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| + | #REDIRECT[[The Family: A Proclamation to the World#Is gender a social construct?]] |
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| − | ==Question: Is gender a social construct?==
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| − | ===Introduction to Question===
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| − | It’s a common refrain among the cultural left of Western politics that gender is a social construct. A social construct is any category of thought that is created and imposed onto reality through and because of human, social interaction. Key to the idea of a social construct is that the category of thought is not extracted from reality but imposed onto reality.
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| − | The view of gender as a social construct stands in stark contrast to the ideas of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that "Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose."<ref>"[https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/the-family-a-proclamation-to-the-world/the-family-a-proclamation-to-the-world?lang=eng The Family: A Proclamation to the World]," 2nd paragraph.</ref>
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| − | When saying ''gender'' in the statement “gender is a social construct”, most are referring to the idea that there are sex-specific, biologically-determined, psychobehavioral differences between men and women. According to these people, there are no substantive differences in preference or behavior between men and women. Postmodern-adjacent philosopher Judith Butler refers to gender as conceived here as a “performance”.<ref>Judith Butler, ''Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity'' (New York: Routledge, 2006), 171–80.</ref> This performance is an outward showing or demonstration of the expectations that have been imposed onto a person through [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_act speech acts] in their cultural environment. In other words, what we call “femininity” and “masculinity” is just people conforming to how society says that a man or woman “should act” and nothing more. There is no biological, neuroanatomical basis for any cognitive or behavioral differences between men and women.
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| − | When others say ''gender'' in the statement "gender is a social construct", they mean to say that the biological sex binary of male and female itself is a social construct. Butler in a 1994 book chapter regards the immutability of the body as pernicious since “successfully buries and masks the genealogy of power relations by which it is constituted”.<ref>Judith Butler, “Bodies That Matter,” in ''Engaging with Irigaray'', ed. Caro- lyn Burke, Naomi Schor, and Margaret Whitford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 148.</ref> “In short,” summarizes social conservative philosopher Ryan T. Anderson, “‘the body’ conceived as something in particular is all about power.”<ref>Ryan T. Anderson, ''When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment'' (New York: Encounter Books, 2018), 153.</ref>
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| − | Some people refer to both the male-female sex binary and cognitive-behavioral differences when saying gender.
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| − | This article will respond to these assertions
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| − | </onlyinclude>
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| − | {{endnotes sources}}
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