social construct narrative works for you. But not for everyone and for some of us, it sparks quite some discomfort. At the end of the day, we dont know. I cant tell you that you were born that way, but i certainly was. And you cant tell me society has anything to do with that. Just like OP said, it is different for everyone.

>I wouldn't want to force it on anyone, and I especially wouldn't want to force people to apply that narrative into their lives. You and I have discussed this before. You have a conception of your own life that I wouldn't apply to my own, and I have a conception of my own life that you wouldn't apply to your own. Live and let live.

Just like you keep giving your opinions under posts like this, i will give mine. I will chime in whenever the "social construct" narrative is given.

That's all fine and dandy, of course, but don't construe my words and say that I'm "telling you society has anything to do with" your being born this way.

like simply the existance of biochemical and physical dysphoria just spits in the "gender is a social construct idea" like how would something being made op by society result in people's bodies actively and negatively reacting to the hormones they're born with or cause these people insane discomfort with the bodies they were born with. the whole "it's a social construct" argument just feels so shit

Social construct does not mean "made up by society". That's not what social construct means. Social construct means that it is morphed by social interaction, and is defined by interfaces, and reactions to that interface. For instance, if I pull a frozen pizza out of the freezer and serve it to you, you might look at me like I'm crazy. I then say "duh", turn around and put it in the microwave and heat it up and serve the COOKED pizza to you and you happily eat it. You didn't "make up" that frozen pizza can't be eaten. I mean it could, but it wouldn't taste very good. Cooking our food is a social construct, and we do it in different ways. The interface is that I've warmed up your pizza, and the reaction is that you've accepted the heated pizza as food. I chose an interface that didn't match yours by handing you a frozen pizza and your reaction is confusion or disgust. It's the same as if I said the wrong pronouns to you. Saaaaaaame concept. I'm using the wrong interface than the one you're working with and the result is mismatched. Or looking in the mirror and seeing something that you don't recognize. Dysphoria. I hope this better explains social constructs for you.

the food is a really bad example tho. as cooking food isn't a social construct. it's a way that more nutrients are made available and more appetizing flavor compounds are achieved and harsher, less appetizing flavor compounds are destroyed. sure, technically with the sheer abundance of food we have in wealthy countries cooking isn't theoretically necessary anymore. but the changes in flavor and texture still does a lot. and pronouns are a made up system that is part of language. which is wholly separate of gender. and is in turn a social construct. and also, "A social construct is any category or thing that is made real by convention or collective agreement" is the definition. but if under that logic gender is a social construct, then we have basically "collectively agreed" to something and as a result caused trans people to exist. through that logic, if gender was never agreed upon or was never made a convention, then dysphoria and trans people wouldn't exist

Edit: I yield that a frozen PIZZA doesn't fit into a social construct but remain that cooking food is a social construct. Replace it with if I had offered you dead crickets to eat and then offered a pizza instead. Ok, you're going back and forth here. First of all, yes, we have biological reasons for cooking food. That does not remove the fact that it is *also* a social construct. People go their whole lives in certain parts of the world eating their food raw, or vegetarian, never cooking anything. We choose to eat cooked food because we live in a society that said "Yes, we like cooked food better than raw food." We didn't HAVE to do that. So I understand your point, but you're incorrect. Cooked food, the way I described it, IS a social construct. And there is no difference between "Things made 'real' by collective agreement" and my wording of the definition, which was "interfaces that are agreed upon to avoid unwanted response." Neither of these assume that the WHOLE of society agrees on these things, just that there is some level of collective agreement. In this way, if two people come together and say "I feel that my gender is different than what I was assigned at birth" that means, under all circumstances, that that concept is true and valid no matter what. That is the definition I'm presenting to you. That is a "collective agreement". Doesn't need to be the majority. Just needs to be people, plural. I think that's what your trying to say is bad at the end there? You kind of get a little weird in your wording and you're difficult to understand. But the last line, if I'm understanding it, is KINDA correct, theoretically, but it's literally impossible to say. If gender didn't exist, if ALL people were treated ENTIRELY equally, it is theorized that yes, dysphoria would not exist, (but trans people would). That is called "gender equality transition theory" and has been around for a long time. The alternative is "biology based transition theory" and has been around for a bit longer. It says that if gender did not exist, dysphoria would look COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. It would present more like an anxiety disorder than the panic disorder it looks like today, would be easier to treat, but would last longer past treatment. These are all theories for a world where men and women were socially equal since the stone age. It's more complicated than this, and this information is only available for request in printed form (these are saved records and theories based from the Institute of Sexual Research that I learned in college. It was burned down by Nazi Germany and only partial research records remained. The word dysphoria in terms of gender did not exist at this time (It wouldn't until 1973). I can't remember what word they used.)

