Once upon a time, not so very long ago, gender would just have been a synonym for sex to stop people getting all flustered because someone “mentioned, you know, s-e-x” & all the nonsense about putting “yes please” as the answer when forms asking about sex had freespace rather than tickbox answer formats.
However, that understanding has been completely overturned by people whose combined narcissism, selfishness, misogyny & utter determination women not be allowed anything for themselves has been facilitated by exploiting the way women are socialised to be kind, to cede space, & to “share”. The inverted commas around share are to denote that very specific sort of sharing [well-behaved] girls are expected to do - ie handing things over to appease others & to make things easier for the adults. Girls get into trouble if they don’t “share” (hand over whatever has been demanded of them instantly, even if they’ve been witnessed starting their turn) - [some] boys will be loudly praised for barely actually sharing. Not, for avoidance all doubt, talking about children with additional needs who need extra support learning social skills, but about the broad cultural issues (that often don’t help those children) that set boys off thinking they don’t have to share. (And although this research is American, I’d be astonished if the same things don’t happen here in terms of boys talking over girls/taking over STEM projects/being picked to answer questions more in class. Certainly girls I’ve spoken to about it - & it’s a discussion I’ve had with dozens since that research was first published - thought it happens.
Obviously the “sharing” & speaking over social conditioning aren’t recent (I remember all the things, so while that includes things like the joy of icing rich tea biscuits & putting hundreds & thousands on them for the first ever time, playgroup also had a LOT of “sharing” with some VERY mean boys… Although “Nitro won’t share even though I bent her finger right back” didn’t go over quite as well as Michael thought it would when he went to tell that I wouldn’t “share” [read, let him bodily shove me out as I climbed into] the pedal tractor) but we’ve since added the idea that there should be prizes for turning up. Nobody should LOSE at things, they’re just an alternative winner. A whole parenting style around never saying “no”. The world, generally, however, has yet to start handing out prizes for everyone. And the word “no” comes up quite a lot. Rather than accept either of those things, however, boundary tramplers - as discussed above - decided to make more prizes available to themselves. And to make it much MUCH harder to say no to them.
You’ve always had people who’ll use any bit of their identity they can for leverage, but it switched up massively - people were actively seeking minority identities to ID into. If they’re disability-related, the disability is frequently self-diagnosed, even in countries with socialised health care, like the UK; or indeed if they have excellent insurance. Seemingly questioning that, however politely - eg, “wouldn’t you be able to access treatment for this condition that is having a tremendously deleterious effect on you if you got a diagnosis?” - gets a tirade about diagnosis being a privilege; medical gaslighting &/or [trans]misogyny; Big Pharma may or may not make a cameo; & how self-diagnosis is completely valid, questioning them is hateful, & the questioner is clearly [despite frequently being disabled] an ableist - & since the pandemic, a eugenicist to boot, regardless of whether the disability in question increases vulnerability to COVID-19. (Lots of people with self-diagnosed autism were horrified by the reports early in the pandemic that DNRs had been issued on a blanket basis in some areas for people with learning disabilities who lived in residential care. Not about the thing in itself, though, but because clearly They Were Next. With no elevated risk profile & no diagnosis, they were the people to be worried & to be worried about. Oh & it was of course used as a reason not to seek diagnosis.)
This is just yet another way for white men to keep power. They don’t care how said men identify, it’s keeping power centred in the “right” place. The patriarchy wins. Institutions don’t actually care about balancing either the sexes or the genders: it is box-ticking PR progressiveness from their POV. When the BLM protests happened, there was a frantic scramble to beg black academics to guest lecture basically EVERYWHERE. Because universities were in such a panic; & so few had anyone who specialises in what they wanted. Bit short on black academics, too. Being able to combine the LGBT box & women box is probably easier - & if you measure gender you can ignore it if you ever reach the point that you’re celebrating a 50-50 gender balance of senior posts in the university (or whatever) when the posts are held only by those of the male sex.
Essentially, we are trapped in a nightmare that began with just changing one word & now features endless word-manglings (where “literal violence” isn’t even metaphorical) coupled with truth-twisting (anything TRAs say, pretty much) in a determination to rob women of all that is theirs. No educational institutions; no youth organisations; no sports; no public bathrooms; no accommodation for inpatient hospital treatment unless a side-room can somehow be arranged; no refuges or rape crisis centres… you can’t help but feel the Taliban would be impressed with the outcome if not the execution.