When Sex Became Gender (Perspectives on Gender)

---

That sex and gender are both socially constructed is most of my point. I think your final sentence is way too easy. You might like or not , my long post on Caster Semenya: For example, people who identify as male sex are regularly bullied or sexually harassed because of their expressions of gender — which often have nothing to do with their sex or their sexuality, for that matter. But without separate conceptualizations of sex, gender, and sexuality, it would be far, far more difficult to explain the social processes involved in studies like this: Thanks for linking the paper, Chris, which is excellent.

And for the comment. Although you see sex and gender as both social, in the analysis sex is fixed and gender is variable according to the femininity score. I think if you said it was a measure of how he expresses his sex, or sex category, the meaning would not be substantially changed. To further get myself in trouble: When you ask about self-perceived femininity, are you sure the answer nothing to do with his sex?

When you ask a man how feminine he is, could the answer partly reflect his perceptions of things like his body type, voice, etc.? Maybe someone else would be thinking of qualities like nurturing, a certain kind of emotional character, or whatever. I rarely disagree with you, but here I do, and strongly. You are absolutely correct, and i think it now uncontroversial to accept that sex is socially constructed, and not a binary. And what the assignment of sex means is entirely social.

But to allow that to collapse into gender is to ignore the real pain it causes people assigned to female category that they are expected to conform to feminine e. Thank you very much. Gender varies, and sex varies, and the two are always linked socially. I think if we went back in history and started again maybe we could decide to call the whole thing sex, and then study the complex interactions of social and biological at work within it.

The experiments have until very recently been the product of a scientist who knew what they wanted to prove and somehow did…. I was unwilling to believe any results until a new generation free of the old prejudices was driving them and the genetics more sophisticated. Today the genetics is finally getting close to something one can almost believe and the experiments are getting closer to being believable.

So soon we will have something approximating … not conclusions but more interesting data at least. I think things get confusing when concepts like social construction are used without precision — are you talking strong or weak SC? I doubt anyone outside of a small segment of critical theorists really gives strong SC much credence these days. I think the disagreement lies with how you theorize the role of the material or biological and the impact culture has on shaping the expression of these instincts.

These theories also come out of the study of deviancy and discounted any real individual autonomy — homosexuals were like criminals in that society viewed them as deviant and once categorized as such they internalized this deviancy which caused them to act deviantly, etc. Those movements emerged out of a time period where radicalism was more salient but as happens to all social movements, radicalism only gets you so far. Weeks is completely upfront about this so its not like anyone is redbaiting but it explains some of the odd assumptions that discount any inherent human nature.

Alot of the early history of sexuality is really more sociology than theory — Foucault. Obviously society constructs attitudes and beliefs about sex, gender and sexuality but society cannot construct reality itself. However, at least when it comes to sexuality, it seems american sociologists are not as wedded to social theories as one might expect.

Account Options

Otherwise, it just sounds like the Science Wars from the 90s all over again…. PS — When straight lefty sociologists and critical theorists criticize gay people who claim they are born gay because they are wedded to some theory that discounts the lived reality of a large group of people, it really comes off badly — http: This is an interesting discussion and quite timely. I follow and read Gay News every day, and have been since the start of the Prop 8 Trial in January Why this conversation is so interesting to me is because Gender is Breaking Bad with the Gay Haters right now.

Let me show you. They claim attendance of 1, They had a huge line up of speakers and many plenary sessions over 2 Days. Since the beginning of the Gay Hate movement in France, they always framed their fight as needing to protect the children of gay parents. It was more or less save the children from having Gay parents you can thank Regnerus for this. It was not until Robert Oscar Lopez went to France and was a speaker at one of their anti gay protests that there was any mention at all in their movement on transsexuals.

He has a blog that I keep my eye on, so I saw him publish that, and right after that the French Haters start going on and on about Gender Theory. In fact they probably have that ROL translated article on their blog if I cared to look. See how the script changed? Now the rally cry is about protection OUR Children, which is very motivating to parents, to make parents fear for their own children.

Shira Tarrant, When Sex Became Gender - PhilPapers

Flip over to USA, within just the last month the American Hate Groups are now writing about and pushing Gender Theory as being dangerous and you need to protect your children. In conclusion going forward prepare to see many discussions about Gender and specifically transgender from the Gay Haters. Initially I thought this new tactic of attacking gender was because they saw the T.

