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Articles
Gender as Biological Fact vs Gender as Social Construction
Francisco Javier Camacho Jr asks, what difference does it make?
Conservative cultural commentator Ben Shapiro makes quick work of the “gender question:” “Science is certainly not divided on whether gender differences are rooted in biology or culture – the answer is both, but with a heavy emphasis on biology.” (‘The Left’s Doomed Crusade To Erase Gender Differences’, National Review, 2018) Meanwhile, the feminist philosopher Judith Butler has made a now classic statement of the other side of the argument:
“Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of a substance, of a natural sort of being. A political genealogy of gender ontologies, if it is successful, will deconstruct the substantive appearance of gender into its constitutive acts and locate and account for those acts within the compulsory frames set by the various forces that police the social appearance of gender…”
(Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, p.33, 1990)
In other words, to Butler and others, gender is more of a social construction than it is a biological fact. The ‘gender question’, then, this aspect of the so-called culture wars, is a matter of opposing views about the relative responsibility of society and biology for gendered behavior.
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