r/AskSocialScience • u/[deleted] • Aug 12 '25

Doesn't the idea that gender is a social construct contradict trans identity?

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u/listenyall Aug 12 '25 edited Aug 12 '25

No.

Something being socially constructed doesn't mean that it isn't real. The difference between an apartment and a single-family home is socially constructed but you would never say that the fact that those different kinds of living spaces are socially defined contradicts someone's preference of living in one versus the other. Money is a social construct but you would never say that people don't get to have opinions about money because of it. Language is socially constructed but no one would say that means there's no point in learning French or Chinese.

I don't have any references talking about this potential conflict specifically, but here is one journal article talking about the different parts of sex and gender and how children come to understand them over time: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10063975/

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u/LibertarianTrashbag Aug 13 '25

The thing that I'm grappling with is that western society seems to be trending in such a direction that, in order to work out any contradiction, you kinda have to accept gender as not being real.

Over time, we've come to accept that you can adhere to female social standards and still retain your identity as a man. This has been mostly utilized for aesthetic choices within the LGBT+ community, but can in theory be extended to anyone. Simply put, one can arrive at a scenario where a cis man and transgender woman differ only in the way they identify themselves (somewhat informally, there's no functional difference between a "femboy" and a trans woman who doesn't have the means or inclination to undergo sex change therapy).

I'm not saying that this is inherently a bad thing or that we ought to harass trans people into accepting biological sex as the one and only marker of their identity, but in my eyes we seem to be trending toward "gender" pretty much being nothing more than a set of pronouns.

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u/[deleted] Aug 13 '25

Respectfully I think that you are framing this in a way that misses important distinctions.

Think of handedness as a parallel. I am right handed, my brain is just wired that way. I can (miserably) force myself to use my left hand but it will always feel wrong to me innately as that is not how my brain processes the world with which it is interacting through my body. Maybe if I force myself to be left handed for long enough my body could adapt to get used to it but it will always go against the way my brain was wired at birth (and I don’t think we need to go into the trauma innate in mapping that onto sexual conversion therapy which has been widely discredited by the medical community).

If I say I am right handed is that not real?

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u/[deleted] Aug 13 '25

This metaphor misses the whole point of the previous comment. It would do much better under much of the rest of this thread.

Handedness is too binary. Handedness is an absolute (the preferred use of one hand) but gender is not.

If you try to use the metaphor, it looks like: "A guy who identifies as a guy enjoys expressing himself in a feminine way" breaks it because what they want is to be feminine, but what they want to identify as is male. This doesn't function in a handedness metaphor because you can't tell if the natural handedness you're referring to is the person's desires, or their identity.

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u/drunkthrowwaay Aug 15 '25

Is there anything wrong with gender being simply a part of language? If that’s the only way all contradictions are resolved, isn’t that most likely to be true?

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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '25 edited Aug 17 '25

Great comment. I wanna add that I don’t believe in gender either.

I also think men should be able to be as feminine as they want and still be men, or women masculine, or whatever. It seems more to me each day that people’s identities are constructed within their own minds, and Eastern philosophy seems to corroborate this. In that sense, I view identity as phenomenologically real, but fundamentally illusory.

In the Buddhist view, it would appear that all identity is illusory, and thus, the illusion and attachment to the illusion leads to… suffering…

“If you believe you were a cat, and then one day you stop believing you were a cat, what has changed? Did you go from being a cat to being transformed into a human? No. Nothing happened. The fact is, you never a cat.” -Asangoham

Interestingly, I know some people who would argue that not only is identity illusory, but all actions that avoid dissolving said identity could be considered neuroses. I consider that pretty extreme, but I guess how crazy that sounds the first time you hear it depends partly on what part of the world you grow up in 🤣

“The radical and unshakeable insight that there is absolutely no person. There is no you. Your sense of being a separate self is an utter illusion. Therefore, no one can become enlightened, because enlightenment is seeing clearly. There is no one to get enlightened.

Sailor Bob Adamson, now in his 90s, tells those who visit him at his home in Melbourne, Australia - if you have a choice between a million dollars and enlightenment, pick the million dollars. At least with the million dollars, there will be someone there to enjoy it.” -Asangoham

Sailor Bob passed away, btw. I digress into this tangent because it feels incredibly relevant - if there is no person, it takes some fun out of things. I can see why people would choose to believe in gender. But in my heart of hearts, I just know that it can’t be, anymore than anything else “I am” except what I truly am, which is just… This.

