Posted by In my last post I argued that there is evidence that gender identity has biological determinants. But modern thinking (actually post-modern thinking) posits the idea that gender identity is caused, at least in part, by social factors, such as ideas regarding gender roles conveyed by family, authority figures, mass media, and other influential people in a child’s life. Thus gender is not an objective truth, but a subjective one.
Gender in the Twenty-first Century
The idea that there are no objective truths only subjective ones comes from a murky sociological theory called “social Constructionism.” According to Wikipedia “A social construct or construction concerns the meaning, notion, or connotation placed on an object or event by a society, and adopted by the inhabitants of that society with respect to how they view or deal with the object or event. In that respect, a social construct as an idea would be widely accepted as natural by the society.” “Social constructionism focuses on how meaning is created. Emerging from the criticism of objectivity, social constructionism challenges concepts of knowledge put forward by positivism, which postulates the externality of reality and that empirically proved truths are mind independent. According to Marecek, Crawford & Popp, knowledge is an “account of reality produced collaboratively by a community of knowers” Thus, social constructionism focuses on how meaning is created.
In other words, there is no objective reality; “Reality” is created by a community of people who “know.” This theory makes it impossible to undertake any scientific inquiry and therefore it is impossible to validate or critique. As Lewis Carrol wrote in Through the Looking Glass,
“’When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that’s all.’
This becomes important with respect to gender identity. Social constructionists hold that one’s gender identity is largely (if not totally) a construct of our society.
In 1996, to illustrate what he believed to be the intellectual weaknesses of social constructionism and postmodernism, physics professor Alan Sokal submitted an article to the academic journal Social Text deliberately written to be incomprehensible but including phrases and jargon typical of the articles published by the journal. The submission, which was actually published, was an experiment to see if the journal would “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.”
In the article, Sokal writes “Deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined Cartesian-Newtonian physics; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility; and most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of “objectivity.” It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical “reality” no less than “social” reality is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific “knowledge,” far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.”
This, of course, is dangerous nonsense and gobbledygook. Sokal writes in his satire that not only is there no objective truth in a soft science like sociology, but also in a hard science such as physics. He satirizes the social constructionists for their belief that there is no objective truth; that truth, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Because social constructionists deny objective truth, it is impossible to deny their assertions. But what if they are not only purveyors of nonsense but also liars to boot.
Christopher Dummit, a Canadian sociologist reveals in his article “Confessions of a Social Constructionist,” that “The problem is: I was wrong. Or, to be a bit more accurate, I got things partly right. But then, for the rest, I basically just made it up.” What he got wrong was the idea that gender was a social construct. He goes on to say, “In my defense, I wasn’t alone. Everyone was (and is) making it up. That’s how the gender-studies field works.”
Later he goes on to say, “And, was it really always about power? Maybe. And maybe not. The proof that I used to insist that it was about power, was to cite other scholars who said it was. It helped if their names were French and they were philosophers. The work of an Australian sociologist, R. W. Connell, helped, too. He’d argued that masculinity was primarily about power—about asserting dominance over women and other men. In reality, his work didn’t prove this; it just plausibly extrapolated from small case studies, just like I had done. So I cited Connell. And others cited me. And that’s how you “prove” that gender is a social construct and all about power. Or, in fact, anything at all.”
Conclusions. The attack on truth is not just from the left nor from the right. It’s not just political. In its most destructive form it denies the existence of truth itself. The contemporary world is full of attacks on existing norms and existing beliefs. To some extent the more outlandish the new idea, the more it is believed and heralded as path-breaking. Everything we have believed for ages –the centrality of religious beliefs, the way in which we obtain and test new ideas, our ideas of family, of sex, of gender, of our national identity as Americans, our values, are all being challenged. But without believing in truth, in a “scientific method,” then Bob’s truth is as good as Amelia’s, and we have no way of knowing the difference. From our beliefs stem our actions. How can we create a “great society,” if we don’t really know what we mean by that phrase.
