> I keep hearing people say "gender is a social construct" and those same people then go on to emphatically support transgender as a concept.
I say that "race is a social construct" but not "gender is a social construct", because gender has both social and biological components.
Gender having a biological component does mean that gender stereotypes that the average person learns are based on biology. The concept that pink is for girls and blue is for boys is social and cultural, not biological. Gender having a biological component is more complicated. A good book that explains this is Whipping Girl by biologist and trans woman Julia Serano:
The first tenet of this model, the model's core that everything that follows is built upon, is the fact that "subconscious sex, gender expression, and sexual orientation represent separate gender inclinations that are determined largely independent of one another."
Just like cisgender women, not all trans women are "girly".
The fourth and final tenet of this model states that "each of these inclinations roughly correlates with physical sex, resulting in a bimodal distribution pattern (i.e., two overlapping bell curves) similar to that seen for other gender differences, such as height." This idea is what allows for the natural exceptions to gender expression to exist within the system without attempting to claim that they exist in as high of numbers as typical gender expression.
I say that "race is a social construct" but not "gender is a social construct", because gender has both social and biological components.
Gender having a biological component does mean that gender stereotypes that the average person learns are based on biology. The concept that pink is for girls and blue is for boys is social and cultural, not biological. Gender having a biological component is more complicated. A good book that explains this is Whipping Girl by biologist and trans woman Julia Serano:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipping_Girl
The first tenet of this model, the model's core that everything that follows is built upon, is the fact that "subconscious sex, gender expression, and sexual orientation represent separate gender inclinations that are determined largely independent of one another."
Just like cisgender women, not all trans women are "girly".
The fourth and final tenet of this model states that "each of these inclinations roughly correlates with physical sex, resulting in a bimodal distribution pattern (i.e., two overlapping bell curves) similar to that seen for other gender differences, such as height." This idea is what allows for the natural exceptions to gender expression to exist within the system without attempting to claim that they exist in as high of numbers as typical gender expression.