There are at least two different types of people who are called "transgender". The first are those who strongly recognize themselves in the opposite sex (or do not recognize themselves in either sex). The second are those who find that the social expectations assigned to their sex does not accurately reflect their self-identity.
For the first type of transgender person, the use of the word "gender" in the word "transgender" is more or less synonymous with sex. For the second type of transgender person, the word "gender" has a much weaker relationship with sex.
For the first type of transgender person, the second type deflates the legitimacy of their struggle, since they do not experience dysphoria with direct regard to their sex, and are therefore not transgender at all. For the second type of transgender person, the first type are gender essentialists who are gatekeeping the definition of "transgender".
We see similar divides on the use of the word "gender" outside how it is used by different kinds of transgender people. In plenty of scientific papers, and among most ordinary people, gender is synonymous with sex. For many intellectuals and social scientists, and among the extremely online, gender is distinct from sex (though there isn't a consensus on the distinction is). This divide is the source of many a misunderstanding on discussions and debates regarding transgender people, and is abused for political gain.
I claim that the materialist conception of gender is that it is a pattern of behaviour that emerged from a sex-based division of labour, and is therefore a prehistoric cultural tradition formed by sex. In the environments where humans survived under primitive conditions of production, labour was typically divided along the lines of sex. This is because, on average, males are physiologically suited for hunting and combat, and females likewise for gathering and homemaking. Such is the result of evolution and other forces, though this is topic that I don't want to delve too deep into here. In short, femininity and masculinity are informed by the social role that each sex performs best in based on their average physiology.
However, there were times when there was a scarcity of members of a sex in the tribe, or the physiology of a member of the tribe did not align neatly with their expected role, or external conditions disproportionately demanded one role over another, and so on. For example, suppose that a lot of the males d
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