Gender: Philosophical Problems

[Diamat]

Thread Introduction

As most of you are aware, recent years have seen a dramatic rise of gender-identity awareness. The LBGT movement has grown enormously. Feminism, though present for many decades now, has also been quite vocal in recent years. You probably have noticed changes in everyday life as well, such as the installation of gender neutral bathrooms, safe-spaces, or questions about gender identity on applications.

In any event, this thread is not about determining whether these changes are good or bad. Instead, I pointed out these changes because they are illustrative of a major philosophical point which has actually preceded these changes: gender as a construct. The notion that gender is an epistemological construct was a major point made by "feminist" scholars such as J. W. Scott and Judith Butler long ago. Constructivism (and deconstructivism) goes even further back, and one can easily discern an intellectual lineage that goes back to the likes of Fanon, Foucault, and Derrida. And while I certainly respect the work of Scott and Butler, today we are beginning to see a new shift, one which concerns me. Namely, the notion that gender is constructed is beginning to be taken for granted. The purpose of this thread is to revisit this point and give it a philosophical treatment. Is gender constructed? And if so, what are the implications?


My Treatment of the Matter

Constructivism tends to go hand-in-hand with relativism. The fact that gender is socially constructed is seen as evidence for its deceiving nature, and for those who are really cynical it is evidence of a patriarchal system that inculcates these notions in order to keep women down. Relativism is thus a powerful weapon in the hands of those who despise the currently existing, as it was for Foucault and as it is for many feminists today. And it is particularly this relativism which I will argue against in the treatment below. However, I am not going to make a nature versus social-constructivism argument (since this would not be very philosophical at all). I will not deny that gender is a construct. My point is that this constructivism does not have to mean relativism, nor does it have to mean the rejection of gender differences as we know them.

Scott argued that although society would have us believe otherwise, gender is ultimately a constructed conception of sexual difference, not a natural difference. Yet she nevertheless believed there was such a thing as sex, that is, the natural biological difference between the sexes. Butler, however, not only thought that gender was constructed, she also thought that sex was constructed. To Butler, there could be no notion of sex or gender prior to mind - it was an epistemological phenomenon. And it is by performing gender, she contended, that it becomes naturalized, creating the impression of an ontological gender and hiding its epistemological nature. Identity is therefore created through a constant repetition and realization of the discourse on gender.

Admittedly, there is much that could be debated here already. But my gripe is with the following conclusion Butler draws: agency "is to be located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition." In other words, Butler is contending that if women are to be agents, if they are to be free, they must resist that repetition. By extension, they must resist the socially accepted norms of gender. Freedom, in other words, is to be found in resistance, a notion very reminiscent of Foucault. Therein lies a major fallacy which, if taken for granted, could have major social repercussions. Just because gender is constructed does by no means imply that I need to resist it and deny socially accepted norms. Though I can certainly be an agent by resisting (and there is nothing inherently wrong with that), this does not have to be the only way to be an agent. The very performance and repetition of gender, making use of it as a means to realize one's desires, can itself be freedom. There is nothing in the notion of constructivism, philosophically speaking, that implies I need to resist the constructed notions in order to be liberated. In fact, Butler, if we bring her thinking to its logical conclusion, will encounter the same relativistic fallacy that all adherents of relativism encounter: if gender is relative, and if this relativism means that I need to resist the relative in order to be free, then my very act of resistance and the new notion of gender that I have created for myself must necessarily also be relative. What have I accomplished by replacing one relative concept with another? Constructivism should never mean that whatever is constructed is bad. To the contrary, that something is bad can only be demonstrated through socially meaningful ways, i.e., such a debate would itself be constructed. There is nothing inherently wrong about gender differences as we know them today. It is only in social context that we encounter problems. And it is within the social context that these problems need to be resolved. But this should never mean the denial of society as such, its denigration, or a complete resistance to it.

Ok, enough for now...Let's hear some other thoughts first.

[sumskilz]

These word games don’t produce any knowledge, only the illusion of knowledge. They are post-hoc rationalizations for whatever agenda someone wants to push. Their assertions are obviously weak from a positivist position. You already know how weak a position is if it requires embracing relativism, because the best possible outcome in forwarding the argument in that way is to be able to say at least my nonsense is as good as anyone else’s. If you reject positivism, you’re basically saying I don’t believe knowledge of objective facts is possible. In other words, you live in a word of make-believe. Fine, we may all be living in an illusion but if that’s the case, our various illusions seem to be overlapping because positivist approaches are predictive.

