Questioning Sex: The Foundation of Sociology of Gender
People often say that "no one is claiming sex is socially constructed!" But this is a foundational premise of gender ideology, and it has a name: strong social constructionism.
Image from Robyn Ryle’s Questioning Gender: A Sociological Exploration
The idea that sex itself is constructed is best represented in a landmark 2011 textbook now used in many undergraduate classes. It’s called Questioning Gender: A Sociological Exploration.
The book begins, not by showing how gender is socially constructed, but by claiming that sex itself is constructed. The author, Robyn Ryle, recognizes that people believe there are two kinds of people, males and females, but it's just that—a belief.
"Strong social constructionists, then," she writes, "believe sexual dimorphism is a claim and not the truth."
To the gender theorist, the division of male and female is not real. It's a claim, a belief, and one not based in reality.
To justify this claim, the book employs the typical strategies we see, bringing up a variety of rare sex development disorders. It incorrectly claims that there are women with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia who have both a penis and vagina, and that we cannot categorize the sex of someone with Klinefelter Syndrome or Turner Syndrome because they have atypical sex chromosomes.
Wrong. We can, of course, categorize sex through the organization of the reproductive system with respect to gamete type.
People with Turner Syndrome (usually 45:X) are female because they develop a system organized around egg production.
People with Klinefelter Syndrome (usually 47:XXY) are male because they develop a system organized around sperm production.
Women with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (46:XX) are female because they develop an unambiguous system organized around egg production (with typical ovaries). They do not have a penis, but an enlarged clitoris due to overexposure to androgens.
See our animated videos on these conditions here.
The key lie is the purposeful detaching of sex from reproductive role and conflating sex itself with certain sex characteristics or certain sex chromosomes while ignoring the holistic reality.
They also explore how cultural views of male and female have changed over time and use this as a justification that the sexes themselves aren't real.
For example, they bring up how the ancient Greeks believed in a one-sex model of how females were inferior to males and that the vagina was simply an inverted penis, but the Greeks still understood that there was a fundamental, real difference between the sexes. And regardless of what they thought, the reality exists out there in spite of anyone's beliefs. But because the theorist believes that our perception of reality is all that matters (strong social constructionism), they believe that nothing exists outside of language and culture.
Ryle then writes an incredible statement:
"Gender, in the form of the social meanings we attach to sex categories, causes us to believe there are real categories out there called female and male."
See? It's not that gender is constructed on top of sex categories. It's that gender ITSELF creates the categories of sex. To these theorists, sex is not real. It's a construct of "gender." While we have all historically understood that male and female are real categories while cultures can construct some social differences on top of these categories, the strong social constructionist reverses the causation (literally inverting the truth).
These strong social constructionists don't care how scientifically wrong or offensive all of their claims are. In fact, in the book, it is made clear that the practice of science itself should be viewed with suspicion.
"All science only ever pretends to be objective," Ryle writes, "but cannot truly ever achieve objectivity. It is, in the end, impossible to generate a description of the way things are that is not tainted by your own experiences."
You can see how this goes far deeper than just a denial of the sexes. It's a denial of the notion of truth itself, the notion that there is an objective world out there that we can all perceive. Like many of their claims, there are grains of truth, such as the fact that our perception does impact how we see things, but this does not mean it is impossible to obtain what the truth is. The irony of course is that this book is certainly unafraid to make many truth claims. Yet what gives the author the authority to be the source of truth when truth itself supposedly cannot be accessed?
The book concedes that all this does not mean bodies are not real. However, it reinforces that sex is not a real thing:
"From the social constructionist perspective, we're always talking about gender because there really is no such thing as sex."
It does not matter that all of material reality disagrees with this lie. It does not matter how many people and lives this lie destroys in the process. What matters is the passionate, ideological belief that someone's internal sense of self matters more than what is real and that what is "real" is simply a construct of history and power. It can feel freeing to some, but it's a dangerous and harmful deception. The foundational beliefs of gender ideology will rationalize anything imaginable to justify such delusions. And this 500+ page book represents this process of rationalization well.
So when someone claims that "no one is saying that sex is socially constructed", remember this book and all the sociological literature from the past few decades that it has built upon. (See the writings of gender theorists Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler for some of the popularization of the ideas on sex being socially constructed. This has been going on since the 1980s and before.)
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