Gender: A Social Construct
In Response to Candace Owens and “Transracialism”
“Social construct” does not imply immateriality, rather, it professes malleability and recognition of human subjectivity.
When confronted with the notion of gender being a social construct, many socially conservative critics will deploy the concept of “transracialism” as a rhetorical device meant to undermine transgender identities. The argument typically follows a reductive logic: “If gender is merely a social construct that one can identify into or out of, then why not race?” This false equivalence fails to acknowledge the fundamentally different historical, biological, and social dimensions of race and gender.
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Race itself demonstrates the inherently arbitrary nature of such categorizations. Consider how multiracial individuals frequently navigate social pressure to “choose” a single racial identity despite embodying multiple heritages simultaneously. Throughout history, racial categories have been continuously redefined to serve political and social agendas, with individuals sometimes crossing racial boundaries based on appearance, documentation, or social connections. The one-drop rule in American history, for instance, classified anyone with even distant African ancestry as Black, regardless of appearance or cultural affiliation — a classification system that served specific economic and power structures rather than any biological reality.
Any attempt to use racial logic to justify the invalidation of all transgender peoples is disingenuous. For even race does not make logical sense. Whiteness, as a concept, has always been changed and pulled wherever it has needed to be. The same thing applies to gender — what defines a man today and what defined a man fifty years ago is not the same, and what defined a man two hundred years ago or even five hundred years ago is not the same. Intersex people exist, androgynous people exist, transsexual people exist, transgender people exist. It’s been this way for the entirety of time.
We as human beings are physically incapable of perfectly embodying whatever gender role or whatever gender characteristic may exist because we’re simply human. The roles or the characteristics that we’ve projected onto these words like man and woman only reflect who we are today — they don’t reflect any objective truth. When someone says, “gender is a social construct,” they are proclaiming that it’s cruel to subject the lives and the freedoms and the liberties of other human beings to our contemporary, subjective beliefs.
Aberdeen.
