Title: Gender is a Social Construction: Anthropology on Sex, Gender & Sexuality
Headings: Sex, Gender, Sexuality
Sex, Gender, Sexuality
Gender is a Social Construction
What “Gender is a Social Construction” Doesn’t Mean
The Reality of Social Constructions
Clarifying Sex, Gender, and Sexuality
Supernumerary Gender
Sex/Gender Frontiers
Gender is a Social Construction–and Beyond
Taking Account of Humans
Updates on Sex, Gender, Sexuality

Content: And we could do a tour through history and different cultures to find out how very different those expectations and beliefs can be, which is why we say they are “socially constructed.” But that does not mean there is no biological variation, nor does it mean those beliefs and expectations don’t have very real effects. Nor does it mean a particular individual can “generate their own truth” about gender. In fact, our beliefs and expectations can have quite dramatic biological effects, in terms of how boys and girls are differently fed and the spaces and activities they are assigned. And in some cases, most notably with eunuchs, there is the deliberate fashioning of a third-sex role. We are hardly the first or only society to engage in sex operations! Supernumerary Gender
Gender roles and identity have often come as a duality. However, there are a number of societies where “supernumerary gender roles developed that apparently had nothing to do with morphological sex anomalies” (Lavenda and Schultz 2015:378). Many of these cases are from the peoples indigenous to the Americas, which very often had a third-gender (or even fourth-gender) roles for “Two-Spirit Peoples” (which the French denigrated as berdache ). Two-Spirit Peoples typically took on tasks appropriate to the other gender.