Although you could take another angle on it, a positivist angle, and recognize that of course it’s constructed, like the concept of the color red. It’s a categorization that may not be perfectly representative of objective reality, but is a tool for us to understand reality which is rooted in our biology. There won’t be as much talk about that however, nobody has a personal or ideological agenda that requires undermining our confidence in the reality of the color red.

[Diamat]

Indeed, one should not deny the possibility of natural facts, their investigation, and their bearing on gender. At the same time, however, one should not deny the power of the human mind, particularly in complex human societies. The latter can also be empirically verified. The two need not be in conflict, but any good positivist ought to pursue both.

I purposely avoided the nature versus constructivism argument, but was speaking strictly from the perspective of constructivism itself. Most people neglect to do this, instead attacking constructivism as such. I'm not willing to go this far, and instead pointed out some of the fallacious conclusions stemming from a relativistic understanding of constructivism. My position is inherently Hegelian, meaning that my end goal is to reunite us with the existing rather than deny and denigrate it. I find a wholesale attack on established gender notions to be unfounded and unnecessary. One need not deconstruct gender or stop performing it in order to be free. Quite the opposite, freedom can be attained within established gender norms as well.

[Basil II the B.S]

Scott argued that although society would have us believe otherwise, gender is ultimately a constructed conception of sexual difference, not a natural difference.
Yet she nevertheless believed there was such a thing as sex, that is, the natural biological difference between the sexes. Butler, however, not only thought that gender was constructed, she also thought that sex was constructed. To Butler, there could be no notion of sex or gender prior to mind - it was an epistemological phenomenon. And it is by performing gender, she contended, that it becomes naturalized, creating the impression of an ontological gender and hiding its epistemological nature. Identity is therefore created through a constant repetition and realization of the discourse on gender.

Question 1. What exactly would be the difference between ''sex'' and ''gender''?

Her whole reasoning is flawed anyway. How exactly is gender ''constructed'' and not a natural difference?
Gender is a scientifical observation. A classification. The root of scientifical progress in natural sciences is the catalogue of differences: A, B, C, D etc.

It seems to be that she takes a scientifical concept, brings it into social sciences, ignores the basics of the scientifcal method and proceeds to demolish her own definition of gender, that is not the scientific one.
This is the definition of strawman.

If you have a penis, you are A. If you have a vagina, you are B. That's it. This is because when natural sciences ramify into medicine or biology, if you are discussing testicle cancer you are discussing a problem related to group A.
Does your belonging to either group A or B affect other parts of your body? Yes. Do natural difference translate into natural predispositions? Yes. Now we enter behavioural science. We are still in the observable field. Choose another being in the animal kingdom, they do not have ''laws'' besides the law of the jungle. Everything is derived via animal instinct, that is the natural instinct. Everything depends on testosterone and estrogen. Darwinian evolution says that those who adapt survive, and to adapt you have to make the best use of what nature gave you. Testosterone makes you stronger to ''fight and hunt''. Estrogens combined with a vagina makes you the core element for reproduction.
There's no such thing as ''repetition'' that you talk about in the second part of your post and social norms are rather insignificant if compared to the law of nature.
Natural differences translate into roles (that is what I assume she would call ''genders'') simply because by Darwinian logic that's the best for the species.
Now I assume that what I mention above would get a trigger warning among feminist circles, followed by various hisses against the ''patriarchy''. It's not the patriarchy. It's nature. And if you go against nature, your species dies out.

[Hobbes]

positivist approaches are predictive.

They are not, not when it comes to examining human societies, at least. The sheer volume of observations regarding how other societies function is enough to send positivism to the trash bin of history.


Basil, how do you explain the difference in gender roles in various social and historical contexts, when genetically all humans are pretty much the same? Surely, if our social behavior was the result of biological processes and features, we would see a uniformity in social practices, yet we know that this is not the case, with some societies having even more than one gender, for example.

[sumskilz]

They are not, not when it comes to examining human societies, at least. The sheer volume of observations regarding how other societies function is enough to send positivism to the trash bin of history.

