https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/1j19wgb/does_gender_even_exist/
created by [deleted] on 01/03/2025 at 21:11 UTC
184 upvotes, 4 top-level comments (showing 4)
The way I have thought about this (without reading any of the literature on the subject), is that the two primary genders, male and female, are derived from the respective biological sexes. Otherwise the concepts of male and female gender wouldn't really have any meaning. Saying, for example, 'I identify as a woman', seems to be the same thing as saying, 'I want to exhibit traits that are commonly associated with the female sex'. But there is nothing which intrinsically links the female gender and the female sex, because gender is something that (I think) we have invented to explain the preponderence of certain traits in men and certain traits in women. It seems to me that traits, as in character traits, the things that make up your identity, are not at all linked to sex, or at least not necessarily. If this is the case, then surely gender identity is a meaningless term, because there is no sex for it to be derived from? Gender identity would really, then, need to be called merely 'identity', which is in my opinion is what most gender identity consists of. Perhaps it is an issue of definitions, and maybe gender is a thing now synonymous with 'identity' in general? Rather than being linked with sex, as it has always been.
If anyone can tell me if there's any credibility to my little thesis here, or point my to some highly-reputed academic work on the topic, I would really appreciate that.
And just so nothing is left in doubt, I am absolutely supportive of all LGBTQ folks and send love and digital hugs to all trans, non-binary and gender-non-conforming friends in these fearful times.
Comment by BernardJOrtcutt at 02/03/2025 at 19:48 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
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Comment by Anarchreest at 01/03/2025 at 21:42 UTC
130 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Just some notes on social constructivism:
i) If we remember other social constructs like money, it seems obvious to say that gender is real in our world. We can look around us and see that gender norms play a part in how society functions by the fact that people, on the whole, largely conform to a number of gender norms typified by their sex. That seems enough to say that gender is a *social* reality, i.e., not necessarily tied to some other biological, etc. factor, but social realities are still *real*. Bogartus, in his controversial essay on the question "what is a woman?", noted that while gender theorists on the whole do note many ethical, etc. reasons to abandon gender, they've failed to explain why the "metaphysics of gender" in a conventional account (which is something he defines in the essay) are *false* and not merely undesirable—if I remember correctly, he draws on Lewis (or Lewisian account of convention, at least) and Kripke's rigid designators to lay out that point.
ii) When you say gender is something like "I want to exhibit, etc.", you're actually departing from the mainstream theorists on this. Butler, etc. would say that gender is a *performance* in the context of a societywide "play" of sorts; it is often completely unconscious, where people adopt their gender roles in accordance to their natural sex without question. Again, this gives this a *social* reality in that there is a display of the norms which we can point to and it doesn't appear to be solely based in the conscious desires of the individual.
iii) As Hacking notes in the first chapter of *The Social Construction of What?*, these types of constructivists often theorize in such a way that they are trying to show that X is a social construct *and* that social construct shouldn't be the case, i.e., as we could do otherwise than is the case, we ought to do otherwise than is the case. The opposite side of the coin, though, is that pointing out something is a social construct doesn't actually commit us to saying the social construct ought to be abolished. We might find Marx's critique of the money-form to be inspired, but the movement to abolish money could be impractical or undesirable on some other count (there are some interesting individualist anarchist accounts here on this where, even if we were willing to accept the critique of the function money has in our capitalist society, they say Marx's view of money is (ironically) essentialist and akin to a reinvented "original sin" that we don't need to hold onto); similarly, even if gender is a social construct, that's not *prima facie* a reason to dispose of it. Obviously, gender theorists do a lot of work after that identification to make their case as to why they think we ought to do such a thing.
Comment by kazarule at 01/03/2025 at 21:42 UTC
31 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Gender is the way societies organize sexed bodies. It's a real social construct. Different societies have different ways of organizing (i.e., managing and policing) sexed bodies. Gender identity is the way a subject understands themselves in relation to their societies ways of organizing sexed bodies.
Comment by AutoModerator at 01/03/2025 at 21:11 UTC
0 upvotes, 0 direct replies
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