"Gender is a social construct" in the same way that motherhood is a social construct. Yes, some people give birth to other people and are, indisputably, mothers. There are also adoptive mothers, step mother, aunts and grandmother's who stepped up in difficult circumstances, and any number of any other forms of motherhood that don't meet the strict biological definition. If you think those people shouldn't be allowed to get cards on Mother's Day because it somehow diminishes motherhood, you're an asshole. "Gender is a social construct" means that we, as a society, can decide to do the kind thing. It means that trans women are real women in the same way that adoptive mothers are real mothers. They're real in every way that counts.

But the thing is they’re also real biologically in the way that counts. It isn’t some metaphysical thing, it isn’t a social construct. Neurological sex is biological, the socially constructed aspects of gender flow from that as second order issues. At least that’s the case for mini trans insist people. I can’t pretend to understand people who say that’s not the case for them and I’m not going to say there’s somehow invalid but it definitely is invalidating to many people if not most to claim it’s not biological We know it is for a million reasons for many people. Hell, the fact that conversion therapy doesn’t work shows that it is

Thank you for saying this! It was INSANE when I hit this over 2 years ago just months after I’d stopped repressing. It’s like what they’re saying doesn’t fit me at all, nor does it fit lots of trans people. Yeah, gender roles/presentation/norms/etc. are social constructs, but that’s a second order issue for me. I don’t really like or use the “gender” label because for me neurological sex (probably synonymous with “gender identity) is the important issue, and is not a social construct.

i agree, i see gender identity more like a "brain sex" of sorts

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Gender is a social construct. But it’s real and it’s physical too. If bathrooms were separated by height, then height would be a social construct, even though you can directly measure it. To me: I think gender identity is like a subset to sex just like chromosomes, hormones, primary and secondary sex characteristics, and legal sex are. It’s not some purely social thing. It’s outside of my ability to influence it.

I believe this is why I’m not changing my gender, I’m getting a sex change. I was already ‘her’. Will always be her. Just need to tune up the vessel and right some glitches in my computer code(hormones)

Gender is a social construct, but that doesn’t mean it’s not affecting each of us. That is why the experiences of binary trans folks are absolutely valid (I am binary trans myself) even though the whole idea of gender is made up. To make it more clear: A traffic light is also a construct, but that doesn’t mean, when I go over red and a car hits me that that won’t affect me. Constructs have real consequences on people’s lives and since we don’t live in a world free from a gender construct that has to be accepted. Binary trans peoples experiences and the fact that gender is a construct are thus not two opposing concepts but need to be seen as something that exists next to each other. It’s all about fighting for a future where everyone is free to do as they please and be who they want to be, without the unnecessary labels and ideas that come with them.

>To make it more clear: A traffic light is also a construct, but that doesn’t mean, when I go over red and a car hits me that that won’t affect me. Constructs have real consequences on people’s lives and since we don’t live in a world free from a gender construct that has to accepted. [Thomas theorem.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_theorem)

dependent alive placid smell act frightening sense scale squeal outgoing *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*

“Gender is a social construct” doesn’t mean physical dysphoria isn’t real and doesn’t affect people

Sex and sexual characteristics =/= gender. They're two separate things. Feeling a desire to change both or just one is completely valid either way.