In LGBT as a weak link, less socially accepted.

Judith Butler is a famous or infamous depending on your view of science queer theorist that made a big splash back in the 90s applying post-structuralism to sex and gender. She is a very polarizing figure — people usually either love her or loathe her — due not only to her theoretical work but also to her politics she is very committed to Palestinian liberation and the Boycott and Divestment Movement against Israel.

She was hailed as brilliant by many but also criticized for being concerned with meaningless obscurantist theory. As you can tell, I have my reservations about her work but she certainly inspired many devoted followers. Reblogged this on The Lobster Dance and commented: One of first things I learned in my very first gender studies class was the distinction between sex and gender. I feel like it was useful at the time, but that the narratives about biology vs culture have changed in the last 10 years.

For example, if we assume that sex is purely biological, where does that leave trans and intersex people? It seems very simple and yet very radical, and I am really interested in seeing how this new idea develops in sociology. Conditionally Accepted Beyond Allies: Year-end report Family Inequality. Revealing and Concealing Identities: Interesting article, I agree there is a greater interplay of factors between sex and gender than just the two ideas being separate but related ideas.

However, it is helpful when dealing with the less forward thinking. Syllabus supplements for fall family sociology Family Inequality. Reblogged this on bornghanaian. Feminism the musings of jac. Does doing difference deny dominance? Transgender discrimination is sex discrimination Family Inequality. The denial of facts is never a good basis for an opinion or philosophy. Gender is a social construct, Sex is not. Truth can always be stated simply and clearly without diversion. Your theoretical leaps are intellectually disingenuous and entirely politically motivated, shame on you.

You demean yourself when you make unintelligent arguments. We need to know the sex of animals and people. It is useful to have a categorical term for it sex , even though there are only two options, with very few exceptions. The truth is that there are two sexes among humans, and we may as well just make gender a synonym for sex or get rid of the word. Do you have a penis? Do you like to wear dresses and makeup and do things that are more common for vagina- bearers to do?

Still a male, though. It will be a very long time before society gets there, stops needing arbitrary titles, because so many are stuck on them, and so many people are not ready to just let people be themselves, dress how they want, etc. I believe that gender is a linguistic term used to identify the sexes. To categorize them so we can talk about them. Without these terms, the concept would be incomprehensible.

I feel as though people that advocate the transgender trend say that gender is a construct of society, differing from sex. However, I believe that they are confusing gender and gender roles. Like I said, gender is just a way to identify the sexes.

Download options

I acknowledge that some people can experience different levels of hormone secretion and feel more masculine or feminine regardless of their DNA. But the hormones do not control the DNA. The DNA control the hormones. I feel as though education is key for this aspect of the argument. I feel as though if people are questioning, or have questioned their sex, they should visit a doctor to do a cheek swab to tell them exactly what their sex is. They can continue to lie to themselves or move on with the rest of their lives.

But I think a good illustration to overcome this is to look at many diseases. You can choose to ignore it and let it take over your body and, potentially, kill you. Although most transgender people are not actually dying, I feel like it is important for them to educate themselves on what is going on in their body and find their own ways to deal with.

In order to better understand Butler's critique, consider her account of gender performativity. For her, standard feminist accounts take gendered individuals to have some essential properties qua gendered individuals or a gender core by virtue of which one is either a man or a woman. This view assumes that women and men, qua women and men, are bearers of various essential and accidental attributes where the former secure gendered persons' persistence through time as so gendered. But according to Butler this view is false: First, feminists are said to think that genders are socially constructed in that they have the following essential attributes Butler , These are the attributes necessary for gendered individuals and those that enable women and men to persist through time as women and men.

See a Problem?

Think back to what was said above: These gender cores, supposedly encoding the above traits, however, are nothing more than illusions created by ideals and practices that seek to render gender uniform through heterosexism, the view that heterosexuality is natural and homosexuality is deviant Butler , Gender cores are constructed as if they somehow naturally belong to women and men thereby creating gender dimorphism or the belief that one must be either a masculine male or a feminine female.

