Originally a comment by Mosnae on No no not the chair, the person.

Gender is a [social] construct. But so is sex. So is money. We work with [social] constructs all of the time.

The point appears to be that it’s not bad for gender identity to be a social construct because the authors can come up with examples of social constructs that aren’t bad. Leaving aside the highly dubious claim about sex, there are a few issues with this. For starters, why not throw in some undesirable social constructs, too? Why not point out that God is a social construct, as well as racism and homophobia and honor killings and forced marriages and slurs?

Then there’s also the matter that money is very different from gender. Consider the following attributes:

Concreteness

Sure, money is a social construct. But it also has a very clear physical manifestation. I can point to a twenty-dollar bill and tell you: “There, that’s money.” Maybe you don’t attach value to it like I do. But you know there’s a specific thing in the real world that stands for my concept, and you can observe it and examine it and tell it apart from other things (the one exception being well-made counterfeit $20 bills). And although the broader concept of money might only exist in the mind, this particular money isn’t just in my mind; if you take the bill away from me, I don’t have those twenty bucks anymore. You can’t really do any of that with gender identity. (Of course, you can do it with gender to some extent, but it’s a limited extent, and anyway I don’t think that’s what the article wants to get at.)

In addition, though this is not a necessary feature of money, it is quite often defined, created and regulated by governments with great precision. I don’t think I need to explain how this clashes with gender and gender identity; the latter pretty much just consists of random people going around saying they have gender identities, with no particular coordination.

Mutuality

Money as a social construct only works because its users agree on it. I’m not going to convince you to trade twenty dollars’ worth of food for a worthless piece of paper. You need to regard that piece of paper as money, or no transaction will take place.

This is exactly why money has a physical instantiation. It’s not feasible to have a monetary system without any concrete token to stand for it. Alice can’t just go up to Bea and tell her that she has $20 in her mind and that she’ll transfer them over to Bea in exchange for food. How would Bea know that Alic is saying the truth? Even if she did agree to go through with the transaction, how would she use those $20? If Bea wants to buy something from Clara with the money Alice gave her, then Clara finds herself in a situation in which both Alice or Bea could be making stuff up. It just doesn’t work. Even without accusing Bea of being a liar, Clara should be able to say, “Listen, I have no way to know whether you’re saying the truth or not. No offense, but I can’t acknowledge your money nor go through with this transaction.”

With gender identity, however, people are the “experts of themselves” and if they say they have a gender identity then they do and that’s that and everyone should just take their word for it.

Utility

As far as I’m concerned, this is the big issue. Money has a clear function and purpose. We don’t just run around believing in it and telling each other about it without having any reason for doing so.

On the other hand, there isn’t an evident reason for which it would be useful to tell others about your gender identity and have them believe you. I don’t see what purpose there is in getting your gender identity acknowledged through proper pronominalization. Gender identity doesn’t impact interactions between humans in any obvious way. Or at least, there isn’t anything that’s obvious to me.

Maybe it would be fairer to put it this way: I can easily make up many scenarios in which Alice, Bea and Clara are communicating and need to have information about money. But when it comes to gender identity, I’m drawing a blank.

It’s also worth mentioning that you can reject social constructs. Granted, doing so might put you at odds with society, or prevent you from living within it. But you don’t have to use money or to adhere to a monetary system; not everyone does. And a given society can change; it’s possible for entire social constructs to disappear. Yet, despite claiming that “gender is a [presumably social] construct,” the authors appear to treat it like it’s some kind of weird absolute that is intrinsic to human beings.