> I don't think this is true at all. I actually think the population that really believes there is some abstract distinction between gender and sex is relatively a tiny minority, mostly in Western nations.
The opening paragraph literally says, "The modern terms and meanings of transgender, gender, gender identity, and gender role only emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, opinions vary on how to categorize historical accounts of gender-variant people and identities."
Applying these labels to historical peoples is projection at best. The whole problem with "gender" is that it is either undefined or it has no universal definition, therefore it's meaningless to apply it historically.
To say someone was "gender-varying" at the time is to say they didn't conform to the typical roles associated with their sex in that culture, because there was no notion of gender as we know it, nor is there even a universal definition of gender that we can apply retroactively.
> To say someone was "gender-varying" at the time is to say they didn't conform to the typical roles associated with their sex in that culture[...]
You agree that similar concepts have existed across the globe and in other eras, but want to have a semantic (and convenient for your argument) position that there must be a universal definition for some reason. Are there any societal or cultural concepts that actually do have a universal definition?
I’ve lost interest in the “obv gender equals sex, because sex defines gender” nonsense, but your question is interesting.
Murder comes to mind, but lots of asterisks there (it’s not murder if it’s an honor killing). I’m hard pressed to think of universal mores. Respect for elderly maybe? Or unacceptability of theft?
> You agree that similar concepts have existed across the globe and in other eras, but want to have a semantic (and convenient for your argument) position that there must be a universal definition for some reason.
I don't think I did. I said historians noted that cultures often had roles and duties divided along sex lines, but that some people did not strictly conform to those divisions of labour. In what way does that entail that they had some notion of gender that was abstracted from sex?
> Are there any societal or cultural concepts that actually do have a universal definition?
Law. Government. Trade. Religion. Gods. These all have a definition by which we can look at a system and say, "that was a religious belief", or "that was not a law but a local custom", "this was a deity they worshipped". They're not "universal" in the sense that they are identical in all cultures, they are universal in the sense that you can look at the definition and use that definition to classify cultural characteristics in a meaningful way.
My understanding is that it is not entirely Western nations and not even all that modern of an idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history