That's a common perspective in the branches of social sciences which have a very strong streak of anti-positivist ideology running through them and rarely engage in methodical empirical investigation anyway (sociocultural anthropology for example) whereas those that engage in empirical investigation and the scientific methodology a central aspect of their academic training (biocultural anthropology for example) tell a completely different story. Emphasizing unusual exceptions in the ethnographic record is a great way to make a name for yourself if you're a cultural anthropologist.

Basil, how do you explain the difference in gender roles in various social and historical contexts, when genetically all humans are pretty much the same? Surely, if our social behavior was the result of biological processes and features, we would see a uniformity in social practices, yet we know that this is not the case, with some societies having even more than one gender, for example.

Gender differences in personality are consistent across cultures and surprisingly more pronounced in the cultures that try to minimize them. As that study notes, individual differences within genders are greater than those between genders. However when many traits are measured together, there is only a 10% overlap between male and female personalty profiles. Measured at the population level, about 20% of human genetic variation is between populations. That would in fact be the traits that are most under selection.

There are a lot of these differences that are modulated by ethnicity, for example:


Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/

There is a consistent pattern for both sex and ethnicity. While some of this could be cultural, those effects would have been minimized by the fact that the participants were all Canadians from the same city. This has been replicated many times. My point is that while Basil's post may have been simplistic in interpretation, your counter-argument is a lot like saying men aren't taller than women because German women are taller than Mbuti pygmy men. There is variation because not all populations are the same genetically and because both culture and genetics play a role.

All that said, I don't think that debate is really that important to Diamat's main question. Which I understood from his second post as something like, assuming gender is a construction, why would that imply one should not perform it? Even if partially rooted in biology, there are cultural aspects of gender roles, so I think the question isn't invalid even if one doesn't completely accept the premise.

[Diamat]

Question 1. What exactly would be the difference between ''sex'' and ''gender''?

Her whole reasoning is flawed anyway. How exactly is gender ''constructed'' and not a natural difference?
Gender is a scientifical observation. A classification. The root of scientifical progress in natural sciences is the catalogue of differences: A, B, C, D etc.

It seems to be that she takes a scientifical concept, brings it into social sciences, ignores the basics of the scientifcal method and proceeds to demolish her own definition of gender, that is not the scientific one.
This is the definition of strawman.

If you have a penis, you are A. If you have a vagina, you are B. That's it. This is because when natural sciences ramify into medicine or biology, if you are discussing testicle cancer you are discussing a problem related to group A.
Does your belonging to either group A or B affect other parts of your body? Yes. Do natural difference translate into natural predispositions? Yes. Now we enter behavioural science. We are still in the observable field. Choose another being in the animal kingdom, they do not have ''laws'' besides the law of the jungle. Everything is derived via animal instinct, that is the natural instinct. Everything depends on testosterone and estrogen. Darwinian evolution says that those who adapt survive, and to adapt you have to make the best use of what nature gave you. Testosterone makes you stronger to ''fight and hunt''. Estrogens combined with a vagina makes you the core element for reproduction.
There's no such thing as ''repetition'' that you talk about in the second part of your post and social norms are rather insignificant if compared to the law of nature.
Natural differences translate into roles (that is what I assume she would call ''genders'') simply because by Darwinian logic that's the best for the species.
Now I assume that what I mention above would get a trigger warning among feminist circles, followed by various hisses against the ''patriarchy''. It's not the patriarchy. It's nature. And if you go against nature, your species dies out.

Her argument was that gender is what you get through socialization. Gender is the result of an epistemological process. Sex, however, is a biological fact. Yet according to her, the way we come to understand that fact differs depending on the society in which you live, i.e., how you are socialized. Gender, hence, is a construct. Whatever natural dispositions there might be, this does not mean we are determined by them. To the contrary, if you know humans, we tend to dominate our own nature, doing things that we would never do if we simply followed our natural predispositions. Suicide is but one blatant example (which usually occurs in a social context). If indeed the human conception of gender was merely driven by biology, then we would have positive proof of this, on hand of the sameness of every society's understanding of gender throughout time. This, however, is not the case. While you could certainly argue that certain facets continued through many different historical societies, there are also obvious differences, particularly in regard to what the role of a woman and man should be, and, based on this, how both should interact, sexually and socially.