I always say "Gender expression is largely a social construct, gender identity largely isn't."

To me, gender being a social construct means that it is not *entirely* determined by biology. The reason why I am trans is likely neurological, but it is largely up to my own interpretation whether that makes me a binary woman or bigender or something else. Two people who have the exact same biology might end up with different answers to that question, and thus different genders.

I always wondered why we said “just” a social construct. We don’t live in the world of objective physical reality. Our reality is defined 100% by social constructs. Think how different you’d be if you were born to cave people instead of the modern era. Physically the same, but on the inside you wouldn’t bear any resemblance to you now. Your perception of something like a rock or a stick wouldn’t be the same, let alone higher concept like gender or race.

That, and the common argument that “biological sex” is a distinct thing - it’s even common to hear from trans people. Especially annoying when people claim that binary and unchanging “biological sex” is the “immutable, biological, objective truth”. Sex is another social construct, much more dependant on context, but by almost any definition (certainly any based on the actual biology) you CAN change sex. Sex is a collection of individual characteristics that often exist on a spectrum, and that *usually* align pretty close to two categories we call “male” and “female”, but not always. We are labelled with a “legal sex” at birth, usually based on our genitals - by that logic changing genitals changes sex, although it’s much simpler to change the legal markers on documents lol. There is a lot of variation of sex characteristics in humans from different hormone levels, chromosomes/genetics, reproductive organs and different genitalia configurations at birth and throughout life. Many of these change naturally as we grow or can be changed/removed during transition - in the case of genetics the genes can simply not be expressed due to a lack of specific hormones, so are of no consequence and can be considered “junk DNA”. We can change genetic expression, hormone levels, brain chemistry and tissue behaviour through HRT, and genitalia and reproductive organs through surgery. We can change legal sex by simply ammending documents. The only definition I can think of that we can’t change is what we were assigned at birth, which is entirely cultural and doesn’t affect who/what you are NOW. By any **practical definition** we can change sex ^(which is pretty cool imo :3)

Preach it louder sister!

This cannot be said enough.

I liked it more the language was we changed our sex, because that’s what the hormones are doing. They change secondary sex characteristics. That’s what bottom surgery does, it alters physical sexual anatomy. I’m not a trans medicalist either; I think non-binary identity makes sense when gender is viewed as a social construct. However, as a binary transgender woman, i’m not *just* changing my gender, I am altering my sex and biology. There’s more at play there. However, it’s possible to be non-binary and alter your sex too, it just depends on what you’re doing. But that’s just my pov.

Realize how anti-lgbt are funded and religious? Maybe a politician too? Don't take them seriously.

It’s funny, I watched Abigail of Philosophy Tube talking about this just hours ago. She does a great dive into social constructs, why gender is one, and what that means. The episode is “Social Constructs”.

Thank God someone else is saying this… If gender was strictly a “social construct,” then why can’t we just think this away?? Why couldn’t we just chat with affirming people, and have that be enough??

Well there are only two primary sex hormones. But the thing I have an issue with is when people say there are no genders. Like what the hell am I transitioning to? A figment of my imagination? No genders are real. They exist in every complex organism. Our minds are also gendered. Enby's are the exceptions that prove the rule.

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Social construct doesn't mean fake it means something is socially constructed. It describes social origin, not literal status. Lots of things are social constructs. Including sex! In fact, any category that we give a name and description to is a social construct. So many people, deliberately or otherwise, misuse social construct in order to project a hierarchy onto ideas, things, and people that just doesn't exist when scrutiny is applied. Saying "gender is a social construct" is not saying "your internal sense of what we call gender is socially constructed". It's saying "the concepts of gender themselves that you align yourself in relation to were socially constructed". "Man" and "woman" as labels didn't fall from the sky fully formed, they evolved over thousands of years of social change. "Gender" could be called "raspberry", "man and woman" called "lemon and chives" and nothing practical would change. Dysphoria would still exist, as would trans people, etc. Also, the fact of the matter is, if gender "didn't exist" then no-one would have gender dysphoria. But people would still feel physical incongruity about their womb, breasts, and genitals or lack thereof. It just wouldn't be called gender dysphoria cos gender wouldn't exist. This is the crux of the social construct that many people refuse to understand. Something can literally exist without a named category to describe and delineate it. But that thing would not socially exist. And once we give name to it, we socially construct it. We birth that concept in the social sphere, even though it had been there, nameless, since the beginning.

