"Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other. As a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time."
This is talking about gender expression, not gender itself. Gender is not a "social construct." I'm not going to take this essay apart; my comments are limited to this destructive meme.
All concepts are "constructs," because they are models: mental projections upon experience made in an effort to order that experience, find meaning in it and facilitate interaction with it in pursuit of desired goals. In that sense, they are relative. The real question is whether there is something objectively real to which that construct is tied.
Because all ideas are "constructs," the only purpose for singling out gender as construct is to delegitimize its reality -- to imply that it has no "essence," no real meaning other than whatever we arbitrarily decide to give it. And that's what makes calling gender a "social construct" destructive and delegitimizing to the trans experience.
Singling out gender as a "social construct" is to say that its meaning is arbitrary, i.e. not real, or that its real meaning is unknowable -- either way, it is to say that the term is functionally meaningless. I realize this is not what many people mean to say when they call gender a "social construct," but this is what they ARE saying, whether they mean to or not. And if gender is meaningless, then being TRANSgender is meaningless, our pain and suffering over our experience is meaningless and despair is all we have left. Guess what comes next.
Why would anyone do this? Why would they go out of their way to delegitimize the reality of gender? Radical feminists pushed this idea in the 1980s; can you imagine why? Probably for the same reason that many trans activists and their supporters picked up the meme: because to say gender is real is to say that it has defined limits -- and defined limits are, well, limiting; and trans people often felt the pain of limits the same way radical feminists did. In order to do away with the pain of limits, they sought to do away with those limits by denying the objective reality of gender.
Calling gender a "social construct" is a destructive, delegitimizing, dehumanizing meme, and it needs to die, a.s.a.p.
