In general, it seems strongly that some aspects of gender are social constructs and others or not. The most helpful way of distinguishing them is to look at differences across different societies.
There are however two huge pitfalls when engaging in this sort of reasoning.
The first is the tendency to conclude that since aspect X of gender apparently doesn’t exist in society Y, it is therefore a social construct, and it can be eliminated by changing some particular aspect of the existing society in isolation—ignoring the possibility that any such change necessarily entails making the society look more similar to Y in other ways, which would be seen as unfavorable even by most people who are negatively disposed towards X per se. This of course sounds like a clear fallacy when spelled out like this, but the fallacy can often be found at the core of many gender-related arguments, and countering it is often impossible without making arguments of the sort “lack of X leads to Y” that sound insensitive and offensive when stated explicitly.
The second is the failure to realize that aspect X of gender can be a stable equilibrium for collective behavior, like driving on the right side. There is nothing (more or less) that objectively favors either the left- or the right-side driving to be the universal rule, and different conventions exist in different places, but this doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to start telling people that since the direction of traffic is a social convention, they should now choose freely which side to drive on. (This also relates to the first problem, since unlike the direction of traffic, different stable equilibriums in gender-related norms may in fact have far-reaching broader social implications.)
(And all this is even ignoring the common tendency to report information about other societies in distorted and biased manner in service of ideological goals, which introduces further dangers and greatly multiplies the amount of nonsense on this topic that is circulating around, even in prestigious venues.)
There are however two huge pitfalls when engaging in this sort of reasoning.
The first is the tendency to conclude that since aspect X of gender apparently doesn’t exist in society Y, it is therefore a social construct, and it can be eliminated by changing some particular aspect of the existing society in isolation—ignoring the possibility that any such change necessarily entails making the society look more similar to Y in other ways, which would be seen as unfavorable even by most people who are negatively disposed towards X per se. This of course sounds like a clear fallacy when spelled out like this, but the fallacy can often be found at the core of many gender-related arguments, and countering it is often impossible without making arguments of the sort “lack of X leads to Y” that sound insensitive and offensive when stated explicitly.
The second is the failure to realize that aspect X of gender can be a stable equilibrium for collective behavior, like driving on the right side. There is nothing (more or less) that objectively favors either the left- or the right-side driving to be the universal rule, and different conventions exist in different places, but this doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to start telling people that since the direction of traffic is a social convention, they should now choose freely which side to drive on. (This also relates to the first problem, since unlike the direction of traffic, different stable equilibriums in gender-related norms may in fact have far-reaching broader social implications.)
(And all this is even ignoring the common tendency to report information about other societies in distorted and biased manner in service of ideological goals, which introduces further dangers and greatly multiplies the amount of nonsense on this topic that is circulating around, even in prestigious venues.)
Characteristically Burkian.