What the hell is "gender"? Explain it please.

DaNiceguy · 2013-05-05T12:41:52+00:00

Gender, supposedly, is the notion that the behaviors associated with your biological sex are "socially constructed". That is, you only behave like a man because you were taught to be a man. The corollary is that (it is claimed), if you raised a boy like a girl, he'd effectively be a girl. All of this assumes that human beings start life as a "blank slate" and that biology plays no role in the way you think or behave. This, of course, is nonsense. Sexual dimorphism is quite distinct, and psychological differences are apparent within the first hour after birth.

Now, despite this criticism, the term "gender" does have a use. Most people who are born biologically male, identify mentally as male. They "feel" male. Some, however, do not. A person might be biologically male, but "identify" as female. That is, their "gender" is female - they feel they have a "female" brain.

ninja_jay · 2013-05-05T14:48:27+00:00

There are three different sliding scales for three things often used interchangeably and innacuratly:

Sex: Having biologically boy-bits or Girl-bits or in rare cases a mixture of both.

Gender: What you identify with “in yourself” So while your Sex may be “Male” you could feel that inside you are gendered as a Female. The proverbial Woman trapped in a man’s body, or vice-versa. It’s also considered by many to work on a sliding scale, you can consider yourself a Female inside but value the traits you exhibit that make you feel Manly, or the other way around.

The “Social Construct” argument is often misquoted/misinterpreted as well, even once by my Lecturer who has a PHd in Developmental Psychology (though we since both looked it up and have settled on a better description). The idea that “Gender is a social construct” isn’t that you can simply raise a child as a Man and even if it was born with a Vagina it will be a Man, the unfortunate case of David Reimer proved everyone wrong on that very specious argument.

It’s the idea that we as a society collectively decide and re-enforce an idea that is “Gender” is what the “Gender is a social construct.” To put it in an MRA perspective: Who decides that “Maleness” is defined by willingness to sacrifice? Withholding of emotions? Feigned indifference to pain(emotional or otherwise)? A Feminist might argue that it’s “Patriarchy,” I consider it a symptom of the society we live in, we construct that Gender Identity and then re-enforce it, often to the detriment of both men and women.

Sexuality: The sliding scale between homo and hetro, not too relevant to this post, but I wanted to make it a clear and distinct category.

rightsbot · 2013-05-05T12:36:16+00:00

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YetAnotherCommenter · 2013-05-05T15:36:55+00:00

In my country words have genders like: chair - "he" pen - "she" lake - "neutral gender"

I am not a linguist but this is where the notion of "gender" first originated... French, Italian and Spanish treat certain words as "male" or "female" (metaphorically). IIRC the term "gender" originally came from linguistics, and as such meant whether something was associated-with-male (masculine) or associated-with-female (feminine).

That said, these days, "gender" can mean either something's association (arbitrary or otherwise) with maleness or femaleness, or it can refer to "gender identity" (an individual's mental "sense" of being a man or a woman). Current research indicates that gender identity is a product of neuroanatomy (i.e. you could describe gender identity as the "sex" of the brain).

Deansdale · 2013-05-05T16:59:32+00:00

"Gender" is bullshit.

If you want the longer explanation: it's orwellian newspeak, an empty, postmodern phrase made-up with the aim to confuse people and needlessly complicate conversations. Sex and sexual orientation is too direct, too simple - they had to come up with something more elusive to muddy the waters.

blinderzoff · 2013-05-05T16:15:04+00:00

cf. Newspeak

Somebody__ · 2013-05-06T05:36:57+00:00

Gender is a thing that corporeal beings tend to use to divide themselves into factions. It has something to do with the connection between their mind and *the meat wrapped around it, I've heard.

StandsInRefuse · 2013-05-05T16:10:32+00:00

I don't buy the bullocks that says gender is a social construct, it's not. Wild animals have gender 'roles' that relate to their sex.Even Crabs have distinctive gender roles. Gender / sex is interchanged in the UK and rightly so.

NWOslave · 2013-05-05T17:28:13+00:00

It's a made up word to legitimize any behavior or whimsy and give credence to pop psychology based on feelings instead of reality. In the world of biological reality, your sex is your gender. In reality you're born either man/male or woman/female and there's only one sexuality since the entire reason for sexuality is reproduction. There is only one legitimate sexuality since if sex wasn't needed to reproduce, no one would have any sexuality. We'd be like ameba's cloning ourselves. By living in a fantasy land where sex, gender, orientation or whatever pops into anyone's head are called choices, and all choices are given legitimacy. Science is after all heresy.

Here's a story in the Atlantic about a man who says he's a woman and is also a lesbian.

http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/05/every-single-family-in-the-world-is-a-nontraditional-family/275505/

So here we have a man/male, obviously since he has the bone, muscular, cardiovascular, reproductive and brain structure of a man, yet he claims to be a woman/female. So he gets the old slice and dice and artificial drugs which doesn't change anything but his superficial appearance. He also says his choice of sexuality is being a lesbian. The article treats the entire thing quite seriously as if whimsies that popped into his head are reality.

