Gender roles are biologically evolutionary, capable of being socially constructed

The argument

This argument accepts an evolutionary account of the differences between men and women and then denies that the account settles anything about how people should live — which is why it treats gender as an amalgamation of nature and nurture rather than as one or the other. The first half states the biological case. Biological evolution is held to have given males and females psychological differences arising from the survival strategies their ancestors used. On this account men are more aggressive and competitive, having had to hunt and to compete for females, while women are less promiscuous and more selective about partners. Those inherited differences are then offered as the explanation for the familiar power imbalance between the sexes, in which men are more dominant and women more submissive. The second half concedes the premise and blocks the inference. Even if there were biological and evolutionary predispositions towards particular male and female characteristics, it would not follow that they must be followed as the natural course of things. Evolution is about survival, not about what is right or wrong: it explains why a tendency exists and says nothing about whether acting on it is justified. A disposition that helped ancestors survive carries no authority over people who are not in their situation. What follows is that inherited tendencies are inputs rather than instructions. As societal needs progress, the evolutionary needs of the past need not remain in force, and the roles built on them can be altered by challenging the norms according to what society and survival now require. The predisposition may persist while the behaviour and the hierarchy built on it change. Gender on this view has two components that are both real. There is an evolutionary substrate that is not chosen, and there is a social construction laid over it that is chosen and can be rebuilt. Since gender roles are evolutionary yet socially malleable, gender is an amalgamation of nature and nurture.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The allotment of gender into just two categories of male of female is not accurate. There are many variations in gender which can be biological or behavioural. For example, those born with difference in genitalia, or with hormonal imbalances, such as of testosterone. Gender is therefore not binary as the biological evolution of gender theory suggests. Evidence of transgender individuals has existed in archaeological finds dating back to ancient civilisations. This suggests that gender is not binary, and that the approach that biological and psychological male and female characteristics developed as a result of their evolutionary survival needs does not reflect on the diversity within each of the male and female identities, and neither of those individuals that would have identified as transgender.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The evolutionary account is a reconstruction rather than a finding. The division of labour it assumes — men hunting and competing, women selective and less promiscuous — is not what the ethnographic and archaeological record uniformly shows, with women's hunting and provisioning documented in a number of foraging societies, and the premise moves from a story about ancestral conditions to a claim about present psychology without evidence connecting them. [Rejecting P2] The second premise concedes the argument's own foundation. If evolutionary origin carries no normative weight, then P1 does no work in the conclusion, and the case rests entirely on the social half. [Rejecting P3] The malleability claim is compatible with either rival position. Both the social-construction and the biological accounts accept that roles change; what divides them is what those roles attach to, which this premise does not address. [Rejecting C] The counter-argument on record raises the objection the framework cannot absorb: the two-category scheme the evolutionary story presupposes does not fit the observed variation, including intersex variation and differences in hormone exposure, and gender-variant people are attested in the archaeological and historical record across many societies. An account built on two ancestral roles has no place for that, so 'amalgamation' is not established by describing one binary story and then conceding it can be revised.