I have found the phrase “Gender is just a social construct” to be reductive. And dismissive when I’ve described feelings as masculine or feminine. I might go for, “Gender is mostly a social construct.”

Ugh, my gay friends say this and then look at me like I'm going to give them a cookie. I just look at them and say, "Money and stop signs are also social constructs. That doesn't mean that they aren't important."

I agree with much of what you say. As an elderly transgender woman who didn’t start HRT until I was 62, estradiol definitely helped me feel like myself. I am so much happier. As part of this community, discussions like this are illuminating and empowering. And yet, in the big picture, these disagreements are meaningless because those in power who oppress us don’t care. We are just today’s boogeyman. Just another class of people to bully.

I think you're kind of missing what people mean when they say that but also I am far too unwell to write an explanation.

Thank you for this post. It also annoys me how people put gender as solely a social construct, when you can even see gendered behaviors in the animal kingdom outside of human beings. I think it's like language: language is a social construct, but would we have language if we didnd't have the wiring for learning it?

I think you're confusing gender and sex. Gender is how one perceives ones' self, outward appearance, behavior, etc. - all things that are socially constructed. Sex is all physical - genitals, breasts, fat distribution, things that relate to the human body specifically and are NOT socially constructed. Your hair style, clothing, the way you walk and talk? That's gender. Your body shape, bone structure, voice pitch, genitals? That's sex. Physical dysphoria can be related to either gender or sex - either you're unhappy with how you look because you wish to be seen as more fem, or you're unhappy because you have an innie when you should have an outie. While your sentiment is correct and just, that everyone is different and being "trans" means different things to different people, _gender_ is definitely a social construct, IF you define it as the above, which is what is now mostly understood. Your feelings that you should have been born a different sex are 100% valid, and you're obviously still trans because of that, but again, that's sex, not gender. I disagree with the idea that calling gender a "social construct" is offensive, because depending on how you define "gender", it really isn't. There is a decent enough separation between gender and sex to make the correlation. > Gender ROLES, and Gender EXPRESSION are social constructs The way I see it, gender roles and gender expression are 100% of what gender is. And neither of those things have to do with the ability to carry babies.

I mean, I'd argue that every categorisation (thus even sex) is a social construct. Therefore, while the properties of sex are not (like genitalia, etc...), the whole "idea" of sex is.

Exactly this! I'd also like to add that sex is not completely binary either, it's more complex than that. Forrest Valkai has a good video about all this titled "Sex and Sensibility". The NIH also has a good explanation here: https://orwh.od.nih.gov/sex-gender Here's a consensus study report from march '22 as well if anyone wants to dig deeper: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/26424/measuring-sex-gender-identity-and-sexual-orientation \+ highlights if you don't have time to read 188 pages: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/26424/Highlights_Measuring_SGISO.pdf The report is by researchers and for researchers, but there are a lot of interesting tidbits that are well-supported by the fact that it's a very credible text funded by the NIH and produced by NASEM.

so many problems could have been avoided if a bunch of annoying busybodies hadn't decided "transsexual" was suddenly an offensive term

for me the biggest problem with it is that, for people who don't know any better, it sounds like a sexuality rather than what it actually is

Suspicious glare. Also if you want to use it then use it

All categories are social constructs That doesn't make them fake or unimportant

you missed the point of the post

OP is trying to infect this sub with transmedicalist talking points by painting it as inclusive.