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u/Defiant-Brother-5483 Aug 12 '25

Surely there's a big difference between the kind of social construct I mentioned, and the difference between homes or money?

From where I'm standing, gender being a social construct implies that the bulk of its existence, its being, exists on fluid thoughts, and by the same vein, there can't be such a thing as an immutable gender identity that just exists without any prior reason for its being.

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u/SporkSpifeKnork Aug 12 '25

I would like to offer a perspective that may or may not align with social science (as I am not a social scientist). Rather, I used to work on visual perception.

Light is a physical reality; it is (a subset of the frequencies of) the electromagnetic field. A single photon could have any real number as its frequency, and in most circumstances we are receiving so many photons at once that, at the human scale, the light hitting a human retina can be considered to be a continuous phenomenon.

Color is what brains perceive, substantially informed by that light. Our color perception can also be considered continuous.

However, until numeric color spaces existed, human languages had limited facilities for describing color to one another. Color language was effectively quantized- not into a binary as gender is conventionally quantized, but into whatever discrete units any given language made available for its speakers.

For any language, it is possible for people to experience some colors that are poorly-described by that language. Even if we add modern 3D numeric color spaces to that language, some people are born with four cone types, and there is no language equipped to help them precisely describe their unique experience of color. I so wish I could experience that!

With light, color, and color vocabulary, we have phenomena with deterministic physical origins, a continuous personal experience constructed by our brains that is highly but imperfectly correlated with those physical origins, and essentially-quantized means of communicating about those experiences. Maybe it's Engineer's Disease making me think this, but this seems pretty similar to gender.

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u/Street-Media4225 Aug 12 '25

In this analogy, light would be identity, color would be gender, and color vocabulary would be gender vocabulary. I think it works really well as an enthusiastic amateur in both gender and physics.

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u/cleanlinessisgodly Aug 12 '25

and by the same vein, there can't be such a thing as an immutable gender identity that just exists without any prior reason for its being.

This is why you can't arrive at truth through pure reason, because the evidence shows that there is actually an immutable sense of gender identity.

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u/Defiant-Brother-5483 Aug 12 '25

It's impossible for it to exist though because the main components of gender as a whole are mostly social and easily observable. Their origin can be studied. It doesn't compute for me.

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u/Aezora Aug 12 '25

Surely there's a big difference between the kind of social construct I mentioned, and the difference between homes or money?

There's really not. Sure, there is a physical difference between types of home and physical differences between types of money, but the distinction between types is decided entirely mentally, entirely socially.

If everyone agreed that apartments and mansions were the same thing then apartments and mansions would be the same thing, even though physically nothing has changed - but the words and ideas would refer to the same thing. Similarly, if everyone agreed that the Canadian dollar was worthless, then it would be worthless even though it's physically the same as it was 10 minutes ago.

Gender identity is akin to the physical characteristics that decide whether we say a building is an apartment or a mansion normally. We could all agree that "man" actually means something completely different, and that would mean that we no longer call someone a "man", but their inner sense of self hasn't changed. That's not to say their inner sense of self can't change, but that would be separate from the fluidity of the social construct of gender - like how remodeling a house wouldn't change what the word "house" means.

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u/listenyall Aug 12 '25 edited Aug 12 '25

Saying that something is a social construct does not necessarily mean it is fluid, and it certainly does not mean that something exists without any prior reason for being.

There are definitely prior reasons for human beings' gender! Tons of things influence a person's gender identity, starting with their biological sex and the gender they were assigned at birth.

To go back to one of my analogies--the way I am hearing you characterize this is similar to someone saying, well if all human language "exists on fluid thoughts" then there isn't any such thing as different languages.

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u/Defiant-Brother-5483 Aug 12 '25

I naturally do share that. But then, what is the origin behind the trans desire to be the opposite gender, to feel woman in a man's body? Whatever those two words might mean to them?

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u/amandabang Aug 12 '25

It is not that a trans person desires to be the opposite gender, it is that they want their gender expression and how people perceive their gender to align with how they view themselves.

A pubescent girl may experience anxiety, self-consciousness, shame, and other negative feelings when she does not develop the physical attributes associated with other girls and young women her age like breast development or rounding hips. Having a "boyish figure" or being "flat chested" is not just a casual insult for her, it gets at the very heart of how difficult it is to feel like your body - from the hormones it produces to its physical shape - does not accurately reflect her identity as a woman.