But gender dimorphism only serves a heterosexist social order by implying that since women and men are sharply opposed, it is natural to sexually desire the opposite sex or gender. Further, being feminine and desiring men for instance are standardly assumed to be expressions of one's gender as a woman. Butler denies this and holds that gender is really performative. Gender is not something one is, it is something one does; it is a sequence of acts, a doing rather than a being.

Gender only comes into being through these gendering acts: This activity amongst others makes her gendered a woman. Our gendered classification scheme is a strong pragmatic construction: But, genders are true and real only to the extent that they are performed Butler , —9. And ultimately the aim should be to abolish norms that compel people to act in these gendering ways. For Butler, given that gender is performative, the appropriate response to feminist identity politics involves two things.

Rather, feminists should focus on providing an account of how power functions and shapes our understandings of womanhood not only in the society at large but also within the feminist movement. Many people, including many feminists, have ordinarily taken sex ascriptions to be solely a matter of biology with no social or cultural dimension. It is commonplace to think that there are only two sexes and that biological sex classifications are utterly unproblematic. By contrast, some feminists have argued that sex classifications are not unproblematic and that they are not solely a matter of biology.

In order to make sense of this, it is helpful to distinguish object- and idea-construction see Haslanger b for more: First, take the object-construction of sexed bodies. Secondary sex characteristics, or the physiological and biological features commonly associated with males and females, are affected by social practices. In some societies, females' lower social status has meant that they have been fed less and so, the lack of nutrition has had the effect of making them smaller in size Jaggar , Uniformity in muscular shape, size and strength within sex categories is not caused entirely by biological factors, but depends heavily on exercise opportunities: A number of medical phenomena involving bones like osteoporosis have social causes directly related to expectations about gender, women's diet and their exercise opportunities Fausto-Sterling These examples suggest that physiological features thought to be sex-specific traits not affected by social and cultural factors are, after all, to some extent products of social conditioning.

Social conditioning, then, shapes our biology. Second, take the idea-construction of sex concepts. Our concept of sex is said to be a product of social forces in the sense that what counts as sex is shaped by social meanings. This understanding is fairly recent. Females' genitals were thought to be the same as males' but simply directed inside the body; ovaries and testes for instance were referred to by the same term and whether the term referred to the former or the latter was made clear by the context Laqueur , 4.

For an alternative view, see King She estimates that 1. In her earlier work, she claimed that intersexed individuals make up at least three further sex classes: In her [a], Fausto-Sterling notes that these labels were put forward tongue—in—cheek. Recognition of intersexes suggests that feminists and society at large are wrong to think that humans are either female or male. However, she was discovered to have XY chromosomes and was barred from competing in women's sports Fausto-Sterling b, 1—3.

Deciding what sex is involves evaluative judgements that are influenced by social factors. Insofar as our cultural conceptions affect our understandings of sex, feminists must be much more careful about sex classifications and rethink what sex amounts to Stone , chapter 1. More specifically, intersexed people illustrate that sex traits associated with females and males need not always go together and that individuals can have some mixture of these traits. This suggest to Stone that sex is a cluster concept: But, one need not satisfy all of those features or some arbitrarily chosen supposedly necessary sex feature, like chromosomes Stone , This makes sex a matter of degree and sex classifications should take place on a spectrum: Further, intersexes along with trans people are located at the centre of the sex spectrum and in many cases their sex will be indeterminate Stone More recently, Ayala and Vasilyeva have argued for an inclusive and extended conception of sex: This view aims to motivate the idea that what counts as sex should not be determined by looking inwards at genitalia or other anatomical features.

In addition to arguing against identity politics and for gender performativity, Butler holds that distinguishing biological sex from social gender is unintelligible. For her, both are socially constructed:. Antony ; Gatens ; Grosz ; Prokhovnik Butler makes two different claims in the passage cited: To unpack her view, consider the two claims in turn. Prima facie , this implausibly implies that female and male bodies do not have independent existence and that if gendering activities ceased, so would physical bodies.

This is not Butler's claim; rather, her position is that bodies viewed as the material foundations on which gender is constructed, are themselves constructed as if they provide such material foundations Butler For Butler, sexed bodies never exist outside social meanings and how we understand gender shapes how we understand sex , Sexed bodies are not empty matter on which gender is constructed and sex categories are not picked out on the basis of objective features of the world.

