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Question: Is gender a social construct?
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Question: Is gender a social construct?
Introduction to Question
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.
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 someone’s individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.
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 them, there are no substantive differences in preferences or behavior between men and women. Postmodern adjacent philosopher Judith Butler refers to gender as conceived here as a “performance”.[1] This performance is an outward showing or demonstration of the expectations that have been imposed onto a person through 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.
When some others refer to gender, 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”.[2] “In short,” summarizes social conservative philosopher Ryan T. Anderson, “‘the body’ conceived as something in particular is all about power.”[3]
Notes
- ↑ Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2006), 171–80.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Ryan T. Anderson, When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment (New York: Encounter Books, 2018), 153.