“Gender is a social construct”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

No. The costumes are constructed. The sexes aren't. There are two, male and female, and gender doesn't float free of the body. Biologists define sex by the reproductive cell a body is built to make, eggs or sperm, and there is no third kind. Second, if it were all social pressure, freedom would shrink the differences. A twenty eighteen study in Science found the gaps between men's and women's preferences were larger in wealthier, more gender-equal countries. Third, Genesis one says God made them male and female. It's the first thing we're told about being human. You'll bring up intersex conditions. They're real, they're rare, and they're variations within the two sexes, not a third one. Let me ask you this. If gender is pure invention, why is every society on record built around men and women? Pink is a construct. Chromosomes aren't.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

There are two sexes, fixed by biology. Bodies are organized around one of two reproductive roles, and gender is rooted in that.
Biologists define sex by gamete type. Humans produce two kinds, large eggs and small sperm, and no third gamete exists.
If the differences between men and women were only social, more freedom would erase them. Some of them grow instead.
Falk and Hermle, studying data from dozens of countries, found that gender differences in preferences were larger in countries with more economic development and gender equality.
Intersex conditions are real and very rare. They don't make sex a spectrum.
Leonard Sax argued that, defined clinically, true intersex conditions are present in only a tiny fraction of one percent of births.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: What counts as manly or womanly changes across history and cultures. Men wore wigs and heels in eighteenth-century France, so gender has to be invented by society.

Nate: The costumes change. Every culture has still had men and women, because every culture has had mothers and fathers. Fashion is constructed. The bodies wearing it are not.

What he grants the other side

Plenty of gender norms are cultural, like clothing colors and hairstyles.

The lines

“Pink is a construct. Chromosomes aren't.”
“The costumes change. The bodies wearing them don't.”

Sources

Armin Falk and Johannes Hermle, Science, Relationship of Gender Differences in Preferences to Economic Development and Gender Equality (2018)
Leonard Sax, Journal of Sex Research, How Common Is Intersex? A Response to Anne Fausto-Sterling (2002)
The Bible, Genesis 1:27 (ancient)