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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.
Debated this before here. The people who really grew up in the blue tribe have accepted gender is not sex.
I have no idea what they are talking about but in their social environment it’s extremely past being seperate meanings.
Honestly don’t think this ever gets settled unless transgenders disappears. Which seems like the most likely path. Transsexuals seem like a fad to me. Someday we will look back at this debate like beanie babies when the young people get a new current thing. A lot of us will always look at you stupid if you claim gender and sex are different.
I can speak to my experience of this. I remember back in the mid 2000s I was starting college at what is one of the most obnoxiously progressive institutions on the planet. It was end of freshman year. I remember talking with someone who said that gender and sex were different and gender was a social construct. She just like dropped it into a conversation so casually, so matter of factly, such that I, who tries to be a blank slate, just accepted it, assumed she knows something I don't or whatever.
And there were hundreds more conversations just like that that happened throughout my college career. I basically started believing it and buying into it myself to some degree. All these people, all the reasonable and smart people i knew, couldn't be wrong about something they're so sure about, right? It wasn't until 4 years after college, that I saw "gender and sex are different" had started to be weaponized into justifications I disagreed regarding the how society needs treat trans people. I then realized, "Wait, why did I buy into this in the first place? What value or evidence is there that gender and sex are different? Is there any logical consistency to this?" such that I ended up rejecting the notion of gender and sex being different altogether.
This is the moment of enlightenment with the gender/sex distinction, I think: when you realise that there was never a good evidence basis for this distinction, and it was developed for political rather than explanatory purposes.
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