Basically, words are made up in a feeble attempt to deny reality, and then the self anointed intellectuals base all studies off ideologies that could never stand up to any scientific scrutiny. Mensrightsreddit is notoriously leftist in it's ideologies on sex/gender. A huge supporter of tgb crap ideology. Mentioning that a man is born with a different biological make up from top to bottom is heresy. Science is forbidden knowledge in the pages of mensrightsreddit. Mentioning men have a different bone, cardiovascular, muscular, reproductive and brain structure than women is heresy. In the world of ideology, you can choose what is scientifically impossible to choose.

Deusmetal · 2013-05-05T18:24:22+00:00

It used to be synonymous for sex, male or female.

Thanks to postmodernists and other people with convoluted and fucked up personalities and opinions it's now an overly complex and convoluted term thinly veiled in sociology terms and ideas spewed by other poster modernist idiots.

Something "gender is just a social construct man!".

DavidTheWin · 2013-05-05T14:35:04+00:00

As well as what others have posted, from my experience it's generally used in the same way sex is. Could just be a UK thing, gender and sex are pretty much interchangeable on paperwork here.

spermjack_attack · 2013-05-05T17:08:56+00:00

So, there a quite a few different angles that feminists have taken with the conceptualization of gender and sex. But, normally the use of these terms goes something like this:

Gender is socially constructed. We often use the terms "women" and "men" to signify we are talking about gender. The idea here is that the things we see as "gender" are things that are made up within our shared culture, and then confer gender onto a body. So, from a basic level, muscle mass, hair length, dress, body presentation, how we move, etc are things that "express" our gender.

A specific conceptualization of this idea was done by the feminist Judith Butler. She use the idea of performativity to explain how gender is "produced" through social acts:

Butler characterizes gender as the effect of reiterated acting, one that produces the effect of a static or normal gender while obscuring the contradiction and instability of any single person's gender act. This effect produces what we can consider to be "true gender", a narrative that is sustained by "the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions – and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them."

Sex is also socially constructed, but differs from gender in that it is something that is also medically constructed. We often use "female" and "male" to signify we are talking about sex. Often people say that sex is "biological," but this is only half true. Rather, sex is medically constructed, because we use medically constructed definitions of bodily sex to assign sex to bodies (usually when they are born). Proof of this is in the medical discourse that permeates the "treatment" of intersexed children. Suzanne Kessler's "The medical construction of gender" is a really good primer on how this process takes place:

The birth of intersexed infants, babies born with genitals that are neither clearly male nor clearly female, has been documented throughout recorded time.' In the late twentieth century, medical technology has advanced to allow scientists to determine chromo- somal and hormonal gender, which is typically taken to be the real, natural, biological gender, usually referred to as "sex."2 Neverthe- less, physicians who handle the cases of intersexed infants consider several factors beside biological ones in determining, assigning, and announcing the gender of a particular infant. Indeed, biological factors are often preempted in their deliberations by such cultural factors as the "correct" length of the penis and capacity of the vagina.

There is one more category which is usually not given a name, but I've seen occasionally called "gender role." We often use "feminine" and "masculine" to signify we are talking about this. These terms are used because sometimes men can embody femininity and women can embody masculinity. These things are the traits that we usually associate to a gender but are not exclusive to a gender. Things like "strength," "rationality," and "dominant" are masculine things, but women can embody them too. Things like "sensitivity," "maternal instinct," and "compassion" are feminine things, but men can embody them too. J. Halberstam does a lot of cool work on the "Female Masculinity," it's totally worth looking up!

I hope this helped clear up any confusion :D

OThomson · 2013-05-05T20:37:21+00:00

Sex = Male / Female

Gender = Man / Woman

Orientation = Homo, Hetero, Bi, Pan, etc, etc

2013-05-05T12:52:30+00:00

ELI5: It's like race; only used by racists. Read Feminist literature. Read Mein Kampf. Feminine good, Masculine bad. Aryan good, Jew bad.

Bohica69 · 2013-05-05T14:38:30+00:00

Definition:

Female

An individual of the sex which conceives and brings forth young, or (in a wider sense) which has an ovary and produces ova. The male and female of each living thing. (Drayton)
(Science: botany) a plant which produces only that kind of reproductive organs which are capable of developing into fruit after impregnation or fertilization; a pistillate plant.

Origin: oe. Femel, femal, f. Femelle, fr. L. Femella, dim. Of femina woman. See feminine.

Belonging to the sex which conceives and gives birth to young, or (in a wider sense) which produces ova; not male. As patient as the female dove When that her golden couplets are disclosed. (Shak)
Belonging to an individual of the female sex; characteristic of woman; feminine; as, female tenderness. Female usurpation.'b8 (Milton) To the generous decision of a female mind, we owe the discovery of America. (Belknap)
(Science: botany) Having pistils and no stamens; pistillate; or, in cryptogamous plants, capable of receiving fertilization.

If there is no uterus and it can't have children, it's NOT A FEMALE.

Title	What the hell is "gender"? Explain it please.
Author	[deleted]
Upvotes	9
Comments	61
Date	May 5, 2013 12:34 PM UTC (13 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/mensrights/comments/1dq8u9/what-the-hell-is-gender-explain-it-please/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/what-the-hell-is-gender-explain-it-please.1612043 https://theredarchive.com/post/1612043

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