If gender (or gender roles) are socially constructed, can they be deconstructed?
JoeMorgue has said many times that gender does not change how he views or treats people. Everyone says that everyone should be treated the same. male/female, man woman, black/white? Treat everyone the same. But if everyone is viewed the same, then what does it mean to treat someone as a man or as a woman?
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Suppose that dress and hairstyle differences between men and women disappeared. And names, career expectations, etc. Is that a genderless society?
There's a subculture in Japan that does this. Modes of dress, hair, and overall presentation is intentionally neutral. It does result in people being treated generally the same, without consideration to their sex, because there are no sex-cues to base that treatment off of. I think that this would be a fantastic way to move toward demolishing sex-based stereotypes.
Now, as a caveat, this may not be as effective on all societies. The variation in male and female secondary and tertiary sex characteristics among most Asian people, and among Japanese people in particular, are relatively small. The difference in over height, hand and feet size, and hip width ae smaller than in Caucasian or African people. I think they're actually greatest for people with a strong African ancestry. Additionally, Japanese females tend toward smaller breasts, and culturally large breasts are not considered particularly attractive. The facial phenotypical variances produced by racial backgrounds (epicanthic folds, cheekbone shape, chin and jaw shape) are also much more different from the phenotypes of Caucasian and African people, than they are between male and female people of Asian descent. Given that the differences between male and female people of Caucasian and African descent are larger than for people of Asian descent, adopting an intentionally neutral presentation might not be quite as effective at countering the subconscious assumptions related to sex that we have ingrained in our society.
Obviously, sex is still there, but is gender gone?
Hypothetically, if we could eliminate completely all of the sex-based stereotypes, including gender roles and behavioral expectations, I think that would get rid of *most* of gender. I do think that there are some inherent behavioral tendencies that have been evolved, as a result of us being sexually dimorphic. Purely as a result of real biology, and the hormones that come with it, males will still tend to be more aggressive on average than females, and females will still tend to be more collaborative. It's a behavioral distinction that has been essentially bred into us through eons of both natural and sexual selection, and similar behavioral tendencies are observed in other primates, as well as in most mammals. I would expect that those elements of inherent tendencies would remain, and would still have an affect on the assumptions that we make about people on the basis of their apparent sex.
And if gender is gone, what does that say about gendered spaces? Would they be needed?
They're not needed now, so... ? There really aren't much in the way of gendered spaces today, nor have there been in the past.
And if they are no longer needed, would there not still be a need for sex-segregated spaces, sports leagues etc?
Yes... because biology is still a thing. You'd have to engage in external sexual selection in order to overcome the inherent biological differences between the sexes... and even then you will be left with some variances that cannot be overcome no matter what. We're a sexually dimorphic species, so unless you somehow manage to eugenics out our binary reproductive methods, we're still going to have physical and hormonal differences as a result.
With intense selective breeding, you could probably eliminate the differences in tertiary sexual characteristics (those correlated with sex, but not directly driven by biological difference, such as hand/foot size, eye socket shape, brow ridge, height, etc.). You could likely also reduce the magnitude of differences between secondary sexual characteristics (those produced as a result of puberty, including breast size, density and location of body hair, size of penis, etc.). But you wouldn't be able to eliminate the differences between primary sexual characteristics... because we actually need those i n order to reproduce.
On the other hand... you want to do a medical study on children where there is no control group at all, and a group of children who are unlikely to benefit from treatment at all are provided invasive hormonal and surgical treatments that leave them sterile and with permanently altered bodies while converting them away from being gay?
