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Writer's pictureWomen's Development Cell Blog - Daulat Ram College
Aug 27, 20203 min read

Gender is Assigned at Birth and Cannot be Changed?

Sex differences may be natural, but gender differences have their source in culture. 

- Ann Oakley, 2005


“There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender... identity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results,” writes Judith Butler (1993), American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced the fields of third-wave feminist, queer, and literary theory in the twenty-first century. 


With the increased acknowledgement of queer, alternate or flexible sexual identities, it has far been claimed that gender is can be chosen by a woman or man. One possible way to understand ‘woman’ or ‘man’ in this claim is to take it as a sex term: ‘woman’connotes being a human female which depends on various biological and anatomical features (like chromosomes, hormones, genitalia). Historically, many feminists have understood ‘woman’ differently: not as a sex term, but as a gender term that depends on social and cultural factors, like social position. In so doing, they distinguished sex (being female or male) from gender (being a woman or a man), although most language users appear to treat the two interchangeably. More recently, this distinction has come under sustained attack and many view it nowadays with (at least some) suspicion. In order to explain why some people felt that they were ‘trapped in the wrong bodies’, the psychologist Robert Stoller (1968) began using the terms ‘sex’ to pick out biological traits and ‘gender’ to pick out the amount of femininity and masculinity a person exhibited.


Opposedly, schools of biological determinism have believed that the catabolic versus anabolic body functions in men versus women lend them different character traits, such as being passive and conservative for women, and being passionate and energetic for men. However, feminists have argued that behavioural and psychological differences have social, rather than biological, causes. For instance, Simone de Beauvoir famously claimed that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, and that “social discrimination produces in women moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to be caused by nature” (Beauvoir 1972 [original 1949], 18). Masculinity and femininity are thought to be products of nurture or how individuals are brought up. They are causally constructed (Haslanger 1995, 98). 


Further, claiming that gender is ‘assigned’ as birth and cannot be changed, firstly: presupposes gender to be a fixed binary and, secondly: claims that gender is a notion that cannot be determined by an individual for themselves. Gender is fluid, not binary (Lisa M. Diamond, 2010). Transsexual scholars, in particular, would take issue with the placement of the transgender identity within this dualism. They would locate gender instead on a spectrum or perceive it as a unique identity in and of itself (Turban, Ferraiolo, Martin, & Olezeski, 2018). 


In conclusion, arguments against biological determinism and the claim that gender is socially constructed can be examined against the critiques of prevalent understandings of gender and sex, and the distinction itself. In response to these concerns, few things can be illustrated. First, that gender, or what it is to be a woman or a man, is still very much a live issue. Second, a prevalent view is that gender is about social factors and that it is, in some sense, distinct from biological sex. Thirdly, that gender is not necessarily a fixed binary. And lastly, that gender can be adopted by an individual for themselves. 


 

Author-


Bhavya Pandey

bhavyapandey08@gmail.com


Bhavya Pandey is a student of Economics at the University of Delhi. A voracious reader and declamatory writer, she has grown up exploring and opinionating on a plethora of subjects ranging from environment

to economics. She is a trained Indian classical dancer in Kuchipudi, and has been performing for more than a decade. You can reach out to her for endless conversations about the internet and food.



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