jumpingjacktrash:

morven:

softtrade:

Wish people didn’t use “social construct” to mean “fake”

Exactly.  Fucking everything is a social construct at least in part.  Language is.  Politics is.  Science is!  Yes, its social construct cannot grossly contradict observed reality for long without correction because that’s part of the way we’ve constructed it, the purpose it exists.  But its structures and classifications and ways of looking at things are social constructs.  

It’s what we DO.  It’s how humans deal with the world, because we are highly social creatures in the main and very little that we do does not involve dealing with other humans.

it’s messier than that, i’m afraid.

my spleen is not a social construct, it’s a busy meat item that objectively exists. the word ‘spleen’ and its use to denote anger or bitchiness as well as to describe the physical organ, those are social constructs. so if you say ‘spleen is a social construct’ are you saying my internal organs aren’t objectively real, or are you speaking from the assumption that the social construct of spleen-as-ire is the only one under discussion? well, nobody stops to discuss that before launching into discourse with elbows swinging.

so when someone says ‘gender is a social construct’, well, some of them mean it’s fake altogether, and some of them mean there are a lot of social constructs attached to it. and then you’ve got people going “excuse me, my experience of gender is direct and empirical, it is as real as peanut butter and jelly.” and some of those are in fact talking about direct experience of gender, and some are talking about direct experience of social constructs of gender, and not realizing there’s an extra layer of abstraction between themselves and the experience, because it’s never not been there for them.

so that’s how you end up with people using the exact same words to argue opposite points. it’s a mess.