The goal of Part I has been to upgrade our capacity for gender analysis. All along, we’ve been asking after the realness of gender: In what sense does it exist? What makes it real? A review of the answer might help.

For too long, our gender habits have been stuck in a world split in two by a tenacious binary of men and women, hard and soft. When human bodies present themselves to this world, they are met with pronouncements of girl or boy upon birth, usually without much dispute, but often with a great deal of fuss and fanfare. Gender proceeds from there as a social construction that responds to our given bodies and can certainly veer off script. It thus entails both innate biological components (once dubbed sex) and acquired cultural elements that are more variable and flexible (at one time gender versus sex).

In this popular view, gendered persons are both natural-born and humanmade: The physical parts are mostly set, unless camouflaged or acted upon with chemical or surgical intervention, while the social parts are more flexible, culturally infused and performed by human actors. A little nature and a lot of nurture, we say—why choose? Problem is, the biological and cultural drivers remain distinct.

The issue is precisely that separation, the persistent division of physical and social. Today, both are allegedly given their due. I say, as long as they remain separate, we do justice to neither and pay a high price.

Gender is inescapably sociophysical, social and physical mattering together. What we like to think of as discrete biological and cultural strands are actually co-mingling, co-creating, and co-evolving from the beginning, in that inaugural act of birth assignment. Yes, the body is active in social relations. But it is not some determinative, set-in-stone force that serves up ‘hard’ limits to ‘soft’ social potentials. Biology listens to, and is deeply affected by, the social, because the social is always also physical.

The substance of gender comes from bodily encounter and the physical imprints thereof. Being a woman, man, or any other kind of person is first and foremost a sensory social reality. That is to say, we become individuals—discrete persons of a particular kind—through ongoing contact with the world. Our bodies are physically constituted by gendered sociality, whether we’re aware of it or not.