[Cyclops]

It seems to be that she takes a scientifical concept, brings it into social sciences, ignores the basics of the scientifcal method and proceeds to demolish her own definition of gender, that is not the scientific one.
This is the definition of strawman.

If you have a penis, you are A. If you have a vagina, you are B. That's it..

There are people born with both. There are children born with neither, or weird mixtures.

Gender identity is constructed, you just did it by describing terms. The fact that terms do correspond to some phenomena does not make them comprehensive.

the discussion of gender identity stems in part from WWI when a bunch of guys got their penises blown off. Clever French surgeons came up with a fake. One thing led to another, an whatshername Jenner comes along.

does a person cease to be a man if you sever the penis? And you reattach it, or cobble a fake, man again? What if they are born with two, do they get two votes? Baby gets born with both genitals, parents freak and have one lot removed: male female or other?

we are fast approaching the point where the whole paraphernalia of sex will be alterable : XX XY hormones gonads reproduction the lot. These questions are relevant because people often feel their gender doesn't match the textbook. If they are wrong we need to prove that and not make simplistic rulings like like penis=man.

[Basil II the B.S]

Her argument was that gender is what you get through socialization. Gender is the result of an epistemological process. Sex, however, is a biological fact. Yet according to her, the way we come to understand that fact differs depending on the society in which you live, i.e., how you are socialized. Gender, hence, is a construct. Whatever natural dispositions there might be, this does not mean we are determined by them. To the contrary, if you know humans, we tend to dominate our own nature, doing things that we would never do if we simply followed our natural predispositions. Suicide is but one blatant example (which usually occurs in a social context).

The number of things men and women to ''to get laid'' shows we are much closer to animals than we pretend to be. Rationality is never going to suppress natural instincts.

If indeed the human conception of gender was merely driven by biology, then we would have positive proof of this, on hand of the sameness of every society's understanding of gender throughout time. This, however, is not the case. While you could certainly argue that certain facets continued through many different historical societies, there are also obvious differences, particularly in regard to what the role of a woman and man should be, and, based on this, how both should interact, sexually and socially.

Actually by applying Popper's non-falsicability principle we can derive evidence.
Were there ever ''genderless'' societies? No.
If there were, did they survive the test of time? No.
Then Darwinian logic stands and what she calls ''genders'' are actually biological derivations. Either the only form of society or the best one because it follows natural imperatives.

There are people born with both. There are children born with neither, or weird mixtures.

They are called genetic abnormalities for a reason. There are plenty of genetic abnormalities.That is, outside the obsarvable norm.

Gender identity is constructed, you just did it by describing terms. The fact that terms do correspond to some phenomena does not make them comprehensive.
the discussion of gender identity stems in part from WWI when a bunch of guys got their penises blown off. Clever French surgeons came up with a fake. One thing led to another, an whatshername Jenner comes along.

does a person cease to be a man if you sever the penis? And you reattach it, or cobble a fake, man again? What if they are born with two, do they get two votes? Baby gets born with both genitals, parents freak and have one lot removed: male female or other?

we are fast approaching the point where the whole paraphernalia of sex will be alterable : XX XY hormones gonads reproduction the lot. These questions are relevant because people often feel their gender doesn't match the textbook. If they are wrong we need to prove that and not make simplistic rulings like like penis=man.

Men had their penis cut off. Not really a natural things you can observe and classify. As far as science concerns they were perfectly healthy mens at birth. Not an abnormality. Then somebody later on decided to mutilate them. We are outside the interests of scientifical classification with that.

[Diamat]

You are missing the point, Basil. The arguments made by Scott and Butler aren't that gender does not exist, but that it is constructed.

And the claim that "rationality is never going to suppress natural instincts" is quite unscientific and unphilosophical (even your Popperian falsification can easily disprove this). To begin with, you are needlessly separating rationality from nature. In the human mind, nature is so interwoven with higher spiritual activities that the two become quite inseparable. It's not like nature and Reason are separate. Reason, in fact, is nature negated, swallowed up, and raised to a higher plane. There need not be a dichotomy here. Natural dispositions are mediated by the social (and vice versa), by the higher realms of mind (Geist). Thus, over the course of human history, as well as in the modern state, they undergo a harsh tempering.

