The Social Constructions of Gender

ABSTRACT The concept of social construction—i.e., the premise that something is created through social interactions, rather than being God‐given, natural, or otherwise inevitable—is foundational to gender studies and to the sociology of gender subfield. Through most of the twentieth century, when feminist scholars said that “gender is socially constructed,” they were disputing the idea that women's subordination was inevitable. Instead, they maintained that it was produced through childhood socialization and enforced by social institutions, laws, and through social interactions. Toward the end of the twentieth century, some scholars extended social construction arguments to our understanding of men and women as “opposite sexes” or the idea that there are two and only two sexes. Moderate constructionists limited their claims to ideas about, or categories concerning, sex. Radical constructionists denied that there was any pre‐discursive reality to sex. For some scholars, activists, and activist‐scholars, “assigning” any infant to the category of male or female at birth was not only arbitrary. It constituted an act of violence that enforced a harmful sex binary and denied people the right to self‐determination. Recently, some activists have taken up the assertion that sex “assignment” is socially constructed while also maintaining that gender identity (whether one knows oneself to be male, female, or nonbinary) is innate—thus repudiating earlier theories of gender identity as a blank slate. This paper traces this intellectual history and discusses how these distinct—and conflicting—understandings of what it means for gender to be socially constructed inform contemporary debates.