Alan Jacobs, arguing that intractable cultural debates are often downstream from philological confusion (in this case, the transition from “sex” to “gender”):

When “sex” became the most common term for coitus, we found ourselves needing a different term to describe the distinction between male and female. And when in turn “gender” emerged as that term, it was inevitably accompanied by the arbitrary character that it possesses in its grammatical context. Moreover, that emergence occurred in a social world that had come (for reasons too complex to be traced here) to perceive the human individual as the locus of meaning and value—as a rational actor choosing its own meanings, its own values. The sense of arbitrariness embedded in the term “gender” is a perfect fit for such a society; indeed, perhaps this is why “gender” emerged as the preferred substitute for “sex” to describe what male and female are.

Therefore, to talk about our current debates as debates about “gender” is already to concede the most essential point at issue: whether maleness and femaleness are rooted in biological reality or are basically linguistic, arbitrary signifiers. The first step in making these debates more productive is to call attention to the philological facts: the ways that our language for discussing these matters has changed, giving a certain structure to our debates.