Gender as sex is what you are born in
Gender as a role/identity is a social construct
Leftists push for the first one, right wingers push for the 2nd
Comment on Eat garbage
balderdash9@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
Is gender merely a social construct or are we born with it?
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Think you mixed those up, conservatives believe sex and gender are identical and don’t differentiate. Progressives believe gender is a social construct, but depending on who you talk to that means the path forward is twofold and not everyone really agrees on what form gender should take in the future.
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
I’m not sure what conservatives you talk to but moderate right has trans people, enby, etc. then you go further and you men where suits, women wear dresses. And further you get men work while women take care of the home
When you go left of centre you get men have a Y and women don’t. Further you go the less it becomes identifiable, like you can have men without penises (by accident or surgery) and behaviours don’t matter
nitrogenez@lemmy.world 7 months ago
if you have a penis i won’t consider you a girl, that’s how it really works. you on the other hand can consider yourself whatever and whoever you want.
Cowbee@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Can’t believe you’re outing yourself as a Genital Inspector, looking into everyone’s pants when you meet them.
c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I’m not LGBTQ, I’m just explaining how the two different philosophies fall into political discourse.
icepuncher69@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Based
ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world 7 months ago
[deleted]WalrusDragonOnABike@kbin.social 7 months ago
Sex is also a social construct. Its separate from gender though.
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
Most of us? Are there actual cases where a viable off spring had no x or y?
balderdash9@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
But people who are transgender say they are born with their gender. And I’m inclined to believe them given their testimony.
NENathaniel@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
No one could possibly know they were “born” with a gender.
By the time they’re old enough to have memories and concious thought, they have already been socialized.
balderdash9@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
This response is initially persuasive but the line of reasoning doesn’t hold in other cases. For example, let’s replace gender with sexuality:
No one could possibly know they were “born” with a sexual preference. By the time they’re old enough to have memories and conscious thought, they have already been socialized.
Now, we all agree that sexual identity is something you’re born with. Analogously, if we reject the idea that lack of knowledge of innate sexual identity implies sexuality is a social construct, then we should reject the argument that lack of knowledge of gender identity implies gender is a social construct.
ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I don’t see how that contradicts my statement.
balderdash9@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
You’re saying gender is a social construct. People who are transgender say they are born with their gender. Being born with something is incompatible with it being a social construct. Since you don’t see a tension here, are you saying gender is a social construct for everyone except transgender folk? In other words, do you think transgender people are the only ones born with their gender?
That seems like an odd view to me, but perhaps that’s what you meant by “well for most of us”.
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Gender is a social construct designed around sexual dimorphism
Females of the species are equipped to and (before the development of birth control) likely to carry children, which inconveniences them physically for several months. Historically this was somewhat frequent. This caused a selective evolutionary pressure to concentrate traits compatible with said inconveniences on the female chromosome, and concentrate traits less compatible on the male chromosome. This created the kernel of gender roles, which themselves evolved over the years under the resulting social pressures of gender interplay.
Consequentially, women traditionally fill roles that can be accomplished while pregnant and/or breastfeeding (cooking, cleaning, childcare, weaving, sewing, etc) and men traditionally fill roles which are particularly difficult to do while pregnant and/or breastfeeding (hunting, farming, other strenuous labor, etc). These were reasonable adaptations that were broadly useful for quite some time. So in a sense, we’re born with it.
Recently, developments in housekeeping (breast pumps, formula, automatic appliances, public schooling and childcare, affordable industrial textiles, etc) and labor (the transition from physical to mental work) have made the biological differences between males and females less relevant in fulfilling social roles. What’s more, social roles have changed so much anyway.
Personally I think we’re getting to the end of the usefulness of gender as a social concept.
WalrusDragonOnABike@kbin.social 7 months ago
Both. Just like race. Its subject to change based on changing concepts, but are regardless of which version of the social construct is used, race and gender are generally based vaguely on immutable things.
balderdash9@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
I think the analogy with race is a good one, but it also raises further questions. I profess to be unclear about how we should think about race.
WalrusDragonOnABike@kbin.social 7 months ago
Not sure I can help with that question. I just know the answer isn't disingenuously adapting the language of equality to attack those oppressed by the system of race by acting like "black lives matters" is bad. Likewise, using "gender abolition" as an excuse to be a TERF by getting mad at trans people for fitting any stereotypes of their gender (while ignoring cis people doing the same thing) or telling trans people they're delusional. Even if long-term we want to eliminate race and gender, it doesn't mean we can ignore the relatively short-term impacts they've had historically and continue to have.
balderdash9@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
I have the same problem with the implication that race and gender are social constructs so they don’t matter. The impacts that these aspects of identity have in the real world matter a great deal to many people. Saying they “don’t exist” isn’t far from saying that we can just ignore them.
Zehzin@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I asked my cat what he thinks of gender and he just stared at me, so I think it’s a social construct
ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world 7 months ago
That’s the only way to test if something is a social construct. Ask a non-human animal.
icepuncher69@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Are there human animals?
SatansMaggotyCumFart@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Swedes.
ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Serious answer: humans are animals, apes specifically.
Non-serious answer: see Swedes comment
BigBlackCockroach@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I am not a native English speaker, in my native tongue we only have one word for both, may I ask for clarifcation, so gender is the role, but sex is the biological like XY or XX or something? so you can have one sex but another gender, right?
ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Sex is the parts on your body that physically makes you male or female of form, while gender is every social rule that comes with having those specific parts. The social rules are made up constructs and can be broken. Pretty much.
Getawombatupya@aussie.zone 7 months ago
Ducks rape.