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Notes -
So there's a tendency on the left when discussing this topic to refuse to ever say anything that could possibly construed as denying someone's conception of their gender. This is where the stupid circular non-definitions come from. But reversed stupidity is not intelligence, this does not mean there isn't a reasonable point of view in there. I don't think this is "sane washing", I'm not trying to justify or defend this person's conduct or beliefs, I'm trying to determine what policy is reasonable.
Gender is an attempt to decouple the social roles that tend to be associated with particular sexes from the biological reality of those sexes. I would say gender is essentially "everything that tends to be associated with a particular sex but can be decoupled from the biological reality of that sex". Gender identity is "the set of those things that one wishes to have", and a female gender identity means you largely want to have the things that are associated with the female sex. I'm sure many would take issue with these definitions, but I think these definitions accurately describe how people use these words.
So,
#2 is a central example of something that is gender, not sex. Yes, historically it is people with male sexual characteristics who would be referred to as fathers even in adoptions. But the biological sex is completely irrelevant in this case, if someone could successfully pass as the opposite sex, they absolutely would be treated that way.
Yes, because they do not decouple sex from gender. I still don't understand why you think that this gestalt of "sex" and "gender" actually only corresponds to what I would refer to as "sex" and not "gender". This seems tautologically false?
There is not actually this clean linguistic separation between sex and gender in actual usage, regardless of whether we might wish that was true. "Male" and "female" get used to refer to both gender and sex all the time. But this person likely would use "Assigned male at birth" to mean the exact same thing you mean by "Male". You probably think this is obnoxious, because I do too. But you are talking about the same thing.
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