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Asked by anon-203753 to Alexandra, Dawn, Jane, Matthew, Tirso, Vassilis on 7 Mar 2019.
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Dawn Rose answered on 7 Mar 2019:
Yes in some ways, but that is a very BIG question and not easy to answer without also defining what you mean by society. Ideas of gender definitely change across societies and have been different in different times, and that is about ^society^, but one’s own sense of one’s gender is also a personal thing, but influenced by the context in which they live.
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Matthew Longo answered on 7 Mar 2019:
Gender, like almost any rich aspect of our mental lives, is likely to result from a highly complex interplay of biological factors (such as genetics, sex hormones, etc) and cultural factors (such as depiction of gender roles in media and daily life, gendered language, etc.). Scientific research can help to understand which factors contribute and how they interact, but we shouldn’t expect to get a simple answer that gender is defined either by biology alone or by society alone.
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Vassilis Sideropoulos answered on 8 Mar 2019:
Gender is a social construct, it is used to assign people into groups. For instance, when thinking about Gender we are taking into account different characteristics such as biological sex, sex-based social structures, or gender identity to assign someone the label of female, male or non-binary and so on and so forth. But as Dawn and Matthew state below, gender is very dependant on the social norms, but also in biological factors.
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Tirso Gonzalez Alam answered on 11 Mar 2019:
It is an interplay between biological factors and social factors, so yeah, to a certain extent it is defined by society, and you can see that in the different ways that some societies have constructed gender identity across the ages. But at the same time, it’s not an absolutely blank slate, as it starts from a physical/biological reality.
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