Language Constructs Perception
Human language is used in two ways:
To give words to physical manifestations of matter and energy, ex. “Stone”, “electricity”, “human”
To create constructs to explore phenomena that affect physical reality but are intangible themselves ex. “Self”, “Gender”, “Morality”
A construct is a theoretical concept, theme, or idea based on empirical observations. It’s a variable that is usually not directly measurable.
At the point in which we are using language to create constructs, we must become very careful with the ideas and ideologies we are creating. The ideas we create form within our minds lenses of perception through which we will filter our sensory observations.
Some social constructs are the very foundation to some of our senses of identity, and to dismantle those constructs would be to disassemble our senses of self, as well. Instead of allowing ourselves to live in that uncertain space of who we could be and what life could be like, we may vehemently stick to the social constructs instead, vilifying anyone who questions them as a threat to the certainty of our identities, worldviews, and our subsequent behaviors based on those foundational assumptions.
Viewing the world through the filter of a social construct can change how we feel, behave, and interact/relate with the people and world around us. For example, when nonjudgmentally observing the phenotype expression of human beings, one may notice different bone structures and melanin levels in skin. But paired with a social construct like racism, one instead sees separate groups of people with different assumed attributes based on their unique phenotypic expressions, which can lead to fallacies of thought and subsequent harmful behaviors like being prejudiced, bigoted, stereotyping or discriminatory towards people that look one way or another and causing those people distress, exclusion, and pain.
Simply because of the culture you live in and the language that you speak, you will see the world in a different way. There’s a quote, “the fish will be the last to discover the water” which alludes to how we are so immersed in our social/cultural/linguistic environments that we often can’t distinguish social constructs from actual reality. For some people, they have always lived in a racist culture and thus don’t have any understanding that it’s possible for a culture not to be racist, as if racism is as omnipresent and irrefutable as a physical object like Mount Fuji. What is the most problematic about harmful social constructs is that they can become invisible and insidious, being akin to the water we swim in or the air we breathe. Some constructs have been in the background for so many generations that people can’t see it as distinct from reality as if it is a natural force like gravity.
The same can be said about gender. Because we have been so immersed in a gendered culture and language, the concept of gender is difficult for some of us to distinguish from the physical reality of the biological forms of the human body. The physical reality is simply that we are people with a few different parts and organic systems, and the social construct is that people have to be “masculine” “feminine” “a man” or “a woman”, a “he” or a “she” based on which reproductive system they happened to have at birth and each of those concepts come with restrictive and oppressive assumptions, associations, and stereotypes that dictate how a person should behave which are all normative, arbitrary and based on cultural or social context, not based on physical reality. These assumptions can be incredibly harmful to the authentic expression, safety, and well-being of people, no matter their biological form.
Race and gender are shame-based concepts, not real physical realities, only attached to gene expression in human beings culturally and linguistically. Race and gender are harmful in society because they link biological form to a set of concept associations that may not be accurate to an individual and can be restrictive and oppressive to that individual’s safety, happiness, success, opportunity, and authentic self expression just because of the physical form they were born with and the cultural/linguistic environment they happen to live in.
What reproductive system you have or where your ancestral lineage was from shouldn’t determine what you’re allowed to do or who you’re allowed to be, period. There wouldn’t be any restrictions at all if we hadn’t created damaging and restrictive social constructs in our language in the first place.
Gender neutral pronouns and breaking down stereotypes and assumptions in relation to race and gender is imperative to the well being of ourselves and our communities. Holding on to damaging social constructs because we have lived with them all our lives and thus think they are an irrefutable facet of reality is being ignorant, and we are capable of more than that. We can and will create a safer world to live in as we continue to notice the cultural aspects of our language and concepts that are oppressive and begin to dismantle them.
A better question than “what constructs are correct or incorrect?” is “what constructs benefit or harm people?” It’s important that we constantly question the constructs of language and ideology to release harmful constructs and introduce possible alternatives that could be more beneficial for individuals, society, and the ecosystem we live in.
