Topic is to filter through interstices By Prof Dr Sohail Ansari& Gender identity

 Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live. Norman Cousins ‘And We will surely test you with something of fear and hunger and a loss of wealth and lives and fruits, but give good tidings to the patient. Quran 2:155
Interdisciplinary topic and its richness

·       Topic that falls in the interstices among the traditional disciplines is the interdisciplinary topic and its richness  is ranked by ‘weighing four variables: number of disciplines involved, the "distance" between them, the novelty of any particular combination, and their extent of integration’

Gender identity is one's personal experience of one's own gender. Gender identity can correlate with assigned sex at birth, or can differ from it completely.

Social constructionism or the social construction of reality (also social concept) is a theory of knowledge in sociology and communication theory that examines the development of jointly constructed understandings of the world that form the basis for shared assumptions about reality. The theory centers on the notions that human beings rationalize their experience by creating models of the social world and share and reify(make (something abstract) more concrete or real. these models through language.

        Definition

A social construct or construction concerns the meaning, notion, or connotation placed on an object or event by a society, and adopted by the inhabitants of that society with respect to how they view or deal with the object or event. In that respect, a social construct as an idea would be widely accepted as natural by the society, but may or may not represent a reality shared by those outside the society, and would be an "invention or artifice of that society."

A major focus of social constructionism is to uncover the ways in which individuals and groups participate in the construction of their perceived social reality. It involves looking at the ways social phenomena are created, institutionalized, known, and made into tradition by humans

Criticisms

Social constructionism falls toward the nurture end of the spectrum of the larger nature and nurturedebate. Consequently, critics have argued that it generally ignores biological influences on behaviour or culture, or suggests that they are unimportant to achieve an understanding of human behaviour. The view of most psychologists and social scientists is that behaviour is a complex outcome of both biological and cultural influences. Other disciplines, such as evolutionary psychology, behaviour genetics, behavioural neuroscience, epigenetics, etc., take a nature–nurture interactionism approach to understand behaviour or cultural phenomena.

In 1996, to illustrate what he believed to be the intellectual weaknesses of social constructionism and postmodernism, physics professor Alan Sokal submitted an article to the academic journal Social Text deliberately written to be incomprehensible but including phrases and jargon typical of the articles published by the journal. The submission, which was published, was an experiment to see if the journal would "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."^[47] The Postmodernism Generator is a computer program that is designed to produce similarly incomprehensible text.^[48] In 1999, Sokal, with coauthor Jean Bricmont published the book Fashionable Nonsense, which criticized postmodernism and social constructionism.

Philosopher Paul Boghossian has also written against social constructionism. He follows Ian Hacking's argument that many adopt social constructionism because of its potentially liberating stance: if things are the way that they are only because of our social conventions, as opposed to being so naturally, then it should be possible to change them into how we would rather have them be. He then states that social constructionists argue that we should refrain from making absolute judgements about what is true and instead state that something is true in the light of this or that theory. Countering this, he states:

But it is hard to see how we might coherently follow this advice. Given that the propositions which make up epistemic systems are just very general propositions about what absolutely justifies what, it makes no sense to insist that we abandon making absolute particular judgements about what justifies what while allowing us to accept absolute general judgements about what justifies what. But in effect this is what the epistemic relativist is recommending.

Later in the same work, Boghossian severely constrains the requirements of relativism. He states that instead of believing that any world view is just as true as any other (cultural relativism), we should believe that:

If we were to encounter an actual, coherent, fundamental, genuine alternative to our epistemic system, C2, whose track record was impressive enough to make us doubt the correctness of our own system, C1, we would not be able to justify C1 over C2 even by our own lights.

Woolgar and Pawluch argue that constructionsts tend to 'ontological gerrymander' social conditions in and out of their analysis. Following this point, Thibodeaux^[51] argued that constructionism can both separate and combine a subject and their effective environment. To resolve this he argued that objective conditions should be used when analyzing how perspectives are motivated.

Social constructionism has been criticized by evolutionary psychologists, including Steven Pinkerin his book The Blank Slate. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides used the term "standard social science model" to refer to social-science philosophies that they argue fail to take into account the evolved properties of the brain.