Rex Kerr
2 min readMay 9, 2023

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After all that (60+ minutes of video) there was only one hint with the very brief mention of Julia Serano that might possibly be beginning to get at my question.

The rest was all background one needs to have to know what I'm asking.

It doesn't matter whether I use the "social construct" language I did or Butler's performative language. My characterization was plenty close enough.

I am asking about a serious treatment of the interaction between societal roles and physical constraints, and in particular, justification for which parts are, as you put it, due to "social norms and expectations rather than biological differences".

Dinner is performative to an extent--all meals are. But we still need food. And one cannot adequately understand the performativity of meals without also understanding the nutritional requirements of the human body, because we're both engaging in a social construct and meeting a critical biological need at the same time. You can try dividing it into nutritionalizing and foodieness ("sex" and "gender"), and while the subdivisions are useful in some cases for focusing attention, you still need to understand the interactions. You can't eat once every two days--so we can't socially construct it that way. And although we could eat every twenty minutes, our glycogen reserves last way longer than that, so there's no need. So we don't do that either. However, whether the salad is eaten first or last seems like it is probably arbitrary. (But that we eat vegetables is is mostly not arbitrary. And that dessert comes after a high-protein part of the meal probably is not entirely arbitrary, even though we might at first assume it is before we check blood glucose response curves.)

So I still have exactly the same question I did before: are there, to your knowledge, feminist philosophers (or others) who have grappled with the issue of the interaction between biological constraints and our social construction of gender?

Also, if at all possible, if you have any guidance for me, can you please please not only link videos? They're probably good for (some) other readers--the explanations are very clear--but the problem is that they don't actually address my concern. If it had been text, I could have recognized this in like three minutes.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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