“weed” jumps to mind as a social construct. 
My husband is fond of dandelions.
No, it’s really a very straightforward question. The “completely” obvious implies the absence of something. If my shirt is completely black, I am simply saying that it does not have any other colors.
In the phrase “ARE completely socially constructed”… what is absent that might sometimes be present?
Huh? You seem to think that Babale was making a definitional distinction between the concepts of “completely socially constructed” and “incompletely socially constructed” that is emphasizing some kind of absence in the former.
I can’t speak for Babale’s intent here, but ISTM that that’s just a misinterpretation on your part. Nobody here understands what you’re asking about because nobody meant to imply the specific classification binary that you imagined you spotted.
In particular, Babale’s made it quite clear that he was not trying to argue that the social-construct status of gender implies that it’s completely separate or isolated from physical realities like anatomical sex organs. It’s not.
Gender, defined as the collection of norms, expectations, and privileges that society associates with the concepts of “Man” and “Woman”, is a social construct. It does not exist outside of these societal expectations - it cannot, because these concepts are entirely made up of social expectations. There is no “Man” mollecule or “Woman” particle. They only exist in our mind. Gender cannot exist outside this context any more than a drop of water can exist without H2O molecules.
In that way, Gender is similar to America. The United States of America does not exist as a real entity made of particles or energy. It only exists in our minds. A person is only “American” because we all agree that they are. And our conception of who does and does not deserve the label can change over time.
Social constructs are things that only exist in the context of society. They are shared stories we tell one another - justice, money, nation-states, race, class, and yes - gender - these are all concepts we invented in order to fascilitate interpersonal cooperation. If we all believe in money, we can exchnage it for goods and services; of we all believe in the United States of America, we will pay taxes and fight for our country; and if we all believe in gender roles, we know how to treat each other.
As for what is NOT a social construct? Well, we run into the allegory of Plato’s cave here. You and I are communicating through language, so to an extent, all we can talk about is social constructs. @puzzlegal brings up two examples:
This is true, but I would caution that even here social constructs exist. What is a “rock”? Wikipedia defines it such:
any naturally occurring solid mass or aggregate of minerals or mineraloid matter
Well, is a diamond a rock? Carbon is a mineral and a diamond is a solid mass, no? Wait, what’s a mineral?
a naturally occurring inorganic element or compound having an orderly internal structure and characteristic chemical composition, crystal form, and physical properties
Crap, so is a natural diamond a rock but a diamond we made in a lab not a rock?
This may seem like pedantry, but consider: what if you are writing a paper and using the term “rock” to mean “any solid mass of any mineral”, thus you describe a diamond and a gold nugget as “rocks” - but you do not define this - and the paper is translated into another language, where there is no single word with the same exact meaning as “rock”? You could end up with serious miscommunications arising from your assumption that the group of objects you consider “rocks” are in fact part of a natural category that would immediately be obvious to any observer. Remember what happens when you assume!
So, the properties of the collection of atoms that @puzzlegal is holding are not socially constructed, but calling the object a “rock” and thus lumping it in with certain objects but not others is.
The fact that @puzzlegal has a uterus is not a social construct. Deciding that it is natural to group humans into “uterus havers” and “non uterus havers”, to find traits predominant among the “UH” group and the “NUH” group, and to associate those traits with those groupings? That is a social construct.
This, this, this. For a breakdown of this in a context that has nothing to do with gender or race, check out Yuvaal Noah Harari’s book Sapiens. It’s very much a pop science book rather than deeply academic literature, but it gives a fantastic explanation of this concept.
Exactly. Another good example is colors. “Wait!” You may cry. “Colors can’t be a social construct, after all they correspond to specific wavelengths of reflected light!”. That’s true, but these wavelengths come in a continuum from infrared to ultraviolet. Why did we divide the band of visible light into (in the traditional rainbow) 7 colors? Why not 3, or 50? In fact, before Newton, most people in the West would have said a rainbow has 5 colors - red, yellow, green, blue, purple. Newton has strange ideas about mysticism, though, so even though he could allegedly only identify five bands with the naked eye, his book would add orange and split purple into indigo and violet.
Are there underlying biological reasons to the colors we see? Yes, absolutely. We have three types of cones that are sensitive to different wavelengths of light, and we best percieve colors that happen to fall at certain spots on the continuum where our cells are particularly sensitive. So the specific colors that human cultures tend to invent could be said to have a biological component - after all, no human society is going to be naming colors outside the visible spectrum, are they? And it makes sense that cultures give names to colors based on how well we can see them as well as how frequently they occur in nature. But that doesn’t change the fact that declaring “red is the color you see when you look at light between 630 and 740” is arbitrary, and that our culture could instead see 30 different colors in this range, or call anything from 575 nanometers up “Amber”.
