Gender is a social construct in the same way as race is a social construct, and sexuality is a social construct, and family is a social construct, and good manners are a social construct, and marriage is a social construct, and love is a social construct, and taxes are a social construct, and laws are social constructs, and languages are social constructs….
Generally forms of classification are a social construct, where the catagories are chosen due to the importance that society, and the individuals within that society places upon them.
For example the terms homosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual, or heterosexual wouldn’t exist if our society didn’t view gender to be the most important factor in classifying relationships and sexual preference, or would refer to completely different things… for example bisexual might refer to someone attracted to people of all different hair colours, homosexual to people only attracted to people they share a hair colour with…
Social constructs and social contracts are what keep society functioning as a shared consciousness, and allow us to communicate meaningfully with one another.
Without them we wouldn’t have common ideas, let alone languages to express them with.
Take the word ‘cat’. Cats only exist because we have societally agreed that cats exist. We might decide in 10,000 years that we’re going to categorise all the animals according to pattern, and suddenly cats don’t exist. We have plain (which include animals of a single colour, including what we previously thought of as some cats, some horses, some dogs, sheep etc etc), and striped (including what we previously thought of as zebras, tigers, some cats, etc etc), and spotty (including what we previously called dalmations, leopards, etc etc)
So yeah, just because something is a social construct doesn’t mean that its not important, or not ‘real’.
Short version: Social construct =/= not real or even bad. If more radical feminists understood this, they might actually pull their heads out of their transphobic arses. Instead they campaign against gender in a way that’s eerily reminiscent of how US libertarians campaign against non-gold-backed currency. Both sound more than a little disconnected from reality and very irrationally fanatical.
(Source: queersecrets)
