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This is a weird framing. I wouldn't say I believe in gender, but think it's identical to sex (not "sex-assigned-at-birth", just "sex"). I would say that, of the two, sex is the only thing that actually exists. No one actually has a "gender identity" (hell, no one can even provide a cogent, non-circular definition of what "gender identity" even is), but even if they did, it's a bad idea to design public policies around unfalsifiable claims people make about their own inner experiences. "Gender identity" meets this description, "sex" does not, ergo "sex" is a good basis on which to design public policies and "gender identity" is not.
I think we are just arguing over semantics. Of course, if "gender" and "sex" are co-extensive, then there is no need for two different words.
If we were in a society of peafowl or nudists, that would work. You just see the colorful plumage (or the penis) of the person you meet, and you know for certain that you are dealing with a male.
In most human societies, it is not as easy to identify the sex of another person. Asking them to show you their genitals is mostly frowned upon, so you rely on Bayesian evidence -- beards, breasts under clothing, gendered clothes, height, hairstyle, behavior, voice register. All of these can be mimicked, and depending on the social setting some trans people might pass.
"Sex and gender are co-extensive" is a claim which can only be made if one has two different words. Even if it was, it might still be worthwhile to keep the two terms around to discuss this fact. Physics has a concept of "inertial mass" and "gravitational mass", even though as far as we know both are co-extensive.
If I were to ask evangelicals if they supported "traditional gender roles", I think most would affirm (even if they would prefer the vaguer phrasing of traditional family values). If I asked them if they supported "traditional sex roles", they would likely be confused. Am I some freak talking about missionary sex, or an even greater freak talking about sexual roleplay, or am I talking about some ancient environment, as in "males specialize in hunting mammoth, females in picking berries", and could I please avoid saying the s-word?
For what it's worth, I am not a gender fanboy. My (mostly underinformed) impression is that while there are some social sciences who do an admirable job of cargo-cult science, gender studies do not even rise to that level and are probably about as epistemically useful as theology. I just do not think that the main concept they are (presumably) dealing with is devoid of meaning.
Ah yes, one of those incredibly difficult tasks that babies learn to do before they can walk or talk.
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impossible to have a conversation with someone who asserts such transparently false things
I think that my statement is at least technically true, because "it is harder to sex id clothed persons than nude persons" should hardly be controversial.
Now, you could claim that it is only true in that technically sense, as in "it is more reliable to tell apples from oranges through genome analysis than it is to tell them apart through looking at them" -- which would be technically true if there is some weird apple where eyeball id is less than 100% accurate, but functionally false, because nobody is ever likely to encounter that counterexample in the wild, and insisting on running every fruit through PCR is utterly pointless from telling apples from oranges.
For pre-pubescent kids, I do not think that it is particularly easy to tell their sex absent social norms ("boys have short hair and wear blue clothes with dinosaurs, girls have long hair and wear pink clothes with unicorns").
I will grant you that after puberty, most people can reliably pass for their sex even without social cues. Voice register alone probably suffices. I will also grant you that societies can eliminate most adversarial examples by simply punishing trying to pass as a sex you were not assigned at birth by stoning: if I see a bearded Taliban gunman, I do not really have to check the inside of his pants to know what genitals he will have. It is technically possible that it is a trans-man on T, but I would expect there to be less than one such instance in all of Afghanistan.
In freer societies, people are allowed to pass as the other sex/gender, or not prominently display their beard or breasts to the world and thereby sort themselves into one of the categories.
It might be that the rest of the world is much better at id-ing sex in Western adults than I am. Perhaps the rest of you have basically a built-in millimeter wave scanner and I am just to autistic to notice. I mostly rely on secondary sexual characteristics (which can easily be acquired through HRT, or even faked through props) and social conventions.
Luckily, there is very little reason for me to know the sex of a random person in the street. The only exception would be "can we produce offspring together" (which of course also hinges on other factors). I am a member of a K-selected species, the number of times a trans-woman has tricked me into courting by pretending that she could bear my children has been exactly zero. In practice, "could we beget viable children?" is rarely the first thing on my mind when I encounter a person in the street.
The way I see it, genders have their origins in traditional sex-based roles in societies, but I do not think that it needs to stay that way. Things evolve. Ridley Scott is obviously not a mounted warrior aristocrat. To my knowledge he does not maintain any warhorses or plate armor, does not have a fief granted to him, does not follow the code of chivalry and has never been seen leading a cavalry charge against the enemies of his liege. Yet he is a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire.
Still, I am totally fine with saying "he got a knighthood". In case there is any confusion, I can use the term GBE and everyone will know what kind of knight he is. In 1100CE this would never have been possible, but today cavalry has been obsolete in warfare for a century, so we can repurpose the term.
Human females were mostly reduced to their reproductive capability in earlier societies. This seems obvious from the quaint custom of referring to them as either Miss (eligible) or Mrs (married). (There was probably a third category of woman who had sex before marriage and was therefore ineligible to bear heirs, but I doubt there was a honorific for that role.)
Today, society has recognized that human females can also contribute in other ways than making babies. Very few people are interested in whether an unmarried woman who has her uterus removed for medical reasons should be called Miss or Mrs. Granted, gestation still happens in vivo, so the bearing of children is not yet as obsolete a concept as shock cavalry, but much less important than it was 100 years ago.
a "technically true" statement that has no bearing on reality has no value
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