I watched a YouTube debate by Steven Crowder where he went to Austin, TX, and put up a sign that said 'There Are Only 2 Genders: Change My Mind.' Amazingly, I disagree but only in a very small way. I dispute his word usage.
Sex: either of the two major forms of individuals that occur in many species and that are distinguished respectively as female or male especially on the basis of their reproductive organs and structures
Gender: 1) a subclass within a grammatical class of a language that is partly arbitrary but also partly based on distinguishable characteristics and that determines agreement with and selection of other words or grammatical forms.
2) Sex
The English language has three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Whereas languages like Spanish gender most things as either masculine or feminine, English does not. So, the house is neuter in English but la casa is feminine is Spanish. The shoe (neuter) vs. el zapato (masculine). This can get pretty weird with animals. La rana (the frog) is feminine but a male frog would be la rana macho. Gender is primarily a grammatical construct whereas sex is biological.
What if he had said There Are Only 2 Sexes? As it happens, that is what he was arguing since he continually returned to biology rather than grammar. He was using the #2 definition of gender, probably because that is the term used by those arguing in favor of a gender spectrum. The use of gender rather than sex was clearly intentional. Most people look at the terms as interchangeable and that is essentially true through modern usage. However, it is clear that sex is a better choice of words for those arguing against the sex spectrum. Not much spectrum at all if the topic is biology.
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