The Social Construction of Gender

Trans Inclusion in Sports Part 4

Let's start with a quote that I first encountered during my Ph.D. program, in an article written by Cecilia Ridgeway and Shelley Correll: “Gender acts as a fundamental principle for organizing social relations in virtually all spheres of social life.”

It rings so true. Toy sections, clothing, bathrooms, sports….the colors we should like, the occupations we should pursue, the parenting roles we should assume. But it’s only true because we decided it should be that way. Because the ideas of appropriate behavior based on gender—just as the very categories of gender themselves—are socially constructed.

Socially constructing the meaning of terms, concepts, categories, etc., is not just something that social scientists do (e.g., sociologists, psychologists). Natural scientists (e.g., biology, chemistry, etc.) do it too—for example, when they decide what they are categorizing, how many categories there are, and what the rules are for what belongs in each category. Socially constructing meaning is not just something that the “woke” left does. People from all political leanings do it too—for example, when a president issues an executive order defining all humans as female based on a selected characteristic (oops!).

When it comes to biological sex, scientists do categorize humans into more than two categories (this TikTok video does an excellent job of describing why sex isn’t binary, as well as the many different ways that we could choose to categorize sex). Scientists have also long separated sex and gender identity—and recognized more than two genders.

Why then did we all learn growing up that there were only two sexes, and that gender and sex meant the same thing? Well, first of all, we all (at least us grown-ups) went to school a really long time ago and knowledge didn’t stop being produced when we graduated. And second of all, primary and secondary education is designed to give you a basic understanding of a wide base of knowledge—and the science behind the nuances of sex and gender requires more in-depth study.

So if we have research that says sex and gender are different and that neither are binary, why do so many people continue to insist that they are? That comes down to gender ideology (and also the fact that some very powerful people are telling us we should think this way—we’ll get to in Part 5).

"Gender ideology” is treated as a dirty word on the right…but ideology just refers to a system of ideas and ideals that make up our worldview. If we have a view of the way the world works (or should work), we have an ideology. Some people have a gender ideology that sex/gender are the same and binary; some people have an ideology that they are different and not binary.

The challenge is that it can be really hard to change your ideology—because the nature of ideology is that we come to believe that this is the “natural” way the world should be, even though our social world, as we already discussed, is socially constructed by us.

How do we overcome this? My best recommendation is to read and listen critically to information from a lot of sources, and to recognize the humanity of other people. Because trans and non-binary people exist. They matter. And they belong in sports.

Check out the other posts in the series, and head to Athlete Ally's Resource page for more ways to support trans inclusion in sports.