I think some people tend to take a rather naive tack when dealing with post-modernists, however they choose to manifest. They could be social-constructionists, or socialists, or anarchists or what not. One should never really take them, or what they say, at face value. Their main defense lies in the, largely post modern, belief that a person should be judged by their intent, as opposed to their results. It really doesn't matter how many hundreds of millions of people you kill, as long as you meant well.
I think Gellner, at least in "Words and Things" implicitly got onto this idea, that is that these people are playing a game, and they know they are playing a game, and in a way they are laughing at us because we just aren't in on the joke.
If you want to understand the entirety of liberal philosophy and post modernism, read Graham Greene's "The Destructors." You may remember a reference to that story in "Donnie Darko."
Set in the mid-1950s, the story is about the "Wormsley Common Gang", a boys' gang named after the place where they live. The protagonist Trevor, or "T.", devises a plan to destroy a beautiful two-hundred-year-old house that survived The Blitz. The gang accepts the plan by T., their new leader, and executes it when the owner of the house, Mr. Thomas (whom the gang call "Old Misery"), is away during a bank holiday weekend. Their plan is to destroy the house from inside, then tear down the remaining outer structure. Mr. Thomas returns home early, however, and the gang locks him in the outhouse. T. refuses to stop until the destruction job is complete, because even the facade is valuable and could be reused. Inside, they find a mattress filled with money—which they burn. The final destruction of the house occurs when a lorry pulls away a support pole from the side of the house. Mr. Thomas is released from the outhouse by the lorry driver to see the rubble of what once was his home. When the driver finds the situation funny Mr. Thomas is incensed, but he is still unable to stop laughing.
The purpose of the philosophy has really always been to service the resentment of the systemic unfairness of biological life. "Why should anyone suffer?" soon becomes "Why should anyone profit?" The logical course of action is to destroy all of life because it doesn't adhere to someone's disturbed ideal. The promulgation of the ideal, regardless of how silly it is, serves to promulgate the inevitable solution. How very convenient that the whole thing can be couched in the terms of "good intentions", and so serves to seduce people into its ideological sphere of control with the promise of good "belly feels", and at the same time serves to maintain people within the system (you can't be outside of it and still be a good person. There be racists, bigots, sexists! This idea is developed along different terms also by Gellner in his book on the psychoanalytic movement. The inescapability of the ideology is a dominant feature, not an accident. This feature is an essential inheritance of The Enlightenment.
People misunderstand the social construction of gender to be a serious theory subject to logic, it is not. It is a weapon. It was observed long ago that certain types of people are undesirable, quite naturally. They were undesirable because of their "identity", more often that not conferred on them by society, and largely because of objective criteria. Identities like "felon", "rapist", "promiscuous woman", "homosexual", "atheist" and so on. Early attempts at systematizing identity led to racism as a doctrine, which was conspicuously practiced by the left, not the so-called "right."
When a person is undesirable, violence against them is usually justified, that is regardless of how much you torture a serial killer, no one will really get up in arms about it. No one would really mind if a rapist is raped, or a murderer is murdered. This provided the psychopathic individual with an interesting opportunity, if only he or she could construct a system of thought where identities are malleable constructs that can be "adopted" at will as "defensive identities" and flung at enemies as "offensive identities."
Identity then, must not depend on objective categories. But once one does that, it behooves social participants to want to be in certain categories (the defensive ones) and to place anyone they see as a threat in the offensive ones (racist, bigot, sexist, child molester, rapist, 1 percenter and so on).
This is the meta-game being played, and the rest is really a kind of ideational tar baby. If you interact with the actual stated ideas, you are trapped, and the more you interact and try to sort things out, the more trapped you will become.
In a sense this has been the problem of "The Enlightenment" as a whole, though it has evolved over time. We should all be so lucky as to get to name our movement. The Enlightenment sounds so much better than "The Ideas that destroyed western culture, and might destroy all of life."
The Enlightenment is really the Triumph of materialism and atheism. Even my beloved Gellner cannot escape the essential nature of secular thought, it's compulsion to atomization (and all the limitations that come with it) and its restrictive epistemology that not only eschews, but implicitly repudiates, a priori knowledge, i.e. transcendent knowledge. But wrapped up in this rejection of the transcendent is the rejection of objective truth and therefore objective moral standards. You can duct-tape it all together as much as you like, but post-modernism is just the movement of the children of The Enlightenment finally taking itself seriously.
Of course, each generation of liberals is never happy when the next generation is just more liberal than them, so they create sort of ridiculous reactionary positions like "Classical Liberal" and set them in opposition to "Neo-Liberal", which is really just Classical Liberal^2. It's a bit like Dragonball Z, there's an ever increasing level of Saijanness.
Asking if gender is socially constructed is like asking if the moon is made of cheese. No, it's not. What is more, if it was, it wouldn't matter because gender expression serves a pragmatic purpose, and there's no reason to tolerate people who want to "opt-out" of the system. We used to throw such people off cliffs, or burn them at stakes. There was a logic to it. When we stopped doing that we got rid of some knotty problems, but then inherited a whole bunch more.
The current work of the post-modernist, the progressivist, and the liberal is to control our interpretations of history (he who controls the past, controls the present) in order to keep one step ahead of anyone who might actually go back and look and get all kinds of ideas about traditionalism. They may even become conservatives. All of these arguments are couched within very specific and largely secular narratives that what we came from was very bad, and what we're going towards is very good. The real problem is that so many of our assumptions about what happened in the past are simply false. If we didn't have these false ideas, then many of the talking points of the post modernists, and liberals, would sound as absurd as they actually are. We often forget, that for a long time there was a struggle between the liberal progressive ideology and conservatism. It is only in the last century that it was more or less decided (around the 1960s) and conservatives mainly lost the fight (and thus became a kind of weaponized identity, largely akin to racist, sexist, homophobe). Since then we have had a sampling of the direction and evolution of liberal ideology in control and many people instinctively don't like it.
This seems to raise the issue that when we are talking about some specific vector of post-modernist thought that we are really talking about the underlying post-modernist leviathan poking some part of itself above the surface, and if you grab any bit of post-modernism and hold on, you'll get pulled under and see some shadow of the mass of this ideology. Its tendrils go everywhere, atheism, materialism, psychology and social psychology, Science-with-a-capital-s, anthropology, politics and its subdoctrines (anarchism, facism-anti-facism, anarchocapitalism, laissez-faire capitalism, socialism, feminism etc) and on an on. So really it is the hydra, and cutting off one head is not enough, you have to cauterize the wound whenever you excise its malignancy.