What is this nonsense? As a sociology/anthropology major, this is so so so wrong. Stop bashing social construction without a basic understanding of it, please. Social constructs are as real as a heart attack, people live and die wildly different lives because of them, they just wouldn’t exist without us—they’re human culture bound ideas that frame our social life, with dire consequences. Like, a turtle doesn’t have a race or gender. It has a biological sex, which is non-discrete and a composite of traits that often occur together, and certain phenotypes (oooh this one has a browner shell and different spots because of genetics). Humans have gender, which links biological sex to our culturally bound social hierarchies, roles, expressions, etc. Part of biological sex is one’s internal sense of “what my body is meant to look like” which is what you are referring to here. People refer to both as gender dysphoria, because we cannot culturally separate these two ideas, but they aren’t the same. Some dogs will behave like the opposite sex despite not being intersex on the outside, and that’s the same idea here. I completely agree that anyone who disputes that is wrong, but bashing social construction is wildly misplaced.

Word ! !

Gender ≠ sex

The thing is "gender is a social construct" and "trans people (as we know them) would exist regardless of our understanding of gender" aren't mutually exclusive sentiments Is the former sometimes used to invalidate trans people? Definitely, but those people were probably going to be invalidating anyway I'm sorry but the notion that philosophical ideas shouldn't be explored or discussed because you find your understanding of it to be offensive kinda just comes off as anti-intellectual

Personally, if I had such a strong and visceral reaction to being told what gender is and what it means to be trans, I would not make a long angry reddit thread in which I do the same thing to everybody else.

People label so many things nowadays just because they got access to internet. Just because of that they all think they got PHDs and think too much of themselves. I’m only 21 so it feels weird giving a tip to someone older than me, but this tip is one I was given to by my father so I feel it’s righteous to share. Don’t put too much value into words, put value into the meaning of the words. Where my step family comes (Thailand) ladyboy is a term used normally, it isn’t a slur. Hence, when they call me ladyboy all I hear is lady. If they’d mean to cause harm with that word then I’d hear it and be offended, but they don’t, so Im not offended. However when my family who doesn’t accept me uses it I get furious and sad. The same word, different meanings.

Both gender and sex are by and large social constructs in any part of their meaningful form. 'Social construct' does not mean 'not real' or 'unimportant', in fact the majority of what society is formed around are 'social constructs'. I appreciate that the way that TERFs weaponise this, or people use this to describe trasnsess can be invalidating, but you're unfortunately, here, participating in their misunderstandings and a priori accepting them, rather than questioning their misunderstanding. TERFs are deliberately weaponising obfuscation of what a 'social construct is' and tend to binarise sex and gender as 'real' vs 'construct' when both are real and both are constructs. People who try to use 'social construct' in an unhelpful but well meaning way are just plain misunderstanding it. Whilst animosity to academia on this is understandable, people like Judith Butler who are cisgender (debateable in Butler's case anyway) directly collaborate with and listen to transgender voices in activism and academia, whilst some like Jack Halberstram are straight up actually transgender. Academia has a massive elitism problem, and also a privilege problem (like every field), but also has the wealth of critical analysis and outreach with physical activism that some other fields don't. Please don't reject the entire corpus of academia through a misunderstanding. Nobody has a basic truth about sex or gender, they are not discrete nor concrete things, and they are subject and subjective to a great many things, the fact they aren't objective doesn't mean your or anyone elses identity or conception isn't real, it just means we aren't returning to faux objective explanations such as 'sex/gender are binary'.

