They tell me that I have despised being told what to do since I was a baby. I LOVE learning. Those are two different things, and sometimes, depending
They tell me that I have despised being told what to do since I was a baby. I LOVE learning. Those are two different things, and sometimes, depending on who you are, people treat them as if they are the same thing.
So, like a lot of people, I have health issues and risk factors for others. Big ole global club. 
So when people would say, “Race is a social construct,” I would push back with “Race is biological”…. because here I am getting tests for conditions based on my ancestry. Though I’ve recently learned that isn’t the best response.
Race may be socially constructed, but racial classification has not historically depended primarily upon a person’s testimony about their internal sense of race. So their assertion wasn’t wrong. There just may be more to it to be discussed if the people in the conversation choose to.
Here’s a five-year-old explanation:
“Socially constructed” means people made the rules about what something means. But people can make very different kinds of rules.
Imagine a classroom.
The teacher says:
“Everyone wearing sneakers, stand over here.”
So rule #1: The class made a rule for sorting people: sneakers or no sneakers.
Then the teacher says:
“Everyone whose birthday is in summer, stand over there.”
So rule #2: That’s another rule people decided to use for sorting.
Both groups were created by people, but they aren’t created the same way. One depends on what you’re wearing. The other depends on when you were born.
That’s what this sentence means:
Socially constructed does not mean constructed in the same way.
Now race.
Long ago, societies did in fact create racial categories and decided which people belonged in them. Those rules were often based on things like family ancestry, appearance, and who your parents were.
And here’s the important part:
They didn’t ask the person how they felt.
A Black person living under Jim Crow couldn’t say:
“I don’t feel Black today, so these laws don’t apply to me.”
The government and society classified that person regardless of their internal feelings. (Remember we talked about how rights are a contract you have with your governing bodies)
Gender identity works differently because the concept itself places great importance on what a person says about their internal sense of themselves.
So the grown-up idea in little-kid language is:
People made rules for both things. But they didn’t make the same rules. People made the boxes. That doesn’t mean every box works the same way.
So imagine girls have a room. It’s a room the women that came before them fought, sacrificed, and died for them to have.
The room was made for girls because sometimes bodies matter. Maybe they’re changing clothes. Maybe they’re playing a sport. Maybe they’re in prison. Maybe they’re escaping a violent man. The rule wasn’t created because girls hate boys. It was created because sometimes separating people by sex serves privacy, safety, fairness, or dignity.
Now somebody proposes a new rule:
“Sometimes whether someone belongs in the girls’ group should depend on the gender that person says they are.”
The women say:
“Wait. That changes how our room works.”
They aren’t necessarily saying:
“We hate that person.”
They’re asking:
“Who gets to decide who enters? What happens to the old sex-based rule? When should someone’s stated identity override sex? Are there situations where it shouldn’t?”
And here is the part pro-woman or gender-critical groups especially want discussed:
Women -people who are very important too- are affected by the new rule, so women believe they should be allowed to question the new rule. It is their room.
A woman’s “no” is information too.
Her privacy matters.
Her boundaries matter.
Her safety matters.
Her opportunities matter.
The disagreement becomes especially serious when people treat questioning the rule as the same thing as hating the people affected by the rule.
Those aren’t automatically the same thing.
You can believe trans-identified people deserve safety, dignity, employment, housing, healthcare, and protection from violence
while still asking:
“When rights or interests conflict, what rule protects everybody as fairly as possible?”
That’s really the grown-up policy dispute hiding underneath a surprisingly simple children’s question:
“If we’re changing the rules of the girls’ room, do the girls get a say?” Something I’ve been asserting since I was little Tonya.
For pro-woman groups and groups advocating for the rights of girls, the answer is yes. Always Yes.
Critical Questions