Instead, our sexed bodies are themselves discursively constructed: Sex assignment calling someone female or male is normative Butler , 1. In fact, the doctor is performing an illocutionary speech act see the entry on Speech Acts. In effect, the doctor's utterance makes infants into girls or boys. We, then, engage in activities that make it seem as if sexes naturally come in two and that being female or male is an objective feature of the world, rather than being a consequence of certain constitutive acts that is, rather than being performative.

And this is what Butler means in saying that physical bodies never exist outside cultural and social meanings, and that sex is as socially constructed as gender. She does not deny that physical bodies exist. But, she takes our understanding of this existence to be a product of social conditioning: For a helpful introduction to Butler's views, see Salih For Butler, sex assignment is always in some sense oppressive. Again, this appears to be because of Butler's general suspicion of classification: Conducting a feminist genealogy of the body or examining why sexed bodies are thought to come naturally as female and male , then, should ground feminist practice Butler , 28—9.

Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender

Doing so enables feminists to identity how sexed bodies are socially constructed in order to resist such construction. Stone takes this to mean that sex is gender but goes on to question it arguing that the social construction of both sex and gender does not make sex identical to gender. According to Stone, it would be more accurate for Butler to say that claims about sex imply gender norms. To some extent the claim describes certain facts. But, it also implies that females are not expected to do much heavy lifting and that they would probably not be good at it.

So, claims about sex are not identical to claims about gender; rather, they imply claims about gender norms Stone , For a start, it is thought to reflect politically problematic dualistic thinking that undercuts feminist aims: Grosz ; Prokhovnik The thought is that in oppositions like these, one term is always superior to the other and that the devalued term is usually associated with women Lloyd For instance, human subjectivity and agency are identified with the mind but since women are usually identified with their bodies, they are devalued as human subjects and agents.

This is said to be evident for instance in job interviews. Men are treated as gender-neutral persons and not asked whether they are planning to take time off to have a family. By contrast, that women face such queries illustrates that they are associated more closely than men with bodily features to do with procreation Prokhovnik , The opposition between mind and body, then, is thought to map onto the opposition between men and women. The idea is that gender maps onto mind, sex onto body. That is, the s distinction understood sex as fixed by biology without any cultural or historical dimensions.

This understanding, however, ignores lived experiences and embodiment as aspects of womanhood and manhood by separating sex from gender and insisting that womanhood is to do with the latter. Rather, embodiment must be included in one's theory that tries to figure out what it is to be a woman or a man.

First, claiming that gender is socially constructed implies that the existence of women and men is a mind-dependent matter. This suggests that we can do away with women and men simply by altering some social practices, conventions or conditions on which gender depends whatever those are. However, ordinary social agents find this unintuitive given that ordinarily sex and gender are not distinguished.

Second, claiming that gender is a product of oppressive social forces suggests that doing away with women and men should be feminism's political goal. But this harbours ontologically undesirable commitments since many ordinary social agents view their gender to be a source of positive value.

So, feminism seems to want to do away with something that should not be done away with, which is unlikely to motivate social agents to act in ways that aim at gender justice. Given these problems, Mikkola argues that feminists should give up the distinction on practical political grounds. Feminism is the movement to end the oppression women as a group face.

But, how should the category of women be understood if feminists accept the above arguments that gender construction is not uniform, that a sharp distinction between biological sex and social gender is false or at least not useful, and that various features associated with women play a role in what it is to be a woman, none of which are individually necessary and jointly sufficient like a variety of social roles, positions, behaviours, traits, bodily features and experiences?

Feminists must be able to address cultural and social differences in gender construction if feminism is to be a genuinely inclusive movement and be careful not to posit commonalities that mask important ways in which women qua women differ. These concerns among others have generated a situation where as Linda Alcoff puts it feminists aim to speak and make political demands in the name of women, at the same time rejecting the idea that there is a unified category of women , If feminist critiques of the category women are successful, then what if anything binds women together, what is it to be a woman, and what kinds of demands can feminists make on behalf of women?

Many have found the fragmentation of the category of women problematic for political reasons e. For instance, Young holds that accounts like Spelman's reduce the category of women to a gerrymandered collection of individuals with nothing to bind them together , Black women differ from white women but members of both groups also differ from one another with respect to nationality, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation and economic position; that is, wealthy white women differ from working-class white women due to their economic and class positions.

