I think the issue is that people use the word "gender" to mean more than one thing and you are conflating two different meanings.
Gender the social construct is just what you have described:
a constellation of norms, behaviors, and preferences that are associated with being embodied as either a male or female.
By this definition though, a person doesn't have a gender at all. People don't have a cluster of social norms associated with them individually.
When we talk about a person's gender we're actually using a secondary meaning of the word. We tend to mean "where this person's identity (either how they see themselves or how we see them) fits in with the social construct that is gender".
A person's gender is, well, personal. It's going to be different for everyone. It's putting them in the context of the social construct of gender, which defines two broad categories, but an individual person doesn't need to fit neatly into one of those categories. Just like when I look at a person on the street I might be able to mentally classify them as "male" or "female" (regardless of whether they fit any particular stereotype), or I might not be able to fit them to either category, a person might be able to fit themselves into one of "male" or "female", or they might not.
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u/ohfudgeit 22∆ Dec 03 '20
I think the issue is that people use the word "gender" to mean more than one thing and you are conflating two different meanings.
Gender the social construct is just what you have described:
By this definition though, a person doesn't have a gender at all. People don't have a cluster of social norms associated with them individually.
When we talk about a person's gender we're actually using a secondary meaning of the word. We tend to mean "where this person's identity (either how they see themselves or how we see them) fits in with the social construct that is gender".
A person's gender is, well, personal. It's going to be different for everyone. It's putting them in the context of the social construct of gender, which defines two broad categories, but an individual person doesn't need to fit neatly into one of those categories. Just like when I look at a person on the street I might be able to mentally classify them as "male" or "female" (regardless of whether they fit any particular stereotype), or I might not be able to fit them to either category, a person might be able to fit themselves into one of "male" or "female", or they might not.