My dad, a longtime progressive, also said that he didn’t understand how one could feel like something that is a social construct. Wasn’t gender, and all the things associated with it, just a creation of society? Wasn’t that what feminism had taught us? I explained to him that, for me, gender is a lot like language. Language, too, is a social construct, but one that expresses very real things. The word “happiness” was created by humans, but that doesn’t diminish the fact that happiness is a very real feeling. People can have a deeply held sense of their own gender even if the descriptions,
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