Gender varies from culture to culture, and changes rapidly over time to couch politics and power in the legitimating hegemony of the “natural” or even “biological”. But the social being cannot escape the force and reality of gender. Regardless of our critical awareness and resistance, it is a defining feature and frame of every aspect of our everyday sociocultural lives—perhaps even moreso for those who have adopted a more critical eye. We cannot escape the gendered world. And despite the fact that individuals have little to no power over a society’s gender system, it is fundamentally a system of meaning that we, ourselves, make, and by doing so, make real. It is true that, to a degree, we are free to adopt and reject particular gender roles and ideas. But this is still, in many ways, fiddling around in a game whose rules we have no control over. We cannot escape the ways in which gender frameworks structure so many details and trajectories of our everyday lives.

Anthropologists remind us that race is a “social construct”. That the fraudulent “biology” underlying the various modern formulations of race has been obsolete for a century, though occasionally rearing its head again dressed up in some new buzzworthy pseudo-science. But it is a severe miscalculation to argue that a social construct is not real. Just like race, gender is very real.