Sex and gender are both social constructs

Transfeminism.

When I think back to growing up, I was socialized into fitting the gender identity I was assigned at birth ― a blonde-haired, blued-eyed boy. As an infant I wore blue clothes. As a child some of the toys I played with were legos, erector sets, and toy trains. My parents always insisted that the stylist cut my hair short. And the clothes they purchased for me were masculine, such as jean pants and polo shirts. I was never given many choices about my clothing or hair style. I didn’t think about it much until I watched the movie Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) when I was six or seven years old. The film showed me for the first time that it was possible for a person to bend, if not change, their gender. I wanted to be a girl because I remember sneaking into my sister’s bedroom and trying on her clothes and makeup, which I liked better. To this day, I have a fondness for wearing nail polish. As I discussed during Pride Month last year, when I began to openly question my sexuality in middle school, I was stigmatized and ridiculed. We know that other children go through similar experiences. Certain expressions of self in Western culture have historically been made illegal, stigmatized, discriminated against, or have resulted in harm to people who express themselves in those ways.

The point of this vignette was to invite you to recall your own experience of gender socialization. We are all born with a certain kind of body that the dominant culture calls our ‘sex’ and we are assigned a gender and later identify with it (or reject it) through a socialization process. But no one is born as a boy or a girl, a man or a woman. Parents, schools, and parts of our culture like religion are agents of socialization imposing certain expectations on normative ways of ‘doing’ gender or ways of comporting our bodies to express our gender. Ponder on your own life: did you experience incongruities between the gender identity that was expected of you since your birth and the gender you later chose (or wanted) to present? We all have a unique story to tell about the development of our gender and sexuality, even if we don’t identify as LGBT.

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Our unique ways of presenting gender are possible because gender is not an objective quality of the body defined by sex but is constituted by the innumerable acts of performing it such as how we dress, speak, move, and look to others. Judith Butler, a philosophy professor at UC Berkeley, promoted the concept of gender performativity in her influential book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1993).

You might be wondering: if gender is merely performance, then is it real? After all, individuals who are transgender suffer to actualize for others the reality of their gender identification. Following her imprisonment for acting as a whistleblower in exposing U.S. war crimes, Chelsea Manning had to sue the government in order to obtain hormone therapy and medical treatment in a men’s prison after she announced her status as a transgender woman. Even then, she was not allowed to change her name on official documents or grow out her hair. “Butler’s point was never that gender wasn’t real,” said transgender historian Susan Stryker, “rather, it was that the reality of gender for everybody is the ‘doing of it’. Gender is like a language to communicate who we are to others and to understand ourselves. The implication of this argument is that transgender genders are as real as any others, and they are achieved in the same fundamental way.”  Butler’s work has since become central to both queer theory and how many transgender people understand themselves. To be something in the world necessarily entails ‘doing it.’

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From the Latin word genus ― kind or type ― gender is the social organization of bodies into categories. In the Western world, this is usually based on sex but it is important to realize that there have been other systems of organizing people into genders. Some Native American cultures have three or more social genders. There were about 155 Native American tribes that culturally accepted the third and fourth gender, also known as two-spirits. In other cultures, gender is based on the work people do rather than their bodies. Gender is historical―it changes over time and depends on various social relations and cultural beliefs coming together in a certain time and place.

Our entire belief system about sex and gender is based on cultural beliefs. For instance, that sex is used to determine gender categories using chromosomes or genetics, or that being male or female depends on the ability to make eggs or sperm. Existing research finds intersex people (those having differences in their sexual development such as genetic anomalies or bodies born with genitals that look like a mixture of typically male and female shapes) constitute an estimated 1.7% of the population, which makes being intersex about as common as having red hair (1%-2%). The biology of sex is more variable than most people realize. When a culture has a belief that there are only two sexes, intersex people become pathologized and the target of medical interventions such as genital surgery when they are still children to “correct” an alleged abnormality. Sex is just as much of a social construct as gender. Bodies are complex and they can and do change. Any correlation we deterministically make between sex and gender will fail in some way (the prevalence of intersexed persons being just one example) and such correlations have cultural and political dimensions. Social movements for transgender rights assert that the sex of the body does not bear any predetermined relationship to the social category in which that body lives or the identity of the person who lives in that body. “How a society organizes its members into categories based on their unchosen physical differences has never been a politically neutral act,” wrote Susan Stryker.

As one of feminism’s core tenets, society tends to be organized in ways that are more exploitative of women’s bodies than men's bodies. Yet transgender feminist perspectives also locate oppression in the cultural belief of there being two and only two genders, one of which is subject to greater social control than the other and both of which are based on beliefs about the meaning of biological sex. People who do not conform are treated as people whose lives are not worth living or lives that have no value. Thus it is the goal of feminism and social justice activism to break the imposed connection between sex and gender described above. Feminist political action must include trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, and gender non-conforming people in the scope of people whose lives are worth living, whose rights and dignity are worth fighting for.

“Gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.” ― Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

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Sources

Butler, Judith P. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.

“Intersex.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 25 July 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex.

Fausto-Sterling, Anne. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. Basic Books, 2000.

Pesta, Abigail. “Chelsea Manning Shares Her Transition to Living as a Woman - Behind Bars.” Cosmopolitan, 9 Oct. 2017, www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a38728/chelsea-manning-may-2015

Stryker, Susan. Transgender History: the Roots of Today's Revolution. Seal Press, 2017. p.14-15, 162-163.

teglin. “My Experience with People Who Identify as LGBTQIA+.” teglin 🌐, Tumblr, 2 June 2018, teglin.tumblr.com/post/174513641191.

“The Third Gender in Native American Tribes: SexInfo Online.” The Third Gender in Native American Tribes | SexInfo Online, sexinfo.soc.ucsb.edu/article/third-gender-native-american-tribes.