Gender is a social construct

Alright, let’s talk about sex. And gender, baby.

Most folks, due to normative ideas espoused in popular culture, tend to conflate these two words. This conflation leads many to believe that people identified as female-bodied at birth will naturally develop as girly or womanly.

Likewise, many assume that a person identified as male-bodied at birth will become boyish or manly as a natural part of their progression as humans.

Well, fear not; this is a bunch of rubbish. But bear with me. Here’s why.

Whenever I lead or participate in the following exercise, done in many Women’s Studies 101 classes, the answers tend to be quite similar. On the board, the instructor writes “woman” on one side and “man” on the other.

Then, the teacher asks the class to suggest adjectives that others would associate with each of these words.

For “woman,” words like “caring,” “nurturing,” “children,” “submissive,” “passive,” “curvy,” “creative,” “emotional,” “fragile” and “empathetic” often appear on the board.

For the list under “man,” words like “logical,” “aggressive,” “strong,” “tough,” “hairy,” “intelligent,” “unemotional,” “angry,” “authoritative” and “bread-winner” are frequently chosen.

Visualizing these lists, if you identify as a man, please reflect for a moment on whether you ever feel or enact some of the adjectives put under the “woman” category. Caring ever? Creative ever? Curvy ever?

For readers who identify as a woman, do you ever feel angry? Strong? Intelligent?

My guess, as many tend to conclude in the class, is that whether you identify as a woman or a man, anyone at any given time could embody any of these traits.

This means that these categories are ideas. They are frameworks and, yes, constructions that define binary concepts of gender which are not inherently related to the sex people are assigned at birth.

So, biological sex and socially constructed gender are:

1. Not the same.

2. Silly to insist are the same.

3. Not even inherently

correlated.

Typically, the next step in this exercise, if someone in the audience has not already brought it up, is to ask whether the descriptions on the board are specific to any race. That is, do these categories fit our ideas of all women and men regardless of the race they identify with?

Usually, the students (normally a predominately white audience at this university) eventually point out that the lists on the board, especially the “woman” list, pertain to a person who would identify as white.

This reification of white privilege (the class assumed that the “typical” woman was white), raises an important question: If the students in the class believed that female-bodied people would naturally express the adjectives mentioned, does that mean people who identify as black women are unnatural if they do not identify with the adjectives furnished for the “woman” — more accurately, “white woman” — category?

I would argue no. In other words, people born with a female assignment at birth express their gender in a variety of ways; there is no naturally defined way to do so.

But here’s the thing: lots of people are highly invested in denying the idea that gender isn’t as straightforward as we used to think. Some won’t even entertain the idea that the gender binary, though useful for promoting freedom of self-expression, is phony.

Why? For starters, there are a variety of rewards and punishments for either being complicit in or critical of the gender binary.

Moreover, our relationships with our family, friends, lovers, occupation and even country are in turn constructed in reference to this gender binary.

Is this inherently bad?

Because of the domination of women by men that occurs so often under the social constructions of “men” and “women” — which many people use gender’s biological basis to justify — I would argue yes.

But this is not to say I don’t think it’s important to keep a dialogue about sex and gender open and ongoing. With so many aspects of our society based on the idea that sex and gender are one and the same, we cannot afford to continue disregarding this conversation as unimportant or impertinent.

It is our duty to ourselves and everyone we love to promote self-expression by continuing to explore, debate, develop understanding of and criticize traditional conceptions of what relation, if any, sex and gender have to one another — and whether they truly exist the way we understand them at all.