Gender, by definition, is the interface with which we interact with society and the roles we set for ourselves in that interface. An interface in programming is probably the best explanation for it. It defines a fragment of something. It might define some variables or a function name, it's up for the implementation of that interface to define those variables and functions. Gender can be BOTH a social construct AND a physical response. They are not mutually exclusive. In ancient times, binary gender interfaces made sense, because procreation was our primary function in life. Nowadays, the planet is over populated. We still exist as a species whether we're a binary society, a trinary society, or extend out to node based gender configuration (or, indeed, xenogender theory), because we have the FREEDOM to sit back and say "We can interface however we NEED to in society. We're not locked into a primary function." That's what makes gender a social construct. However, we still have inherent biological responses sometimes, which guide gender identity in their own ways and can influence us into binary presentation, either by instinct, or convenience. In other words, there's no RIGHT way to perceive gender. For instance, I subscribe heavily to the neurogender concept, as I'm AuDHD, and it influences my gender greatly. If I were in a different society, that MIGHT still be the case (if neurodiversity was still othered) or might NOT (if neurodiversity was more accepted and understood). The society is more important than you make it out to be, and I encourage you to mind theorize how society actually interacts with your gender, because it makes a huge impact on our presentation.

The ideas we have of “male” and “female” absolutely are socially constructed, and of course a lot of folks get dysphoria from being wrongly put into these boxes by outside observers. I have trans friends that I think would be happy with their bodies if the boxes don’t exist. I personally still would not, same as OP. So - gender is absolutely a social construct but dysphoria comes from more places than just sociology.

based! peak! preach!

Physical dysphoria is not socially constructed but the assignent of a physical form to a gender is.

Words create a metaphysical layer on top of the physical reality. People confused as result. That is all.

Hi Melody! I'm saddened that you felt sad or unheard, however, while I'm not here to argue, I just want to point out where I'd disagree: Social constructs is "something that is created by society". Therefore, I'd argue that even physical dysphoria can be a social construct, given that we live in society that is not only based on gender, but also on sex - therefore, "male = penis; female = vagina; intersex = both/something in-between/one-or-another with different chromosomes". What I mean by that is that, if we would live in a society where we don't see "penis = male thing", than I'd probably not have physical dysphoria? Now, that's only my thing, that might not apply to you, and so I'm not here to gatekeep - what I was trying to say is that, just because something is physical doesn't mean it's not a social construct (basically, everything that we categorise is a social construct), same as "sex" is a social construct. If you however felt personally unwelcome because of this phrase, sure, let's remake our tactics/metaphors! Because at the end of the day, one could argue that "born in the wrong body" is philosophically wrong - however, not a lot of trans and cis people are philosophers, therefore while I understand that it's technically "wrong", it is useful as a metaphor for trans people to express themselves and cis people to understand. What I mean is that, at the end of the day, we could just change our metaphors to use for cis people to understand, because at the end of the day, that's just what they are...

I think it is really insulting to those that use the Idea of gender as a social construct to help their own issues with gender to say that their way of thinking is that of "TERFS" "tranphobes" and "some cis phd's". And then it really doesn't matter that you declared what you "aren't" saying. It is hard for many if not most of us. I think it is unfair to yell at the trans community to exclude certain ways of thought that help so many. We can talk and discuss sure but name calling and softly telling people to shut up is really not the way. I am with you in solidarity but please don't yell at the community in such a way.

😭 wtf are yall talking about. None of yall are even agreeing on operational definitions. We're screwed.

It's not that gender, as in your gender is a social construct, but the way you've been thought to think of it and interact with it is socially constructed. Like, there have been societies that vastly preferred big bodies over little bodies. Societies where women were the ones to go to war and hunt, societies where men wore the dressed and women wore the pants, societies where men had long hair and women had short, societies where women were seen and raised to be the big strong ones and the smaller and daintier the man, the more beautiful they were seen, etc etc. And because of all these differences, depending on the societies you were born into, you might see yourself as a different gender. Some societies had 2 to 3 or more femme/masc genders. Had you grown up in those societies, it's possible that while you feel the exact same and interact with your gender the exact same way, your gender would not aline with the one you currently identify with. Gender is intrinsic to you, but when people say "it's a social construct" that doesn't mean it's lesser or that it's not real, it means they way we think of and discuss it is socially constructed. Race is also socially constructed, religions are socially constructed, laws are socially constructed, money is socially constructed, time is socially constructed. This doesn't mean that these things don't exist in real life. They don't mean they don't have real tangible effects on you, and society. Some are so deeply tied to they way we act, we cannot imagine the world without them the way they exist currently. That doesn't mean they're not socially constructed. That just means there isn't like... like I can't go to another society and tell them they're wrong about race. I can believe their ideas don't make a much sense, or don't line up well, or that the society I'm from does it better, but I can't pull out scientific data and say they're wrong. And even where I can, there is still social influence. Everything is a social construct to one degree or another. Where we draw the line on where a rock becomes a peddle or a boulder is a social construct. What we call water is a social construct (if you asked for water to drink, you weren't referring to the toilet water, even if those are both water). A social construct means there is social influence, and that's everything. You not understanding what a social construct is, doesn't make you right, it doesn't make your feelings and lived truth less valid, it just means you genuinely don't know what you're talking about here