[Basil II the B.S]

You are missing the point, Basil. The arguments made by Scott and Butler aren't that gender does not exist, but that it is constructed.

My point is that they aren't ''constructed'' but derived from biological differences.

And the claim that "rationality is never going to suppress natural instincts" is quite unscientific and unphilosophical (even your Popperian falsification can easily disprove this). To begin with, you are needlessly separating rationality from nature. In the human mind, nature is so interwoven with higher spiritual activities that the two become quite inseparable. It's not like nature and Reason are separate. Reason, in fact, is nature negated, swallowed up, and raised to a higher plane. There need not be a dichotomy here. Natural dispositions are mediated by the social (and vice versa), by the higher realms of mind (Geist). Thus, over the course of human history, as well as in the modern state, they undergo a harsh tempering.

I agree with this.

[Himster]

There's nothing wrong with relativism....... relatively speaking.
Of course everything is constructed. A typical door-way is constructed in a shape and manner derived from the shapes of human bodies. Anything constructed by humans has to (by definition) be derived from our biology, our form, our baser needs/desires, we build layers and layers of constructions to the point where it's hard to remember that they're all constructions. We are, after all, first and foremost biological machines: everything else is derived from that fundamental fact, to varying degrees. The same goes for gender identities, they're all constructed: morals, ethics, religion, history, art, cultures, dance, music, language, human rights, the notion of equality, war, peace, Jews, sports, all identities, sexual preference, philosophy, all abstract thought and bla bla bla. Everything is constructed, even biology can be considered constructed, at least in part, I'll get to that later (unless I forget).

To see the validity of this just look at feral children. See what a human lacking the fancy things we have constructed is: it's an animal, not even on par with our fellow apes, even apes have their own constructs, their own social orders and rules and hierarchies, their own kinds of ethics, culture even, gender roles too.

Many if not all "natural" instincts are very much constructed. One's social role is determined almost entirely by one's society, in a very important sense it is constructed by that society, whether we're talking about wolves, ants or humans. A true individual, utterly lacking the influences of a society, has had no social "instincts" developed/constructed, no language, no gender to speak of, no sexual-preference (except maybe an erotic attachment to inanimate objects), no sense of propriety, no capacity for abstract thought and so forth. That is the extent of a "natural" being, "freed" from the constructs imposed on it by its potential societies.

Culture effecting biology and biology effecting culture: We see species that display sexual dimorphism, including humans. With humans certainly we see how this effects culture: human females don't have the bone density or testosterone caused muscle mass to compete with human males in pursuits that require strength, so we have Olympic games and sports in general that are gender segregated, military and construction positions are either heavily dominated by or exclusively populated by human males. How can this be caused by culture, surely this is culture caused by biology. Well, they can operate in symbiosis. Sexual selection can breed males and females along separated paths, which is at least in part a cultural pursuit, what is fashionable and so forth in a given time increases your chances of reproduction. Females being chosen by a certain set of criteria and males by another. A particularly sexist friend of mine (he's also racist and super gay) has a notion as to why women are smaller and physically weaker on average than men: he says because before language developed to a point where consent could even be considered a thing, humans must have, by definition, reproduced primarily by rape (as we see many primate species currently doing), from this thesis he derives the notion that women were bred to be smaller because those are the ones who reproduced, ie. those were the ones who were physically unable to resist and therefore out-bred their stronger fellow females able to resist. Obviously this is a mildly offensive idea (to put it mildly) and a gross over-simplification of what must have been a very complex process. But there is something to it, not so much the rapey bit, but the rest of it, the culture that molds the biology that initiates gender dimorphism, rather than the other way around.

[dogukan]

That's a common perspective in the branches of social sciences which have a very strong streak of anti-positivist ideology running through them and rarely engage in methodical empirical investigation anyway (sociocultural anthropology for example) whereas those that engage in empirical investigation and the scientific methodology a central aspect of their academic training (biocultural anthropology for example) tell a completely different story. Emphasizing unusual exceptions in the ethnographic record is a great way to make a name for yourself if you're a cultural anthropologist.

This is the bit I am obsessed with. Philosophy of science.
When I was a classical Marxist, I thought I had all the means for understanding society. I had the ultimate tools to reality of social dynamics. I felt like all the concepts I used had corresponded to reality for sure. And I had developed a massive confirmation bias around that. Not the fact that everything I said was true, but that through my limited framework, I could fit everything to reality I had in my mind.

