Gender is a social contract, not a part of you

Societies are highly complex and interconnected structures. They involve having every member of a society essentially getting 'hired' into the society, upon which they accept an (unwritten) contract. This determines their basic rights and responsibilities. Most individuals start off like this when they are born, with their birth implicitly informing their consent.

A newborn gets the most basic of social contracts, which depending on the society usually at least includes the right to being fed and protected, with the parents or guardians being expected to ensure that this is all taken care of, and that no harm comes to the infant. Most societies codify this into their written laws as well.

As the infant grows up, this basic social contract keeps getting modified, with responsibilities and rights amended or removed. The specific society that the child grows up in determines a lot of the exact format, due to peculiarities of traditional culture and formal law. Whether a child is born into a rich, well-off or poor family also massively determines the exact contents of the social contract.


Within this framework, it is easy to answer a question of the type 'what is a typical male?', or 'what is a typical woman?'. It all depends on the exact societal framework that one works with. Depending on one's (perceived) biological sex, one's social contract is amended based on the (unwritten) social rules in that society. This so-called 'gender role' is a specific sub-type of a social contract, which tends to have its roots more often than not in social and cultural traditions.

The exact content of such a Gender Social Contract (GSC) differs strongly per society and per time period, with the exact set of requirements and rights differing wildly. A GSC also forms only one of the possible foundation contracts, with the 'social status' contract being decidedly more relevant.

To then answer the question of 'what is a typical male?', one would have to define within which society, which time period, with which social status, and also with the modifiers of marital status and whether or not the individual has offspring. Ditto for the question of 'what is a typical woman?'.

Essentially, all of us in a society are raised to be lawyers, recognising the subtleties of each individual social contract, trying to amend or circumvent them where possible, and sometimes changing them by force. An example of the latter is when the suffragette women were dissatisfied with the GSC for women in Western societies excluding the right to personhood, and with it the ability to vote in elections, sign their own legal contracts, and so on. Their intense protests resulted in the GSC for women to be modified to include roughly the same rights as in the 'male' GSC.


The assignment of a GSC is determined solely by one's biological sex, which leads to unfortunate consequences in the case of intersex children, whereby at birth it is clear that the child is neither strictly male nor female. Since no intersex GSC exists in most societies, the child is surgically modified to make it fit a GSC, instead of vice versa.

One way to change one's social contract, including the GSC, is by modifying one's physical appearance. This can result in a breach of contract, which results in society modifying and amending one's social contract until order is once again restored. This is usually also the way that new generations end up modifying a society, by invoking changes and alterations that ultimately begin to affect a society on a more fundamental level instead of just for one or more individuals.


As someone like myself, who switched from a male to a female GSC on account of being a hermaphrodite and a written law entry allowing for a GSC change in that case without physical alterations, it's interesting to look back on the past years, and see all of the above play out pretty much as I have just written. It's something that has made me think a lot about one's sense of identity and that of belonging in a society.

Obviously, there is no intersex or hermaphrodite GSC in Western society. The lot of us are essentially 'freaks of nature', with the basic option being to awkwardly conform to the system-as-is, or to provoke change. The latter being exceedingly difficult, as I have had the displeasure of noticing. When a new 'GSC' is being drafted up for intersex people by society, it attempts to either put us away as sub-humans with the definition of 'disorders of sex development' (DSD), or 'third gender', along with other unwanted non-conformists.


Ideally we'd just drop this 'GSC' thing, as it isn't based on any physical reality. Yet societies loathe change, which is why the lot of us will be stuck juggling GSCs and social contract amendments and alterations like the overworked, underpaid attorney lackeys we are.


Maya