Anyone who passed through the Brickyard Wednesday morning may have seen me. One of a few, I spent that morning standing for and calling attention to a table.
Sprawled across the table were some magazines, buttons, temporary tattoos, signs and cameras. The front of the table boasted a sign reading, “Students Advocating for Gender Equality.”
Otherwise known as SAGE, the organization I co-founded, we set out to reduce the stigma surrounding the word “feminism,” teaching its synonymy with “gender equality” as opposed to “misandry.”
On the whole, people were willing to talk to us about our organization and purpose.
“Do you believe in gender equality?” we would ask.
Fortunately, the most common responses were affirmative. However, a few adamantly disagreed with the idea that all genders ought to be equal institutionally, socially and symbolically.
Though perhaps they should’ve, those who stood in opposition to us weren’t the ones who most disturbed me.
What most concerned me was a response from the somewhat illuminated that only once or twice made its way into conversation.
“Gender isn’t real,” someone said. “It’s a social construction.”
Hearing this sort of sentiment is a bittersweet victory. On the one hand, this person acknowledges that gender is not mandatory or determined biologically. On the other, it demonstrates a transphobic and incomplete understanding of social constructions and what exactly we can learn from them.
A social construction refers to anything that is not innate. Often, we build norms and mores around these constructions. Examples range from gender to virginity to religion.
There seems to be some tendency for people to infer that anything socially constructed is unreal. This is a harmful tendency.
Take, for example, language. It is an interrelated system of social constructions stemming from a possibly innate necessity for humans (and animals) to communicate.
Understanding that language is a social construction doesn’t mean that it is no longer valid or real. If it were, the words you are reading right now would be as meaningless as buh duh hywt sneeep.
All it means is that different places across the globe will speak different languages. It doesn’t mean that English is more natural than Creole. It just means that humans at one point or another had or will have a different concept of language than we do now.
Gender is no different.
For those who don’t know, gender is a social construct in that it is a system of ideologies and behaviors prescribed to us at birth based on the appearance of our genitalia. When we speak of gender in this sense, we usually refer to masculinity or femininity.
Intersex people are those born with genitalia that is somewhere between a penis and a vagina. It could be almost a penis or it could be almost a vagina. Typically, parents raise intersex children as one gender or another, rarely as gender fluid or agender.
Gender and sex don’t always go hand in hand. There are transgender people—that is, male-identified people with vaginas and female-identified people with penises—and all sorts of identities in between the binary system of man and woman by which our society currently operates.
Though the unattainable ideals of masculinity and femininity are socially constructed and prescribed, gender identity as a man, woman or anything in between resides within the person and is very much real.
For instance, someone who identifies as a man aspires to be viewed as masculine. The two (male identity and masculinity) are connected, but certainly not the same.
That’s why saying gender isn’t real simply because it is a social construct discounts legitimate feelings, emotions and identities of transgender people as well as cisgender people.
When we understand something as a social construct, all that means is it can be changed or even eradicated, but it doesn’t imply that it isn’t real.
Perhaps the future holds a world or even just one society in which the concept of gender has long been forgotten. But until then, we must embrace one another’s identities as well as our own, understanding that people make their society as much as society makes its people.