Sex is the Same Thing as Gender, and it is Socially Constructed. Not Science

audscratprophetlilith:

baeddeltrender:

So I’m not sure if this will make it easier for people to understand the idea of sex as a social construct as well as being the same thing as gender as soon as it enters the social sphere but I’m going to try.

A penis is just a penis. That’s biology right there. It tells us that this is a bodily organ which does things for the purposes of reproduction and is a sight of pleasure stimulation.

A penis is male. That’s sex/gender.

As soon as you assign a social value to body parts you aren’t talking biology anymore you’re talking sex/gender. Among humans the term female is no more real or absolute than woman. Sex is not an immutable scientific fact among humans because it can not be separated from the social values we ascribe to sex. Social values are not science. They are not fact. They have real consequences and material effects but they are not indisputable truths. They are not science.

This is why the idea of sex is between your legs, gender is between your ears is a fallacious statement which really only benefits half of trans people. The reason it only benefits half of us is because only half of us are not harmed by this notion.

Even without getting into my life as an intersex person I can tell you right now that calling my body male anything is useless. It does not help me with medicine. It does not accurately describe how my body is shaped. It does not accurately depict my upbringing nor my life. It does not accurately depict anything about me and that includes my genitals. My body does not function as male. It is not male. This is because male is inherently tied to social ideas that are fallacious. The only thing calling me male does is hurt me.

For clarity’s sake: The OP is not saying that penises are male, but pointing out that declaring penises as “male” is sex/gender, and crappy sex/gender at that.

"Penis" itself is a social construct. There are several types of external genitalia that cannot be easily described as a "penis" or as a "vagina", and are arbitrarily categorized as some variation on one of these two things (or in some instances, somewhat incorrectly referred to as "cloacal").

At what point does a penis become a so-called “micropenis”? What is the explicit differentiating factor? There is no single marker. When does a “micropenis” become an “enlarged clit”? Also no clear-cut answer. At what point does a penis with hypospadias stop being a penis? If you ask some doctors, it’s always a penis, even at the most extreme degree of the condition when the person is likely to have partially-formed “female” internal anatomy.

Some people claim “male” and “female” are scientific terms that refer specifically to production of gametes. That argument falls apart pretty quickly though, because people will still call a guy who’s lost his testes “male”, or a woman who’s had her ovaries removed “female”. Hospitals and governments don’t have a “sexless” option waiting in line just in case someone stops being able to produce gametes.

People are assigned a sex before they are even able to produce gametes. Some of those people will never produce gametes. What we are then referring to with sex is expected or potential gamete production. Much in the same way anti-abortionists think of women as existing in a lifelong state of potential pregnancy. All of these labels are projections of societal expectations, not factual accounts.

These categorization systems are human-created models. They do not describe reality, and they do not account for its complexity. They function to simplify a very messy system that isn’t fully understood. However, in performing that simplification and enshrining it as “common sense fact”, unnecessary suffering is introduced into people’s lives when they don’t fit this model, and indeed even into the lives of those who do (or at least appear to) fit the model.