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[quote=Anonymous]Hey OP, I hope this doesn't sound too pedantic, but here goes.

Most trans language stuff is an ongoing attempt to describe real people-- it's not something like physics or engineering where you start with solid theoretical principles that the real world examples are built from and follow.  You're not wrong that the reality is a little more complicated.

When you talk about having it beaten into our heads that sex and gender are different, you're talking about a push to get trans awareness into the general public.  That was also shaped by arguments against trans people being allowed to legally transition, or live publicly as their transitioned genders, rather than being dumped back into the legal/social categories of their birth sex.

The argument there was that it was impossible to change sex or gender-- "You can take whatever pills and have whatever surgery you want, but you were born [whatever] and you'll always be one, changing your sex isn't real, you will never be a [woman, man] and you shouldn't be able to live as one socially or legally."  The best way to explain trans people in social terms and in the eyes of the law was to say that, yes, these people had a birth sex of M/F,  but their gender identity was something different that wasn't defined by their body parts, chromosomes, or what they looked like when they were born.

When you get a little closer, it turns out that many and probably, statistically, most people want their sex and gender to match, and they want those things to match up in ways that follow cisgender M/F patterns: most men don't want breasts; most women do.  Why?  We don't really know yet, A lot of trans people feel like it's something neurological or biochemical (there have been some interesting studies around fetal androgen exposure and phantom limb stuff in adults) but the science isn't there yet.

So a more accurate thing to say would probably be something like, your birth sex doesn't determine your gender, but the majority of people want their sex and their gender to match up, whether that's through birth or medical means, although not all people feel this is necessary.  There's still a wide spectrum of what physical changes trans people do or don't want. But the original "sex and gender are totally different" line was something that's true, but also only broadly true, and meant to get people who didn't understand how trans people could exist at all over that first basic road bump.

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