@Powerless you shouldn't sell yourself short. I found your post to be perfectly coherent and I didn't have any difficulty grasping what it was that you were trying to say. That said, I do have some dissenting views on some of the ideas that you presented in your post as well.

Part of what I view some of the tension surrounding the topic as stemming from is also related to terminology, but I feel like I have a slightly different take on it than you do. First and foremost, male and female and not gendered words. Dictionary definitions for both denote sex; not gender. Admittedly, from a linguistic standpoint, 'gender' has become a complicated term to distinguish from sex because modifications have been made to the definition of the word itself to accommodate the overwhelming number of people that misuse it. As a simpler illustration of this trend, the definition of the word 'literally' has been modified to include exaggeration so that statements like "My mouth is literally on fire." are technically accurate when a person is eating spicy food, where previously there would have to actually be flames coming out of the person's mouth. This does not, however, make the statement literal anymore than interchangeably using two loosely related terms - sex and gender - makes them the same.

The reason I went out of my way to give that long-winded explanation is because I don't feel like anyone is assigned an actual gender at birth; they're assigned a sex. Even looking at the definition of 'transgender' indicates that the individual in question's gender identity differs from the sex that they were identified as at birth. In this regard, I have to agree with @Gazzy and disagree with @cahaya . If you have male genitals, you're a male. If you have female genitals, you're a female. That isn't a social construct; it's anatomy.

I will concede @cahaya 's point regarding being respectful to a person whose gender identity does not line up with their anatomy, but I think we have differences of opinion on what being respectful amounts to in that case. I do not feel that an unwillingness to bend to an attempt at mandatory behavior modification (the notion that we should use a person's preferred pronouns) is disrespectful. 'He' and 'she' both contain the sex terms male and female in their definitions, so calling someone that has the corresponding genitals 'he' or 'she' is accurate. This would effectively be the same as saying it's disrespectful to accurately distinguish between any two things, be it red and blue, cats and dogs, cars and trucks, etc.

I will agree that gender is more of a spectrum than a binary, but even doing so takes some legitimacy out of the argument itself. To say that gender is on a spectrum of masculine and feminine - and that everybody falls somewhere on the spectrum - would essentially mean that no two people have the exact same gender. So for people to be 'respectful' in that case, one would have to hypothetically be willing to learn all 7.5b+ sets of 'gendered pronouns' for the people on Earth if they were able to meet all of them. In the same breath though, if over the course of meeting all of those people you receive billions of 'he' and 'she' responses (although, again, I would argue those are not gendered pronouns), given the aforementioned fact that no two people will be at the exact same point on the spectrum, shouldn't everyone have different/unique pronouns that satisfy their placement on the spectrum? The logical answer is "Of course not.", but the functional answer in a spectrum-based reality is "Yes, they should."...

This is what makes a fair number of gender theorists question whether gender 'actually' exists. If it does, how do we feasibly allow for the infinite number of possibilities to be reflected in our language in a meaningful way? If it doesn't, what are we (not just 'we' on this thread, but the larger 'we' of society) arguing about? I don't know... It's a lot.

@Powerless I appreciate your taking the time to type out a response. There are a few things that you said that I disagree with, and some that I agree with as well.

The thing that I would like to point out first is an idea I tried to address in my first post, and you actually touched on in your response: I do not agree that the terms have 'become synonymous', they're just overwhelmingly misused. A person, or even a society, improperly using a word, however confidently, does not change its meaning. The definition that you offered up for gender even leads with 'either of the two sexes (male and female)'. So on the point of sex and gender being synonymous, I cannot agree.

I find it kind of amusing that you chose so-called gender reveals as an example of illustrating your point here. I actually exclusively refer to them as 'so-called gender reveals' or simply 'reveals' because, as you stated, they're actually sex reveals, so that was an interesting matter of circumstance, lol.

The fourth block of text you responded with is where I take the most issue with your response, namely in that you claim that I said something I didn't and that I feel like I did a poor job conveying what I meant in one other area.

I never said that I don't think it's disrespectful to refer to someone someone as a pronoun that 'I choose' as opposed to the pronoun the person prefers, so that's not a statement of mine that you can disagree with, lol. In fact, the only thing that I said I didn't find disrespectful with regard to using (the reason for italicization will be clarified shortly) pronouns when referring to another person was accurate pronouns on the basis of the person's sex. And I feel like you and I will have to largely disagree on this point, because again, you feel like it's a lack of more gender-specific terminology; I feel like the 'typically referring to...' comments you make do not change 'he' and 'she' from descriptors of sex to descriptors of gender by virtue of how commonly they're misused.

The point that I do not feel like I did a good job of explaining what I meant on was what I initially said doesn't amount to being disrespectful which was effectively not using a person's preferred pronouns. But not using the pronouns they prefer does not, at least for me, mean that I have to use any pronouns at all. Personally, in cases of a person demanding me to use an improper sex pronoun, I won't use any pronouns and will opt instead to use their first name in place of every pronoun that I would have used.

Moving on from there, I also never said that anything delegitimizes the existence of a gender spectrum. In fact, I led that section explicitly stating that I felt like gender was more of a spectrum. What I said was that acknowledging the reality of gender existing on a spectrum takes some legitimacy from the argument for the accommodation of gender pronouns.

But I do find it interesting that you chose to provide emotion specifically as another example of a spectrum because, again, it's ironic that it would be me you'd be having the conversation with when you made the choice. When I use 'feeling words' I rarely settle for a generic 'happy', 'sad', etc. options. I actively try to use the word that most closely fits exactly what I'm feeling, and if I'm unable to, I explain it.

For this particular point though, again, I feel like I failed to clarify a broader point that I was making that ultimately amounts to the fact that I sort of agree with you here. It makes my skin crawl that 'they', 'them', and 'their' have been have been adopted as would-be non-binary gender pronouns. Part of this is because, as I've stated, I don't view 'he' and 'she' as being gender pronouns. The other part is because, until somewhat recently, those were viewed as being plural pronouns. Not sure if you read my introduction post, but I cannot let myself accept an individual as being plural. Just can't do it, lol. The part that I agree with you on to an extent is that the 'closest to exact' ideal that I strive for isn't readily available in a lot of gender related instances (the areas of the spectrum we don't have terms for). But I don't think that means people should appropriate other terms and pretend that the mean something that they don't rather than helping our language to evolve and creating accurate terminology instead.

I have read 1984. It's on my all-time favorite books list. But I disagree with the notion that people are incapable of thinking thoughts that words don't exist for, especially given that rebellion was one of the central themes of the book. In fact, your explanation of areas of a spectrum that there are not terms for kind of rejects that concept as well.

I absolutely agree that more clearly defined terminology for sex and gender would be helpful moving forward, but I still maintain that people improperly using sex terms as gender terms presently does not just make them so.