When Sex Became Gender

These sub-groups are themselves diverse: So if we accept Spelman's position, we risk ending up with individual women and nothing to bind them together. And this is problematic: Some, then, take the articulation of an inclusive category of women to be the prerequisite for effective feminist politics and a rich literature has emerged that aims to conceptualise women as a group or a collective e.

Articulations of this category can be divided into those that are: Below we will review some influential gender nominalist and gender realist positions. Before doing so, it is worth noting that not everyone is convinced that attempts to articulate an inclusive category of women can succeed or that worries about what it is to be a woman are in need of being resolved. Instead, Mikkola argues for giving up the quest, which in any case she argues poses no serious political obstacles.

In order to make the category women intelligible, she argues that women make up a series: Young holds that women are not bound together by a shared feature or experience or set of features and experiences since she takes Spelman's particularity argument to have established definitely that no such feature exists , 13; see also: Frye ; Heyes Instead, women's category is unified by certain practico-inert realities or the ways in which women's lives and their actions are oriented around certain objects and everyday realities Young , 23—4.

For example, bus commuters make up a series unified through their individual actions being organised around the same practico-inert objects of the bus and the practice of public transport. Women make up a series unified through women's lives and actions being organised around certain practico-inert objects and realities that position them as women.

Young identifies two broad groups of such practico-inert objects and realities. First, phenomena associated with female bodies physical facts , biological processes that take place in female bodies menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth and social rules associated with these biological processes social rules of menstruation, for instance. Second, gender-coded objects and practices: So, women make up a series since their lives and actions are organised around female bodies and certain gender-coded objects.

Although Young's proposal purports to be a response to Spelman's worries, Stone has questioned whether it is, after all, susceptible to the particularity argument: Natalie Stoljar holds that unless the category of women is unified, feminist action on behalf of women cannot be justified , Stoljar too is persuaded by the thought that women qua women do not share anything unitary. This prompts her to argue for resemblance nominalism. This is the view that a certain kind of resemblance relation holds between entities of a particular type for more on resemblance nominalism, see Armstrong , 39— Stoljar relies more on Price's resemblance nominalism whereby x is a member of some type F only if x resembles some paradigm or exemplar of F sufficiently closely Price , For instance, the type of red entities is unified by some chosen red paradigms so that only those entities that sufficiently resemble the paradigms count as red.

The type or category of women, then, is unified by some chosen woman paradigms so that those who sufficiently resemble the woman paradigms count as women Stoljar , Semantic considerations about the concept woman suggest to Stoljar that resemblance nominalism should be endorsed Stoljar , It seems unlikely that the concept is applied on the basis of some single social feature all and only women possess.

More specifically, they pick out the following clusters of features: For Stoljar, attributions of womanhood are to do with a variety of traits and experiences: Nonetheless, she holds that since the concept woman applies to at least some MTF trans persons, one can be a woman without being female Stoljar , The cluster concept woman does not, however, straightforwardly provide the criterion for picking out the category of women.

Rather, the four clusters of features that the concept picks out help single out woman paradigms that in turn help single out the category of women. First, any individual who possesses a feature from at least three of the four clusters mentioned will count as an exemplar of the category. That is, what delimits membership in the category of women is that one resembles sufficiently a woman paradigm. In a series of articles collected in her book of , Sally Haslanger argues for a way to define the concept woman that is politically useful, serving as a tool in feminist fights against sexism, and that shows woman to be a social not a biological notion.

More specifically, Haslanger argues that gender is a matter of occupying either a subordinate or a privileged social position. In some articles, Haslanger is arguing for a revisionary analysis of the concept woman b; a; b. Elsewhere she suggests that her analysis may not be that revisionary after all ; Consider the former argument first. Haslanger's analysis is, in her terms, ameliorative: In particular, they need gender terms to identify, explain and talk about persistent social inequalities between males and females.

Haslanger's analysis of gender begins with the recognition that females and males differ in two respects: And this generates persistent sexist injustices. With this in mind, Haslanger specifies how she understands genders:. These are constitutive of being a woman and a man: Haslanger's ameliorative analysis is counterintuitive in that females who are not sex-marked for oppression, do not count as women. At least arguably, the Queen of England is not oppressed on sex-marked grounds and so, would not count as a woman on Haslanger's definition.

