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If you can assert it one way, I can assert it the other. "No it isn't, sex and gender are synonyms".
This is not a coherent thing even if one were to agree with your previous framing. If it's tribe-specific, then there is no such thing as "the female gender"; your gender would have to be "American female", "Burkina Fasoan female", "East Timorese female". Very little unifies those cultures (perhaps it was literally zero pre-globalisation), so by this account, we'd need +7,000 genders, to account for all roles in all cultures? At which point, your concept is so far away from the dictionary that you should probably start using a new word instead of trying to repurpose the "gender" one.
Is that so strange? It's like objecting that we can't refer to a single "leadership category" that holds true for all cultures. Like, yes there's a lot of similarities between a President, a King, an Emperor, a Pope, etc. But they are all different categories, and if we're being extra scrupulous you'll probably end up deciding that "American President" is a different category from "North Korean President" in spite of their similar names in English.
Certainly, I think it would be sensible enough to say that race is similar. Different cultures across space and time have had radically different conceptions of race, whether it was the Greeks and their concepts of Hellenes vs. Barbarians, or the highly detailed admixture charts of the colonial Spanish, or the census categories in modern America, it would be silly to criticize the concept of race because "American black" is a different category from "British black."
Why is it so crazy to say that the social category of "American female" is quite different from the social category of "Ancient Roman aristocratic female" which is different from "Ancient Roman female slave"? That just seems obviously true, and not at all weird. Certainly it's not evidence that we went wrong somewhere in our definitions or categorizations. Humans just have made up that many different kinds of social categories, even if they might share broad similarities that we could group together to create fewer categories that are easier to reason about and make broad conclusions about.
It's not crazy, but it's not relevant to the real world. We don't exclude people from bathrooms or decide what prison to send them to based on the difference between an American female and an Ancient Roman aristocratic female. Your categorization is useless for the things that people care about.
I feel like that example is only useless because Ancient Rome doesn't exist anymore. It's very relevant to American women who might travel to the Middle East how females are treated in those societies. The bigger problem is that, since most people never get the opportunity to travel, they never get the chance to see how people are categorically treated in different cultures. It's information they can only gather second hand.
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