patrick.net

richwicks says

No, gender I'm quite certain became the predominate term because so many religious conservatives didn't want to see the word "sex" or hear the word "sex". It was just a way to be polite to them.

"Sex" was considered too clinical or cold, "Gender" was considered the more polite term. So probably Conservatives and others preferred the latter, but they were considered synonymous until relatively recently after much inorganic political pushing. It was Simon DeBeauvoir and Margaret Mead who tried to create the difference between Sex and Gender, which was amplified by Johnson and Masters, and really took off with Foucault and Judith Bulter in the 70s-80s. And the insane (literally) Katherine Millet.

That "Sex" was biological, whereas "Gender" was the personal/social expressive form of sexuality.

Interesting thing about the French postwar intellectuals was that they had a fury against Western Democracy that they never had against Hitler; Sarte wrote about not giving a shit when drafted and posted to a unit in 1940. By the 60s, he was calling for revolutionary violence against DeGaulle's France publicly and openly. Orwell noted Pacifists behaved similarly in the run up to WW2, passive if not excessively apologetic for Stalin, Hitler, and Il Duce.

In any case, we should treat Transgenderism like Anorexia or Schizophrenia.

Nobody validates an Anorexic's claim to need to lose 10 more pounds, their body image disorder.

Nobody validates a Schizophrenic's claim that the people with Red Ties changed the date on today's newspaper to trick them.

We shouldn't validate a Transgender's claim to use the bathroom that speaks to them.