Construction of Gender (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2019 in the subject Health - Sports science, grade: 1,0, University of Münster, language: English, abstract: In the context of this thesis the topic of the gender construction is taken up. Subject areas of the social and natural sciences try to find the causes of the gender-specific differences with the aid of various theories. At first, an analysis of the relationship
between society, gender and sport should make it clear how the social subsystem Sport was influenced and structured by everyday theory. Using the example of the controversial phenomenon of sex tests in sport, it should be shown that the gender
of a person cannot be measured using biological-medical criteria only. This thesis is contrary to the widespread opinion in medicine and biology that sex can be clearly determined based on five criteria. Therefore, a fundamental understanding of the
procedure and basics of gender testing should be created by summarizing these criteria. In a second step, it is shown that it is possible by a social-scientific point of view to question hypotheses of a purely biological, pre-social nature of man. A basic insight is that the society in which we live is a result of our own actions.

At first glance, the question of a person's gender acts as if the answer is obvious. Gender is one of the central structural principles of our society. The population consists of women and men, girls and boys. There is a social system of the two sexes
and sex seems to be given by nature. In everyday life it is associated with the idea of a recognizable and invariable distinction between woman and man. This is closely linked to the assumption of gender polarity. Thus, there are assumptions of different
characteristics and behaviors, as well as a natural gender hierarchy and performance.

Girls play with dolls, put on make-up, wear pink clothes and are especially tender and sensitive. Boys, however, are ambitious and self-reliant, playing with toy cars and crafts. But the fact that this societal system received such great social significance
for the two sexes is not based solely on the natural conditions. Rather, it is a social order that has developed in our society since the eighteenth century and has been proven by biology and medicine since the nineteenth century. An understanding
was developed by supposedly scientifically precise facts of the natural sexual characteristics of women and men.