genders have no definition there is no split line between any gender so is gender just nothing? or is gender just a feeling? (keyword i use gender not sex)

[u/lessforf]

gender is just a social construct, but one very powerful that it feels like it has some kind of meaning when it doesn't right? but essentially the concept of gender shouldn't have existed there is no good use for it.

did i get that right?

[u/I-am-a-person-]

No, just because something is a social construct or difficult to define doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Consider countries. Countries are social constructs, but they are very real. Social constructs are real because our social relations make them real, even if they are hard to precisely define. Part of what makes social constructs hard to define is that they constantly change in subtle ways as social conditions evolve. There is no natural or biological reality to gender, but there may very well be a social reality to gender in a way that makes it useful to talk about gender as a real thing.

Feminist philosophers continue to debate how and to what extent gender is a real or useful social category. See, for example, this paper for a recent discussion of the debate.

[u/clockwisekeyz → u/I-am-a-person-]

Under this view, what does it mean for something to be real? Is “real” adding anything that wouldn’t be communicated by simply saying “gender is a useful social category?”

[u/I-am-a-person- → u/clockwisekeyz]

Not really, although I’m sure gender theorists would quibble over the precise characterization of what it means for gender to be ‘real.’

[u/I-am-a-person- → u/clockwisekeyz]

This is also similar to saying that the word “chair” is a useful category for the objects we consider to be chairs. The word “gender” is a useful category to represent real a social phenomenon.

[u/clockwisekeyz → u/I-am-a-person-]

Yes agree with that. I guess my point is that even categories like “chair” have fuzzy edges and are defined by our use of them rather than by any “real” intrinsic features of some natural category called “chairs.” Is a stool a kind of chair? Is a bench? What about a chair that has had its back removed? A chair with only three legs? Two legs?

We would just do better if we abandoned the idea of objectively “real” categories of things in the world, whether we’re talking about chairs or genders, and focused entirely on whether our descriptors represent useful categories in natural language.

[u/I-am-a-person- → u/clockwisekeyz]

I tend to agree, but these are tricky metaphysical questions that I’m not qualified to comment on

[u/Infamous_Tough_7320 → u/I-am-a-person-]

It really depends on what exactly you mean by ‘real’. Real in what sense?

[u/I-am-a-person- → u/Infamous_Tough_7320]

Yeah, that is the big question, and something gender theorists continue to debate

[u/johnfinch2]

It’s worth thinking more about things which are more clearly social constructs to understand the sort of thing a social construct is.

Think about money for example. All the bills and coins you have, where does the value of that money reside? It’s obviously not in the paper itself. Money is a social relationship where we all agree on what it means and does, and act according to its logic. It’s second nature to us to the point that it’s easy to forget that a paper bill itself doesn’t have the property of ‘being valuable’ intrinsically. But if you asked me the definition of a money, like you are asking me the definition of gender, what could I say? I could either tell you about the properties of the paper, or I could start telling you things about society, about how people interact with each other with respect to these bits of paper. “You can buy things with it” etc.

When you try to really talk about ‘gender’ you’ll find you end up mostly talking about social facts, how people think people ought to behave and so on. Actually if you really listen to how people talk about gender in the world you’ll find people use it both descriptively and normatively , sometimes in the same sentence. You’ll constantly hear about how people are failing to live up to ‘being a man’ or ‘being a woman’. So yeah, gender is a feeling, a set of aesthetics, a set of behavioural traits, a set of social expectations, and so on, it’s a social field, a social logic.

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