Oh yeah. “Rock”, like " weed" is a social construct.
The difference between a social construct and something that is not a social construct is whether that thing still exists outside of any kind of social context.
You can’t pop open the universe’s dev console to determine whether Entity_ID X1637494i3y3749 is tagged as “Man” or “Woman” because these are not real objective things that we can measure, like the gravitational pull of a mass or the ability for Oxygen to react with Sodium. They’re just labels. Without societal context, there’s no such thing as gender.
That the social construct of “gender” is built to some extent along preexisting “sex” based lines does not change the fact that gender itself is entirely constructed.
That’s why the whole “what is a woman” debacle was so funny to me. People on the Right have their mind blown by the question, they keep mockingly asking it - and then, hillariously, they fail to answer the question, because despite their naysaying it’s actually a perfectly legitimate question to ask.
My favorite example of this is cladistics.
Take a term like “pachyderm”. Back in the day, many zoos had a “pachyderm house”, for elephants, rhinos, hippos, and tapirs. This term (meaning ‘thick skinned’) was used to refer to these critters, who were all grouped together because they share some similar properties.
We now know that these animals aren’t very closely related at all. Tapirs and rhinos are closest, both being distant cousins of the horse; meanwhile hippos are even toed ungulates whose closest relatives are those famous hoofed mammals, whales.
That’s right - thanks to modern cladistics, we know know that whales sit squarely in the middle of Artiodactyla.
Does this mean that the old classification system pioneered by Cuiver and pals was socially constructed while modern cladistic groups are somehow objectively true?
Of course not - they’re both social constructs. The difference is that cladistic groups are useful social constructs, because they have an explicit goal - group animals based on shared ancestry.
Monophyletic groups are superior to paraphyletic groups not because they are objectovely true-er - all taxonomy is pretty arbitrary, right down to our definition of species - but because they effectively and consistently facilitate communication, which is what social constructs are for.
That seems like a great analogy.
Look at two maps of the planet. One is constructed from photos taken from space. You can see the land masses and oceans and larger geological features.
The second map has different countries outlined and colored to differentiate each other. The map has labels showing the names of countries, names of oceans, marking and naming major cities and rivers, and so on.
Both maps are accurate. Both maps are useful. Both maps are real. The difference is, the first map shows what is physically there, the second is completely made up by humans and doesn’t exist outside of what humans have defined themselves. You can fly into space to see lines and labels when you look down on the planet.
The two maps are clearly related, enough that you can look at the second map and easily point out on the first map the various names of things and borders using the second map as a reference. And what we’ve socially constructed quite clearly correlates with geological reality; countries end where the oceans begin (pretty much), many borders are drawn along rivers or other convenient geological features, and so on. But many things are just made up for reasons completely unrelated to geology; for example, any straight line is going to just be completely independent of geology.
I do like this analogy because it makes sense and seems to be pretty intuitive. It shows how a social construct is based to an extent on our tangible, physical world, and yet is also independent from it at the same time.
Another fun example that just came up in the wild - my daughter is having some blueberries, and my wife asked me how to say “blueberry” in Hebrew - the word was on the tip of my tongue for a few seconds, and after I told her she said, “I’m surprised you didn’t translate ‘blue’ and ‘berry’ to buy time”. I explained that Hebrew doesn’t actually have a word for “berry” - each of the ____berries is just called something completely different, like “toot” or “petal”. In fact, “berries” aren’t really grouped together at all. Some berries are part of a group called “Perut Yaar”, literally “Forest Fruit” - but not all things that English speakers consider “berries” belong to this group, and not all “Forest Fruit” are berries.
In other words - berries are a social construct!
Hmm, this is the pit, so digressions are allowed…
Can you give some examples of “forest fruits” that we would call berries, and ones we wouldn’t (apples? Pears?) And what categories some berries that aren’t forest fruits might be in?
Related: the botanical definition of berries includes watermelons and cucumbers and grapes, but not strawberries or raspberries.
Bananas are Berries. Raspberries are Not. | Office for Science and Society - McGill University.
It occurs to me that you make a good point - not everything we can a berry in English matches the botanical definition, and not all berries are considered berries in the venacular. That probably solves the mystery here. Forest Fruit IS Berry, as in, it is the translation for the botanical group “berry” - but the term is applied differently in day to day use.
So looking only at the vernacular usage cherries are Forest Fruit but not berries (but you’ll see it said that “they’re not technically forest fruit” which I think confirms that this is also used as the botanical term for the berry family). Strawberries (Field Toot, as opposed to Mulberries which are Tree Toot) are considered berries too, just like in English.
