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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.
I think there is a misunderstanding here.
Sex and Gender are not two completely seperate entities, they are highly correlated. 97% of the time you can think of gender as "the way someone performs their biological sex". That is of course dependent on where and when they were socialized, their self-conception, their peergroup, their class and many other things. A woman in Iran today will perform the role "woman" differently than a woman in russia in the 19th century would have. If you try to think of this variance as discrete genders then yes you would need some ridiculous amount, which is why it is more practical to think of it as a spectrum or, even better, through the lens of clustering. Likewise a man might have different ideas about what it means to "be a man" or to "be manly" throughout his life and adjust his behaviour accordingly. I wouldn't think of that as him switching genders. He's moving around in genderspace if you will, but it's not like a switch gets flipped at a discrete point.
I'm honestly not sure what exactly is going on with transgender people but I suspect in the cases of "genuine" gender dysphoria there is some underlying physiological cause (hormone levels in the womb is one candidate) that causes someone to be born with a brain that behaves like a brain in a different-sex body would. Thus those people default to the opposite end of the gender spectrum and then start deviating from there.
The big difference between sex and gender is that while sex isn't a perfect binary (nothing in biology is) it forms a tight cluster. A very large percentage of people with XY Chromosomes have a penis, produce sperm, grow a beard and so on. Likewise a very large percentage of people that produce viable sperm have a penis etc. etc. Yes there are outliers but it is disingenuous to say that biological sex can't be thought of as binary(with a small asterisk). The same isn't true for gender. The probability that a person with a penis that was raised in the US enjoys one or more of {Beer, Sportsball, Guns, Jeans, (Arm-)Wrestling, Programming, Protecting others, Soldering,...} is high and is much higher than for someone with a vagina. However the correlation there is not nearly as strong as the XY Chromosomes/Penis or Penis/Beard correlations. Gender is much more fluid, more easily changed and obviously more dependent on external factors. There are still two relatively distinct clusters that capture most people but the variance is much higher.
Of course you can use sex and gender as synonyms but that leaves you with a weaker model that is unable to explain much of the variance that you see in how people act vs how they differ biologically.
Biology defines males and females as having small (sperm) and large (egg) sex cells.
True hermaphroditism is extremely rare and non functional:
The chromosomes XY, XX etc generally kick off development to phenotypically adult human sexes but there are rare disorders which most people are familiar with now.
The chromosomal pairs for sexes are different in different species, eg in birds males are the sex with 2 identical sex chroms.
But birds and mammals both fit the large/small sex cell binary
Yeah I deleted that maybe a minute after posting, because I didn't want to explain thee edge cases
RNA != DNA
Still happens (and can cause cancer or mutations in future generations) but in DNA the rates are something like a handful per few billion.
Then they have to make it through repair and error detecting mechanisms.
Not as good as computers (you can move gigabyte files across the internet no problem) but far more accurate than almost anything graspable by humans
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