The distinction between “gender” and “sex,” with the latter strictly reduced to biology, is an invention of sexologists in the 1950s-60s. Queer theorists picked it up and pressed it into academic jargon. Activists picked it up from there. Doctors have used it to justify an industry. But the fact is that both words entered the English language centuries ago and were used for centuries to refer to the same thing. (See Sex and Gender are Interchangeable Terms.)
The earliest know use of the word gender refers to female and male humans. Botanists referred to the gender of plants. Darwin used gender and sex interchangeably. Yes, word was also used to describe feminine and masculine in language (grammatical subclass), and “sex” became the primary term to convey gender in science, including social science, but that doesn’t change the history of the primary meanings and uses of the words.
Swapping “sex” for “gender” in “sex role,” the standard term used by anthropology and sociology to convey the sociocultural features of sex, and then reducing sex to biology, saying gender is something else, that it is a “social construction,” is an ideological move. Manufacturing a new meaning for “gender” allows for the rhetoric of incongruity. The invention “gender identity” soon follows. The social construction is then reified, hypostatized, and essentialized and bodies modified to physically manifest gender identity in simulation. (See Simulated Sexual Identities: Trans as Bad Copy.)
This is how authoritarians work. They grasp that thinking uses words, and that, by changing the meanings of words for ideological and political purposes, they can change the way people think and more readily manipulate them, using them for various projects. (See Manipulating Reality by Manipulating Words.)
freedom and reason 