Blog Post 7: If He Says She’s a Girl, She’s a Girl

"How should one define gender? Is gender natural, or is it socially constructed, and if it is socially constructed, does that mean gender is anything someone wants it to be?"

Gender should be defined by its definition, graciously offered by google: “Gender: The state of being male or female (typically used with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones).” Basically, gender is the social conceptualization of what it means to be either male or female, and while it is often assigned at birth, it isn’t tied to physical sex characteristics and can change and evolve with time. Gender should be, on a personal basis, defined by the individual. Having a vagina doesn’t make someone a girl, anymore than owning an oven makes them a five star chef, and gender, then, should be defined on an individual basis. 

Sex, on the other hand, is physical, it can be changed through surgical intervention, but for the most part it is static. Sex is used medically to sort patients into risk categories for things like prostate cancer or ovarian cysts, but for everything else, there is gender. Gender is a natural byproduct of labor division and socialization, so to say it is purely natural or purely construct is a bit misleading given it’s an intersection of both. That said, our strict American definitions of male and female are indeed constructs, as in, what defines a woman in our culture does not hold true universally, so really gender is less of a concept and more of a nebulous cloud of penises and vaginas roving the countryside.

Gender can, then, only really be determined by a society, though it can be selected on an individual basis, but here’s the thing, why can’t it just be anything someone wants it to be? I mean, academically sure there’s all sorts of posturing and theory, but in reality, you can be whatever you want and literally no one can stop you. Even if you can’t get your license changed, or use the bathroom you feel comfortable in, there’s no one in the world that can stop you from being a man or a woman or neither or both, and sterilizing gender into a semantic debate about socialization and biology doesn’t invalidate that you have a penis and are a girl. Does it really matter what the scholars say about gender to the individual identifying theirs? I mean, does our definition of gender really matter on a personal level and or stop someone from being whatever they choose to be? No, not at all, so of course gender is anything someone wants it to be, because people don’t tend to read dissertations when making choices about their personal lives. Gender can be anything to a person, maybe not to academia, but what’s a few stuffed shirts to feeling comfortable in your own skin. Be a girl, be a boy, be a dolphin, why not? Just be yourself, a definition can’t stop you.