I saw the shift to "gender" as the social side of sex way before I ever heard or read the term "gender identity". Though maybe that is what happened and "gender identity" was just very, very niche at the time (like, 25 years ago, probably) such that its descendent term "gender" outran it, so to speak. However, I got the impression that the distinction between "gender" and "sex" predated my encounter of it by decades.

Webster's 1913 does appear to regard "gender" as exclusively a grammatical quality, so far as definitions related to this topic go. So the modern usage may not be quite that old.

[EDIT] huh, whaddaya know, Garner's Modern English Usage puts the move to "gender" in places where "sex" would previously have been used (to refer to all or to any part of the whole deal, not just the biological bits) as right around when I first encountered it, at least outside an initially-narrow set of academic disciplines. Go figure. It is newer than I thought, by a long shot. I figured it dated to the 60s or so in academia, mainstream by the 80s and I just hadn't encountered anyone who cared to make the distinction until later.

Yeah the shift for social psychologists probably happened 25ish years ago. Though, I'd argue up until 5 or so years ago if you asked the average person the majority would tell you gender == sex. Even today I'd guess close to half couldn't tell you the defined difference between the two.

> Even today I'd guess close to half couldn't tell you the defined difference between the two.

I kinda halfway try to follow this stuff, and honestly, I'd have trouble defining most of the terms involved in a way that didn't step on someone's toes—and I'd be trying not to! No wonder people are put off by it.

If someone wants you to refer to them as $GENDER, then just refer to them as $GENDER. Don't treat people differently because they don't conform to the traditional gender binary. Don't treat attraction between the same sex as being fundamentally different than attraction between opposite sexes.

That's 99.9% of it, right there.

I don't even mean pronouns. I mean the stuff like elsewhere in this thread where people are stepping in it (depending on the perspective of the reader) re: whether gender identity is wholly a social construct. "Yeah, it's entirely social" is no longer the safe fallback answer for careful liberals (I write, as a careful liberal)

I think you have to accept that gender identity is a contentious issue for a lot of people, even among the liberal/feminist/LGBTQ set, so any possible position you take is probably going to offend someone.

So just be honest and try to be polite, that's the best you can ever do. Whether or not you claim that gender is "entirely social" should depend on what you believe, not what you think the safe answer is.