I never understood the "X is a social construct" argument. People seem to use it to dismiss ideas out of hand in my experience. Freedom of speech, rule of law, and consenting to sex are similarly "social constructs" as in they aren't fundamental laws of the universe but they seem to be pretty good ideas. What is intended to be inferred by this argument?

There is a book call the Social Construction of Reality and, exactly like you're saying, everything in our society is a social construct. Schools, legal systems, states, money, war, debt .. they only exist because we believe they do. You can choose not to exist in something like the police and law, and go murder some people, but enough people believe in those constructs that they'll lock you up, or at the least, put you in a mental institution. There are people who have trouble understanding society with mental illnesses, and many of them end up on the streets. Hallucinations, bi-polar, schizo-effective people often have trouble working within the social constructions the rest of us take for granted.

This wasn't really meant to answer your political issue, but just to provide a context of what is and isn't socially constructed.

There's a large group of people who believe that gender is a natural force in the world -- you are either a boy or a girl, because that's the way genetics is. I have had people tell me that boys like trucks and girls like dresses because of chemical differences in their brains.

The gender is a social construct argument is the voice that believes the opposite -- that gender roles and expression are learned behavior in our society. Our parents and peers teach us what it means to be a boy or girl from a very young age, and what is socially unacceptable for those genders. (They also commonly teach us, here in the US, that there are only two genders.)

>I have had people tell me that boys like trucks and girls like dresses because of chemical differences in their brains.

In regards to gender differences I find some of the primate evidence[0][1] rather compelling. This doesn't mean that I believe any gender should be treated differently than the other of course but it seems rather obvious to me that some differences exist outside of any conditioning that human societies may provide.

[0]http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/09/101220-chimp... [1]http://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-29418230/monk...

Note that the primate evidence showed that the girls played equally with the stuffed animals and the wheeled toys.

This reminds me of colour preference, where girls are more likely to say they like pink than boys and so people conclude pink is for girls and blue is for boys, yet if you ask what their favourite colour is, the top pick for both sexes is blue.

So the evidence on trucks doesn't support the claim you replied to, but maybe they'd be on firmer ground if they said boys had proportionately less interest in stuffed toy animals than trucks.

Not all instances of playing with something are equal. In terms of total interactions the females played with both the same number of instances but they also played with the dolls a significantly longer period of time.

Specifically talking about this paper:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/

It seems the duration shows the same pattern as counting the number of interactions:

"males interacted for a greater total time with wheeled than with plush objects while females did not differ in the duration of interactions with the toy types"

Isn't it possible your biology gives you a natural tendency towards certain interests or activities and that these are reinforced and strengthened by society?

I think that's the most sensible hypothesis. Whenever there is a nature vs nurture question, the answer is usually "it's both".

You are talking about gender, as opposed to biological sex? But then, what is gender by that definition? If it is a social construct, what does it even mean to number them - they would be intangible constructs in the first place; it's like arguing there are only X canonical Marvel universes..

In general, social constructs aren't bad.

But consider something like the lower representation of women in math. If it happens because of genetically different altitudes/interests then it's inevitable, and there's no use complaining about it. If it's because of society discouraging women, that's just plain dumb.

(Btw: your examples are highly debatable. You can argue that consent and freedom of speech are social practices which respect objective moral/ethical facts).

> If it happens because of genetically different altitudes/interests then it's inevitable, and there's no use complaining about it.

That's not actually true. Even when something is the expected outcome of certain biological factors, that doesn't make it inevitable. With the right kind of intervention, very little is completely biologically determined. That's what medicine is all about. In many ways, culture is also about overcoming the limits and defaults of human biology. There's no reason to suppose that differences between the sexes can't be influenced into a direction that appears more desirable.

That makes sense. I just wanted to point out that a purely cultural difference should be presumed guilty, whereas if there were genetically driven ones, they might not be. The real meat of the point is that a culturally driven difference in this realm is a bad thing.

> Freedom of speech, rule of law, and consenting to sex are similarly "social constructs" as in they aren' t fundamental laws of the universe

This varies across philosophical traditions. Common-law traditions do, in a sense, hold these sorts of rights as part of the origin story of the universe.

I don't know what idea your statement is supposed to express.

Let's start with this - what is gender?

I know what biological sex is, roughly; I thought gender was a synonym for it(this may be a translation/communication barrier).

From googling the topic, it appears that gender is defined as "the expectations a society places on an individual of a given sex", which makes the "gender is entirely a social construct" statement tautological.

I read about the "blank slate hypothesis", and it seems to be about something else entirely - it seems to be pretty vaguely referring to the "knowledge" and "experience" a human being might have from before they were born vs after. It seems rather naive to be aware of all the other biological differences between men and women but demand that they have no effect on "the mind", or more appropriately, on the expressions of will that a human being exhibits. I'm not an expert though, so maybe there's a deeper truth out there somewhere.

"Gender is distinct from sex" is a scientific hypothesis. It could be true, false, or true with qualifications. The second of those three options appears to be pretty reliably refuted by the evidence we have. Unfortunately, it is a politically problematic to say this in "progressive" circles. Sound familiar to some other hot-topic science debate we've discussed on HN before?