Saying “gender is a social construct” directly pisses all over a lot of trans people, because it directly asserts that we would not exist if not for society. But then it’s usually said by people who forget we exist anyway…i’m starting to revisit some stuff i used to think a long time ago (bare with me) about dworkin and etc.
specifically my thinking is now a bit like this but i’m unsure.
i would appreciate any links or posts on what trans people think about this. my main problem with saying gender is a social construct is that too many people dont know what that really means.
i prefer to say that gender is a cultural construct since i feel like that puts it into better perspective.
it’s a construct in that it is created by humans, yes, but so is basically everything that humans do, think and say.
to say that it is a cultural construct is to acknowledge, in my mind, the fact that gender is so deeply embedded in every single individual. hell, sexual orientation and sexual attraction are cultural constructs!
Here’s my rub:
Since we know very little about sex identity, and since psychiatrists are committed to the propagation of the cultural structure as it is, it would be premature and not very intelligent to accept the psychiatric judgement that transsexuality is caused by a faulty socialization. More probably, transsexuality is caused by a faulty society.
What I’m assuming here is that Dworkin means “the way we understand gender to be dictated by sex- and the binary, false way we see sex- is what causes people who are transgender to be understood as transgender, as opposed to being seen as simply a different way of being whatever gender they are” (here gender and sex being strictly separate things).
Saying gender is a social construct implies that what I feel and who I am is a social construct; that my gender identity- something that is utterly personal and utterly intrinsic to who I am- is a product of society.
In fact, Tim just said it; “it’s a construct in that it is created by humans”. I take incredible offence in the idea that my gender was created. Not least because of the unspoken assumption that if only we did things different my gender would not exist; that I am a fault in the machine. What is the thing that “creates” gender, and is thus somehow “faulty” in the way it “creates” trans people’s genders?
More than take offence, I am convinced it is a fallacy; people who would under our ideas of gender be seen as transgender have and do exist in many, many cultures vastly different to this one. How do you explain gender dysphoria, with your social construction?
This is utterly different to saying “the way we understand gender is a social construct”, which seems to be what you are saying.
(And all this goes for sexual orientation and attraction too).
Perhaps this is because I “don’t understand what it really means”, but if that is the case then frankly you need new terminology, because your old terminology creates very specific ideas in the minds of those who hear it who are uneducated. And yes, that does matter, because education is so hard to get access to and because the spreading of ideas relies on a certain amount of intuitive understanding. If the intuitive understanding of a phrase is so radically different to the intended understanding then the phrase needs to be modified.
The problem with Dworkin is that while yes, she contributed hugely to feminist discourse, that doesn’t mean she was an expert on culture and the way it affects individuals. In fact, from that passage, she was very much the opposite and was clearly grasping at straws.
And of course your gender was created. There’s no other way for it to exist. The options are: cultural construct or physical biology, and since gender very clearly is not the latter, it is the former (as are most things). This is not a judgement of its value or integrity. It’s a simple statement of facts. It is a cultural construct because to say otherwise is to say that it is purely biological, which is absurd.
And yes, I hate to say it, but if we did things differently, your gender would not exist. Then again, neither would you or I, so it’s a moot point. Culture exists not as individual strands of influence but as a massive, constantly-changing web of influences affecting and being affected by everyone involved with that culture. And gender dysphoria is pretty easy to explain with cultural construction, actually, since it’s a psychological mismatch between one’s embedded internal identity and the pressures of other cultural influences that insist that your internal identity is not correct.
Culture goes deep. It is not simply methods of speaking or behavioral quirks or rituals or holidays or what have you. One’s culture is so massive, so enormous, so unimaginably gigantic an influence on one’s entire mind that it has entire fields of academic thought dedicated to trying to slowly undo its Gordian knot.
Frankly, the biggest evidence to show that gender is culturally constructed is the fact that gender varies from culture to culture. You can nitpick and try to separate “gender identity” and “gender expression” and such from “gender” but however way you look at it, the variance in all of these shows that yes, gender is a cultural construct because is shows cross-cultural variance. The fact that trans* people exist across cultures is to be expected, as every culture has multiple genders that are enforced and embedded from birth via enculturation. That does not mean that there is a universal basis for gender which is somehow separated from culture.
this is a pretty good articulation of how i feel as well.
i think people misunderstood dworkin when she said that transsexuality wouldnt exist. it wouldnt exist because there would be no categories of cis and trans, it would all just be people doing whatever they wanted to do.
^ Ditto. The cross-cultural variance idea is especially something I’ve pondered for a while.
(Source: cosmopolitan-fascist)
