31 upvotes, 5 direct replies (showing 5)
View submission: Do non-binary identities reenforce gender stereotypes?
internal sense of gender identity
What ever happened to "gender is a social construct"? I can't help but feel like this "internal sense of gender identity" is simply "personality" being misunderstood and mislabeled.
Masculinity and femininity are not internal emotions we evolved to feel, they are cultural concepts we have been immersed in and taught all our lives. Your conception of "man" or "woman" is, in fact, *not yours;* it was taught to you and hammered home through habits that you had to partake in lest you be ostracized.
This "internal sense of gender" is about as natural as the internal sense of shame religious people get when straying from their lifelong habits, no matter how oppressive partaking in those habits was. Which is to say, while it is very real to the person experiencing it, it is not a *good* thing you *should* experience, and even though it may not be fair, you have to do work on yourself to grow past it.
Comment by zzzzzooted at 13/01/2025 at 00:56 UTC
8 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Gender roles as a social construct ≠ ones internal sense of self.
Throughout history there have been many different words for those concepts - yin and yang being a very obvious example.
Just because it’s the same in english currently doesn’t mean they are the same thing, and clearly that experience has been widespread for all of human history because there is much writing about ones relationship with gender internally, from cis and trans people alike.
Comment by shivux at 12/01/2025 at 23:34 UTC
10 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Then why are trans people a thing? There are examples of people we would understand as trans, or something similar, in lots of different cultures, throughout history. Why are some people so uncomfortable partaking in the habits of their assigned gender, and feel the need to partake in habits of the *other* gender, so strongly that they often do so at great cost and risk to themselves?
Masculinity and femininity are not internal emotions we evolved to feel
Maybe they are though? I mean we’re social animals with male and female sexes, and have been for millions of years. Our continued existence as a species literally depends on our ability to recognize members of the opposite sex, so isn’t it possible we might have evolved some kind of instinct for signalling and recognizing sex in social contexts?
Obviously the *specifics* of gender vary from culture to culture, and clearly *are* “social constructs”, but the same is true of language, yet humans still seem to have an instinct for recognizing and learning language, especially at a young age. Perhaps something similar is going on with gender?
Comment by TheEgolessEgotist at 13/01/2025 at 04:22 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
So, I'm a nonbinary person who uses this framing of gender as a social construct to derive the opposite conclusion. I'm more of a gender binary skeptic.
Gender means "genre" or "type". It tends to refer, in the West, to which "type" you fall under in the historical cast system we call patriarchy. This caste system has existed for long enough that huge cultural expectations are associated with your assigned type, which have historically been enforced much more firmly (though they have also been fluid, e.g. flamboyance in men in the 18th vs the 20th centuries).
Saying Gender is socially constructed though doesn't mean that it's completely without merit: genre and classification systems are effective tools for communication and self-understanding. Part of the way we engage in communicating who we are or fathom ourselves internally is based on the social constructs of gender as we've inherited them.
Thus there may be no true meaning of being a woman that exists outside of human terms, but the passive experience of self understanding and public perception of womanhood is a real thing that people do or do not experience. A trans femme butch dyke might love to get greasy working on cars with a short hair cut and no make up. A trans masc twink might wear slutty little clothes, even a dress or skirt. But they do so engaged in the same social consciousness that accounts for cis butches and cis twinks. When a cis twink wears a dress to the gay bar to meet another gay man on a date, he does not think that makes him a straight woman.
In summary: social construction does not unmake the reality of something, it just means that its definitions are constructed socially. As we become more free and variable in our ability to express ourselves and communicate that expression, so too will the umbrella of gender grow. Using the framework that gender is socially constructed to undermine the validity of trans people is really an excuse to cut us off from the social conversation of humanity in which we are all naturally engaged by simply being here.
Comment by Famous-Ad-9467 at 13/01/2025 at 13:31 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
It's a theory. On that's being pregnanted as fact but a theory non the less.
Comment by Ok_Buffalo1328 at 13/01/2025 at 03:58 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Gender is a social construct became a conservative idea.