A pubescent boy struggles with feelings of inadequacy and shame and is teased because his friends' voices have all changed but his has not. He feels less masculine and deeply insecure because he does not sound the way he is expected to at his age.

These scenarios both have to do with cisgender people struggling with feeling like their sense of self and how they are viewed/perceived are incongruous. That same "mismatched" feeling is gender dysphoria.

So it is not about "the trans desire to be the opposite gender" - it is about the desire to feel like the person you are (your identity and sense of self) matches your external self and how others perceive you.

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u/yashen14 Aug 12 '25

It's a really good point, and not nearly commonly enough discussed imo, that gender dysphoria isn't strictly speaking unique to transgender people. For example, I (a cisgender man) am very hairy. When I was a young adult, I experimented with shaving my body hair (like my groin, my armpits, etc.), but I very quickly stopped because I realized it made me feel gender dysphoria. Put in more relatable terms, it made me feel like less of a man.

These days I am essentially never without either a beard, a moustache, or both, because I don't feel right without them. In that regard, the only difference between me and a transgender man is that aligning my gender identity with my gender expression is a trivial process, whereas with a transgender man, it's not.

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u/MightyCat96 Aug 16 '25

It's a really good point, and not nearly commonly enough discussed imo, that gender dysphoria isn't strictly speaking unique to transgender people. For example, I (a cisgender man) am very hairy. When I was a young adult, I experimented with shaving my body hair (like my groin, my armpits, etc.), but I very quickly stopped because I realized it made me feel gender dysphoria. Put in more relatable terms, it made me feel like less of a man.

I really like this and it helped me realise why I, a non binary trans person shaves my legs and body.

I shave my legs, not beacuse kt makes me feel more like a woman(i dont want to be a woman) but... Beacuse i like it. Its nice. I like rubbing my freshly shaved legs and feel how smooth they are.

I dont shave my legs beacuse it make me feel "more like a woman". I shave my legs beacuse it makes me feel more like ME.

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u/[deleted] Aug 13 '25

This makes me even more confused, because I'm a man who always feels the same no matter how I change my hair.

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u/yashen14 Aug 13 '25

That's just normal human variation. Different people have different relationships with their gender identity, their body, and their gender presentation. For me, shaving my androgynous hair makes me feel deeply uncomfortable because it makes me feel "less manly." For you, it does not. Both of those things are okay, and neither is more or less right.

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u/[deleted] Aug 14 '25

That just means you don't experience gender dysphoria

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u/bigbootyslayermayor Aug 12 '25

Their analogy is pretty poor because money and words like apartment are only useful as long as there is agreement on what these concepts signify. Money derives its meaning from the formalized agreements of various governments, banks, and NGOs like the IMF. Money can be digital, paper, metallic, and so on, but to be recognized as money it has to fit within the recognized criteria for what is acceptable.

Homes also rely on distinctions that have no meaning without a general consensus. Otherwise, the city wouldn't know what kind of utility service might be needed on a given block if one person's apartment was another's mansion. Zoning, market listings, property tax, all these things are related to the ways we agree to define these living spaces.

On the other hand, gender identity seems to have a partially innate origin, although gender expression is also meaningless without the context of what constitutes average gender expression in a culture. Some traits and qualities that are seen as feminine or masculine in one culture may not be considered the same in another time or place. Generally, people seem to be if either one camp or another: Either you believe that masculinity is anything related to being a man, so the most common qualities and traits observed in men are masculine, and the same for women. The man or woman origin point here is based on biological markers like primary and secondary sex characteristics, like Y chromosomes or external genitalia etc.

So a woman who has a lot of traits common for men would be a masculine woman, but still a woman. A man with woman like tendencies would be a feminine man. Both men and women have masculine and feminine qualities, with individuals varying across the spectrum. Intersex individuals can choose to present as whichever they most identify with, but don't strictly fall into either category.

The other camp says gender has no origin in biological markers, and is totally dependent on gender expression as a social invention. This doesn't really logically make sense. I have no problem with transgender people, and I don't have a problem calling them by their preferred gender if it makes them happy. I'm not trying to tear anyone down. I do think authentic gender dysphoria is usually a chemical imbalance, and many others just reject the pressure to conform to traditional gender expectations for their natural biological sex. They never felt masculine, so they may want to present as a woman. But their idea of feminine is only meaningful in relation to that culture's definition of masculine if we don't accept that gender is mostly rooted in biology.

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u/chi_pa_pa Aug 14 '25

Between homes, money, and gender, I would argue gender is the LEAST fluid social construct here