And, similarly, all males who are not privileged would not count as men. This might suggest that Haslanger's analysis should be rejected in that it does not capture what language users have in mind when applying gender terms. However, Haslanger argues that this is not a reason to reject the definitions, which she takes to be revisionary: In response, Mikkola has argued that revisionary analyses of gender concepts, like Haslanger's, are both politically unhelpful and philosophically unnecessary.

Note also that Haslanger's proposal is eliminativist: If sexist oppression were to cease, women and men would no longer exist although there would still be males and females. Not all feminists endorse such an eliminativist view though. Stone holds that Haslanger does not leave any room for positively revaluing what it is to be a woman: But according to Stone this is not only undesirable — one should be able to challenge subordination without having to challenge one's status as a woman.

It is also false: Feminism faces the following worries among others:. He thus proposes that women make up a natural kind with a historical essence:. In short, one is not a woman due to shared surface properties with other women like occupying a subordinate social position. Rather, one is a woman because one has the right history: More worryingly, trans women will count as men contrary to their self-identification.

Both Bettcher and Jenkins consider the importance of gender self-identification. Rather than trans women having to defend their self-identifying claims, these claims should be taken at face value right from the start. In addition to her revisionary argument, Haslanger has suggested that her ameliorative analysis of woman may not be as revisionary as it first seems , Although successful in their reference fixing, ordinary language users do not always know precisely what they are talking about.

Although her gender terminology is not intuitive, this could simply be because oppressive ideologies mislead us about the meanings of our gender terms. Our everyday gender terminology might mean something utterly different from what we think it means; and we could be entirely ignorant of this. Perhaps Haslanger's analysis, then, has captured our everyday gender vocabulary revealing to us the terms that we actually employ: If this is so, Haslanger's gender terminology is not radically revisionist. This would require showing that the gender terminology we in fact employ is Haslanger's proposed gender terminology.

But discovering the grounds on which we apply everyday gender terms is extremely difficult precisely because they are applied in various and idiosyncratic ways Saul , Haslanger, then, needs to do more in order to show that her analysis is non-revisionary.

Her motivation and starting point is the following: Uniessentialism attempts to understand and articulate this. However, Witt's work departs in important respects from the earlier so-called essentialist or gender realist positions discussed in Section 2: Witt does not posit some essential property of womanhood of the kind discussed above, which failed to take women's differences into account. Further, uniessentialism differs significantly from those position developed in response to the problem of how we should conceive of women's social kind.

It is not about solving the standard dispute between gender nominalists and gender realists, or about articulating some supposedly shared property that binds women together and provides a theoretical ground for feminist political solidarity. Rather, uniessentialism aims to make good the widely held belief that gender is constitutive of who we are.

Uniessentialism is a sort of individual essentialism. Traditionally philosophers distinguish between kind and individual essentialisms: We can further distinguish two sorts of individual essentialisms: Kripkean identity essentialism and Aristotelian uniessentialism. The latter, however, asks a slightly different question: What explains that an individual entity exists over and above the sum total of its constituent parts? The standard feminist debate over gender nominalism and gender realism has largely been about kind essentialism.

Being about individual essentialism, Witt's uniessentialism departs in an important way from the standard debate. From the two individual essentialisms, Witt endorses the Aristotelian one. On this view, certain functional essences have a unifying role: Witt's example is of a house: Due to this, gender is a uniessential property of social individuals. It is important to clarify the notions of gender and social individuality that Witt employs. Second, Witt distinguishes persons those who possess self-consciousness , human beings those who are biologically human and social individuals those who occupy social positions synchronically and diachronically.

These ontological categories are not equivalent in that they possess different persistence and identity conditions. Social individuals are bound by social normativity, human beings by biological normativity. These normativities differ in two respects: Thus, being a social individual is not equivalent to being a human being.

• Comme il vous plaira (Shakespeare) (French Edition)
• Wolfsseele (German Edition)
• THE OLYMPIANS AND THE GOD OF DARKNESS
• Meditate
• Character: The Pulse of a Disciples Heart
• Une famille délurée (Les Interdits t. 357) (French Edition)
• A Nation Of Shadows