I'm going to agree but I always thought the difference was 'sex' and 'gender'. The former being innate, with the latter being a quick term for gender expression, and hence cultural.
Am I wrong? I always thought that's the basis of the argument people try to make.
You are wrong, yes. Gender was always synonymous with sex, albeit it from different root languages, until John Money began his grotesque experiments on David Reimer. The results run completely counter to current_year dogma. Reimer was ‘reassigned’ as an infant after a botched circumcision. Growing up, he always knew that there was something wrong — that his body didn’t match his brain. No amount of social reinforcement could convince him that he was a girl and he ended up killing himself when he found out what happened. His situation demonstrated that gender is
biological, not social. It showed the exact opposite of what gender social constructionists claim. The Scandinavian gender equality paradox (the more ‘equal’ a society’s opportunity becomes along gender variables, the more disparate the outcomes) reinforces this but is all but ignored by the gender ideologues.
The next logical question is what motive could someone have for separating the terms ‘gender’ and ‘sex’, and the answer is that the goal of feminism has always been to dismantle gender structures in western society. If they can establish that gender
expressions are inherited socially rather than biologically then they can assert that they are mutable (can be changed). Implanting this cancerous idea in the public’s collective mind has been like taking a sledgehammer to the social fabric. The hypothesis of Money provided a convenient starting point, but it required the results of his experiments to be ignored and significant amounts of cognitive dissonance, if not just straight up lies. We have since had decades upon decades of illegitimate pseudo-religious doctrine published under the facade of science via academic feminism. It has been gradually leaking into the mainstream over the last decade, give or take, and accelerated by the Obama presidency in which he frequently and publicly pushed feminist dogma such as the wage gap.
Ignore the feminist PR front. It is not about ‘equality’, as nebulous and ill-defined a term as that is. It is about dismantling social structures
for their own benefit. Establishing gender as a social construct is a necessary part of this because otherwise they are attempting to change something we have no control over — biology and nature itself. Patriarchy theory is the other critical part — the idea that the history of western gender roles has been about men oppressing and exploiting women like chattel slaves for
their benefit. This is a lie — the role of the male in western society (and every other successful society for that matter) has been as the provider and protector of women and children. Traditional gender roles (nurture) are designed to exaggerate the intrinsic biological attributes (nature) and establish incentives for males to play the protector and provider role for the good of society as a whole. The biological and social aspects are not mutually exclusive.
Feminists can only get away with this scam when the need for gender roles is not readily apparent. We are currently living in one of the longest and most prosperous periods of peace since Ancient Rome. The US and its allies haven’t had to enact a draft in a very long time. Occupational health and safety is more advanced than it ever has been and has made the workplace a more attractive place to be. Technology has automated away much of the traditional household work like washing, cleaning and meal preparation. Meanwhile, birth control has given women complete reproductive agency and released them from the ‘shackles’ of womanhood (the effect on fertility and the macrosocial psychological effects is another can of worms I won’t open here).
Western women are complacent. Life has been made so easy for them that they no longer appreciate their prosperity which has largely been built for them upon a foundation of male disposability. What do I mean by this? To be the most prosperous society, you need to win wars. To win wars, you need the strongest army. To have the strongest army, you need to dehumanise (notice how this word has been co-opted by intersectional feminism?) a portion of your male population to eliminate cowardice that is (rightly) afforded to women and children and instill a greater appetite for risk. How else do you convince them to fight and die on a battlefield? You need to raise ruthless killing machines who are not afraid to dispose of their own self for the greater good. It should be obvious why this is limited to the male gender.
Another effect of war is that, assuming parity of male and female births during peacetime, it reduces the proportion of males to females such that females have to compete for a mate. During peacetime, this inverts and women no longer have to compete for a mate. This results in sex-starved males thirsting for the stankest crumb and women no longer have to exaggerate their natural feminine attributes. No pink haired, unwashed wildebeest is getting laid during wartime. There just isn’t the supply of thirsty betas available for them. So they are forced to compete. But competition inherently produces winners and losers. What happens to the losers of female mating competition? They flock to feminism. Like the losers of any social hierarchy, they seek to tear it down so that they can better compete. This is where patriarchy theory (lie) comes from. This is where the motive to separate ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ (lie) comes from.
What do we do about it? I don’t have a solution. I don’t approve of authoritarian measures, so I oppose direct government intervention (though I would support limiting funding of public academic institutions to only productive subjects like STEM and health). Other cultures, e.g. Islam, allow polygamy. Whether this is deliberate to prevent the above, I don’t know, but there’s no feminism in Islamic culture. I believe that monogamous heterosexual relationships are the backbone of society (get fucked Pocahontas) so the polygamy solution doesn’t work for me. This leaves us with war as an existential thread to prevent cultural complacency (WAR IS PEACE). However, I’ve been anti-war my entire life, so I’m completely conflicted here. But then I think: what happens in 10 years when the US is still bogged down by intersectionality and China is about to overtake it as the world’s largest economy and therefore most influential trade partner? Seems to me that war is inevitable in that instance. Another fun side tangent to think about is climate change as an existential threat — it is obviously acting as one for a subset of the population, but it’s a corrupted one because the enemy — the ‘other’ that must be defeated — is the society itself.
TL;DR
When there is no existential threat (e.g. war, but also famine, pestilence, etc.), the need for male disposability is no longer apparent and the society as a whole becomes complacent. It allows gender roles to be unraveled thread by thread until all you have left is a tangled mess of what used to be a functional sweater strewn all over the floor. Separating ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ is the first thread to be pulled on because it then exposes all of the others.