I came out of this when I was writing my thesis and read extensively on methodology and epistemology.In fact, it helped me greatly that I had became so obssessed with the reality my "scientific method" had created for me.

I am not against the positivism influenced schools of thinking in academia. But I do not really see these two approaches, the critical ones and the empiricism-originating ones as competing, but rather cooperating.
In that sense, my problem is positivists is when they are all about their scientific reality.
When it is not supported by a larger, critical, historical outlook, it becomes problematic and leads to "bad" results.
The trick is, you can use positivistic approaches for saying solid things(for that moment), and you can combine it with critical approaches to show that you sort of understand where you are coming from with what you are saying and leave open doors
The amount of problems created with this pure positivistic attitudes are there in our history. Soviet Union and Nazis comes to my mind.

Thats not how society works. Societies, knowledges, categories, abstractions are contextual. And they are very relevant to existing power relations, or who dominates the discourse. This also builds into our language, our thought processes, our way of analyzing things and our way of creating our future if you know what I mean

Long story short, there is no point in being a prisoner of our past. We need to be aware of it without taking it for granted, and put it out there for what it is. Thats what makes progress, not solid quantitative facts that speak for their own epistemological foundations.

[Maiar93]

Here's a question I'd like people to tackle: gender is a social construct, right? In essence, it means that whatever people think males or females should do, make up the definition of male and female genders. So there's BOUND to be some overlap with the meaning of biological sex. Why treat it as something entirely different?

[Col. Tartleton]

Its pretty much a given that a transgender person is entirely the gender they don't want to be mentally and physically. However if they want to be treated cosmetically to improve their appearance they're as entitled to do so as anyone else. If a man wants breast implants its as logical as a woman getting breast implants. If a woman wants male hormones or a man wants female hormones who cares? If they want to be called by pronouns different than those they're issued it would be polite to use them and impolite to do otherwise. But if someone doesn't want to humor them that shouldn't be seen as oppressive. Like when Ben Shapiro got assaulted by Zoey Tur he didn't do anything wrong by addressing her as sir. Certainly not to justify a violent threat.

[Diamat]

There's nothing wrong with relativism....... relatively speaking.

Of course not. As I've said, I am not against the notion of constructivism. But a major philosophical problem arises once constructedness leads us to the corollary that we should therefore reject whatever is constructed and struggle against it (i.e., struggle against the dominant social norms). As I have explained, I consider this to be philosophically unsound. There is nothing in the notion of constructedness that must necessarily lead us into relativism and a rejection of ethics, social roles, etc. Just because gender notions are constructed should not mean that they should be struggled against, as is the case with feminism. To do so would simply replace one abstraction with another (i.e., another constructed notion), which would be just as relative (from the point of view of relativistic constructivism).

[Basil II the B.S]

Though by constructed you mean artificial creation of societies not consequence of natural inclinations. The latter is easily provable, the former is not.

[Diamat]

That is not what "constructed" refers to. We have to be precise here. "Constructed" refers to an epistemological process that occurs within societies. As such, the resultant construction differs as the society differs. Although this process is natural, insofar as it is an inborn trait of humans to give meaning to their world and generate concepts, the construction itself is variable, unlike nature. This is ultimately how Spirit (Geist) differs from nature. Although Spirit is simply a development of nature, it has negated nature and raised it to a higher plane, at which point nature (the universe, or whatever you wish to call it) is looking at itself, coming to know itself.

[Basil II the B.S]

But aren't we detaching ourself a bit too much from empirically observable genders and discussing abstract concepts in this case?

[Diamat]

Well, that's why this is in the philosophy section. We - or should I say "I" - are talking about gender as it is digested over and over again in the spiritual realm. Nevertheless, the argument for an empirically observable gender is indeed valid even in a philosophy thread, as long as it remains erkenntniskritisch, that is, as long as it remains a question about the limits and limitations of knowledge. If the argument is that gender can be determined objectively through an empirical observation of nature, and that the social aspect is irrelevant, then this is a fair statement. However, it would have to prove itself philosophically and explain the empirical fact of varying gender conceptions in different societies (including gender roles and everything attached with it).