Getting back to the topic,
Found this on NYT.
“Where the Republican candidates stand on transgender rights.”
The push to restrict transgender people’s lives has animated conservatives: States have outlawed transition care for children and in some cases restricted it for adults, limited transgender people’s participation in sports and the bathrooms they are allowed to use, restricted library books and classroom discussions about gender identity and sexual orientation, and more. Several presidential candidates have endorsed similar policies at the federal level and have employed rhetoric reminiscent of past anti-L.G.B.T.Q. campaigns.
Donald J. Trump
Former President
He rolled back transgender rights while he was president, and he wants to go further.
Ron DeSantis
Governor of Florida
He has sharply restricted transgender rights in Florida and embraced anti-transgender rhetoric.
Tim Scott
Senator from South Carolina
He supports limits on sports participation but has been silent on some other policies.
Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina introduced legislation in 2022 to cut funding from schools that use pronouns matching transgender students’ identities without informing their parents.
Vivek Ramaswamy
Entrepreneur
He supports sweeping restrictions on transgender rights, and his rhetoric is hostile to transgender people.
Vivek Ramaswamy has described being transgender as a mental illness and called it a “deluded and mentally deranged state” in a Breitbart News interview.
Nikki Haley
Former Governor of South Carolina
She has framed transgender rights as a threat to women and has signed a pledge declaring “sex is binary.”
Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and former ambassador to the United Nations, has indicated multiple times that she believes transgender women and girls competing in women’s and girl’s sports is “the women’s issue of our time.” She also suggested on CNN that the presence of transgender girls in locker rooms was to blame for suicidal ideation among teenage girls, a claim no evidence supports.
Mike Pence
Former Vice President
He has a history of opposing L.G.B.T.Q. rights and has endorsed state restrictions on transgender people.
Former Vice President Mike Pence has praised state bans on transition care for minors and said in June that he would support a federal ban.
Chris Christie
Former Governor of New Jersey
He has opposed some restrictions on transgender rights, citing the rights of parents.
“I don’t think that the government should ever be stepping into the place of the parents in helping to move their children through a process where those children are confused or concerned about their gender. … What I’d like to make sure each state does is require that parents be involved in these decisions.”
Asa Hutchinson
Former Governor of Arkansas
He once notably broke with Republicans, but supports several restrictions on transgender rights.
Doug Burgum
Governor of North Dakota
He signed several anti-transgender laws in his state, and hasn’t ruled out federal laws.
As governor of North Dakota, Doug Burgum signed at least eight bills restricting the rights of transgender or gender-nonconforming people in 2023, more than almost any other governor.
Will Hurd
Former United States Representative
He has been supportive of transgender rights.
Former Representative Will Hurd of Texas has criticized other Republicans for their opposition to gay and transgender rights, including in a CNN interview in which he said he wished they would “focus their attacks on war criminals like Vladimir Putin, not my friends in the L.G.B.T.Q. community.”
Francis Suarez
Mayor of Miami
He has been supportive of transgender rights, but many policy positions remain unknown.
Mayor Francis X. Suarez of Miami has expressed support for gay and transgender rights for years, including marching in Pride parades and endorsing equal protections in housing and employment. He also signed an ordinance that recognized L.G.B.T.Q. people’s contributions to Miami and designated their businesses as minority-owned, making them eligible for city benefits.
So basically Hurd and Suarez are okay and the rest are all awful.
Christie doesn’t seem awful. Vacillating a bit, but stated he wants to get gummint out of it and leave it to families.
Oh, right. Christie’s okay.
And Suarez is now out, so it’s down to Hurd and Christie.
Problem is, saying parents need to be involved is very often about having kids forcibly outed to parents, like the other awful people have agreed with.
I think Christie is a lot less awful than most of them, however. No, he’s no supporter of trans rights. And he’ll probably sign whatever vile bill congress gives him. But he’s not out to get the trans, which frankly, a lot of them are. He’s not going to push to further restrict abortion, either, nor to persecute gays. Sadly, that puts him head and shoulders above most of the pack.
I remember on the old cartoon Ren and Stimpy, the character of Ren was a particularly loathsome person (well, anthropomorphic chihuahua really). I’m one episode he was split in half due to some scientific mishap and per the old trope he was divided into two people representing the two halves of his personality. But unlike the traditional story where a person is split into their good and evil halves, Ren was split into his evil and indifferent halves. (Because there was no good in him to begin with.)
Likewise, while many of the people listed here represent the evil half of the Republican Party, Christie represents the better half, the indifferent half.