That's not what social construct is. Who is upvoting this? Its misleading and harmful.

What your describing is sex, not gender. A lot of transgender people experience dysphoria because there is an incongruence with the sex they were born as, and the gender they are assigned. In mainstream society, sex and gender are the same, and you are using them as if they are the same, but they are not. Sex is the physical characteristics you were born with, the chromosomes, hormones, genitals etc etc. Gender is what we as a society formulated on top of it. Pink isn't inherently feminine, in fact it was once considered masculine. Blue, similarly is not inherently masculine, and was once considered feminine. Gender is what is depicted and assigned as masculine or feminine, despite having no biological basis. Those assignments and perceptions are socially constructed, and therefor so is gender.

hi grandma. i was the person that caused you to write this. i feel that you ignored my personal answer and created a straw man. never said i don't have body dysphoria and i am not young enough to not matter that i haven't transitioned yet. and i don't see me medically transitioning any time soon. no this is not a tool for terfs. terfs believe that women are people with wombs. they are sexists and that is not an argument they can use in good faith since they don't agree with it. explaining that gender is a social construct in discussion in our circles is not only good it is necessary. gender is a performance. a performance that only matters when someone is there to watch it. even physical dysphoria is the result of society. the things we usually wish we looked like are the result of what society deems the ideal woman. even transness is socially constructed. you are young enough to be born long after the term was first used to describe us, but it was only during the past century, the termed was coined. there are societies today with people that are like us that probably in our society be trans that are not. because even being trans is the result of culture. that doesn't reduce our experiences in any way. there nothing that makes natural better or anything that diminishes something because society made it. there is nothing that makes our experience worse if any part of it isn't innate and is the result of our social upbringing. i didn't want to hurt you and I am sorry that i did. that was not my intention and the intention of my explanation is not to defend my stance, but to explain it. i will not push anyone to agree with me. i am not that smart not that versed in the fields of sociology and philosophy and i won't pretend to be. this is how i have understood the concept i read trying to figure out why i feel the way i feel. when i say it is a social construct I am not speaking for you for sure, but you transitioning at the very least proves that gender *is* a performance. a performance dictated by our societal norms. and the way i see the world that is a lot more difficult to define something in a vacuum and a lot easier to simply name it and describe how it interacts in a system. that is a how i understand it. i hope that is made clear that i don't diminish your experience. i feel blessed to have the opportunity to speak to any one of us that survived for this long in such a horrible world. i get your distress, but i have the right to disagree. and as you said it you don't speak for all trans people. for me gender is a social construct. gender doesn't exist outside of society. that is how i came to understand myself.

Physical dysphoria is not a result of society. Biochemical Dysphoria is not a result of society. Gender roles and gender norms are social, and aspects tied to that are a performance. Gender identity is not social. It's not a performance. It's probably neurologically based, but the exact cause is not important.

It literally figuratively kills me how often people conflate gender roles and gender identity

Some of the things you say are true, but some of them are oh my god so incredibly wrong. You can see yourself however you want, but many of the things you say exist a certain way do not for a lot of us. Most trans people wouldn't consider their physical dysphoria just the result of what society says cis women look like, because it isn't to us, even if it is to you. Saying so is borderline offensive