thepaperpilot
d525a1f2c2
5.2 KiB
| alias | public | slug | title | prev | next |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sex | true | gender | Gender | false | false |
Gender
741 words, ~4 minute read.
Gender is a tricky subject, and there are many conflicting frameworks that have been proposed for defining gender and measuring its impact, and other such aspects of it. Judith Butler, for example, controversially describes gender as a performance); We observe how people act, what they seem to enjoy, and what roles they fill in society based on their gender, and then we (often subconsciously) perform similarly, perpetuating the cycle. That makes gender a Social Construct.
Gender is a very sensitive topic, especially as people's identities are constantly under attack within the west. I'd like to make it explicitly clear I support any and all gender identities, and re-affirm that just because something is a construct does not mean its bad or useless. It just means society has decided to give it meaning, and I think gender will be very meaningful to people for a very very long time. These frameworks used for analyzing it and determining its utility are some nice philosophical exercises, but above all it should be clear any political goal should be to eliminate discrimination against marginalized peoples.
There are some people who believe gender is an exclusively unuseful and negative social construct and should be entirely abolished, and see this act as a requirement for liberating queer people and women. You'll see plenty of people push back on this idea, saying they like their genders, though, and sometimes even trying to co-opt "gender abolitionism" as referring to only abolishing gender roles rather than gender itself as a construct. It's seen as a stance that essentially invalidates the motivation behind so many people going through great efforts to transition from one gender to another. An even more pessimistic stance on gender abolition sees it as a return to biological sex, even further erasing the plights of trans people. However, I think as society progresses towards post-scarcity, a lot of constructs will over time see a natural end as they become less useful, and I do think we'll eventually see a post-gender society where everyone is just "themselves", and the realm of self expression is massively expanded, but no longer sees a need for gender as a construct.
Alright, with that established it's time for another controversial take: Biological sex is also a social construct. Sex is a term used to refer to a collection of underlying natural properties from which sex determining genes one has, which sex chromosomes are present, how much of each sex hormone gets produced, which genitals one has, which hormones get processed, what happens during puberty, and so on. Besides the fact there's plenty of people who don't have every single of the above properties cleanly fit into the same bucket, the fact we choose to imbue those properties with meaning makes them a construct as well, and in fact we imbued them with so much meaning we built our entire society around it. Sure, we created gender as a way of abstracting the roles in the society from the natural properties, but ultimately they're both just as arbitrary distinctions we collectively chose to make. And yet, positioning gender as the social construct and biological sex as the "objective" underlying property, you open the door to essentially continue discriminating against a significant amount of the population, using "truth" and "science" to justify their position.
To be clear, I'm not saying biology doesn't matter (and neither does anyone else who argues sex is also a social construct). Obviously someone with a uterus is going to have different medical risks and opportunities than someone without. But using the presence of that uterus to socially and culturally discriminate against someone is not okay. In fact, society placing importance on the number of years spent at a job is a form of discriminating against people who choose to take time off work to be a parent, even if their actual ability to perform that job is not impacted at all. This impacts both career trajectory as well as making it more difficult to even get some jobs in the first place. I recommend Biological sex is a social construct for further exploration into this concept.
Identity, Gender, and VRChat explores how VRChat has enabled people to explore their gender expression and other parts of their identity in a low risk and very accepting environment. I haven't used VRChat myself, but that sounds like an amazing resource for people to be able to use, and honestly makes me hope socializing in VR becomes an increasingly normalized and accessible activity.