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@Rambler beat me to it--if you told me this was written by a language model, I'd be inclined to believe you.
In particular, I notice a lot of deepity happening here--but also more than a little rhetorical sleight of hand:
This seems like a slightly poetic way of saying something true, until you think for a minute and realize it's almost certainly false. Trivially, these are the English words for adult human females and adult human males, and most people don't speak English. That's a shallow objection but worth noticing in part because you've specified a domain--"across the globe"--but you're handling a concept that you are asserting is culture-bound, like language. And this is before we get to the notion of the verb "identifies." What does it mean? Do adult Japanese males "identify" as "otoko" or "dansei" or "yatsu?" I don't speak Japanese but I bet there are some fun academic debates over there about this. Do all adult human males who do not wish they were female "identify" as "man?" Likewise, females as "woman?" Well, no, actually, at least some so not.
The word "folkloric" is just question-begging.
What's weird about this claim is that it is not only false, it is shockingly false by the lights of trans advocacy. The vast majority of "trans" people clearly reify the traditional binary understanding of gender; they simply decouple it from biological sex. Males seek to make themselves "trans women" by performing (usually, caricatured) displays of what the relevant culture associates with "women." Females seek to make themselves "trans men" in the other direction (though in my experience "trans men" tend instead to downplay any femininity more often than they up-play masculinity). There are some "non-binary" and "genderfluid" types out there who violate this trend, but these seem to be a small minority of the people identifying as "trans."
This sentence seeks to undermine the claim that "this is a new and untested phenomenon" with a total non sequitur. Whether people have ever before sought to define themselves in relation to others is irrelevant to whether this phenomenon is new and/or untested.
This is a complete fabrication. There are thousands, perhaps millions of social science studies on gender as a distinct and measurable phenomenon.
All of these things are measurable.
They do actually seem to be rooted in biology. Gender norms do differ in time and place and culture, and yet the reproductive aspects of sex and sexuality are clear in gender norms in ever human civilization that has ever existed. The close association of women with children, for example, is inherently biological: without modern chemical intervention, men in the ordinary course do not lactate. How cultures handle this fact varies, but is always rooted in biology. That is just one of many items for consideration.
How can it be both of these things? This seems incoherent. Some feelings are clearly deeply ingrained in human consciousness--hunger, for example. Hot and cold. Sexual desire, probably, at least for many people. How can something as contingent as a social construct be "deeply ingrained in our consciousness?" It's nonsense.
Why? What makes it important?
If by "gender" you mean "the social expectations that come along with one's biological sex," like--sure, we've been challenging those things for centuries. Women dressed as men to attend Plato's Academy in ancient Greece. Shakespeare wrote plays including this stuff. But in my experience it is not trans advocates approaching these issues with an open mind or a willingness to challenge their assumptions and beliefs. In the late 20th century, a host of educational and business opportunities were opened to women that never had been before. The world we live in today has discarded swathes of traditional cultural expectations touching on sex and gender. I think some people have benefited, and I think some people have been harmed. On balance, I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that individuals should be as free as possible, modulo compatibility with like freedoms for others. In most contexts, I don't care how people dress or whether they wear makeup.
But also in most contexts, I have very little reason to play along when an adult human male wearing a dress and a wig tells me he's a "woman" (or worse, a "girl")--especially if he is demanding special treatment ordinarily afforded to females for what are, in fact, biologically grounded reasons.
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