Gender, really, is a linguistics term. It refers to the grammatical form a noun takes in languages where nouns are gendered, which seems to be a whole lot of them. English, indeed, is the outlier here, where the gender the noun takes is synonymous with the sex of the object - masculine/male, feminine/female or neuter/no sex.
I don't know how it is to grow up speaking a gendered language and always to think of a table as feminine or a book as masculine or whatever. It isn't even remotely consistent between languages. How do you switch to the opposite gender for a noun in a language you're learning compared to your native tongue? Is it difficult?
There are always anomalies. Not all languages even have a neuter gender, every damn noun on the planet has to be masculine or feminine. Sometimes weird things happen, such as Mädchen in German (girl) taking the neuter gender (because it's a diminutive and for whatever reason diminutives take the neuter in German. A song I sing has the lines
Dort oben am Berg, in dem hohen Haus,
Da gucket ein fein's lieb's Mädel heraus,
Es ist nicht dort daheime,
Es ist des Wirts sein Töchterlein,
Es wohnt auf grüner Heide.
A sweet lovely girl - it isn't at home here, it is the innkeepers little daughter, it lives on the green meadow.
In Gaelic the word for woman - boireannach - takes the masculine gender. So if, for example, I wanted to say "a good woman" it would be "boireannach math", with the "math" being the masculine form of the adjective. (For a feminine noun it would be "mhath", for example, "a good wife" would be "bean mhath" because "bean" ("wife") does indeed take the feminine gender.) But then if I wanted to say "she is a good woman" it would be "'s e boireannach math a th' innte", with the "innte" part being "she" (in effect), because to say "he is a good woman" would be silly, wouldn't it?
So that's just a sample of how actual gender works, linguistically. The mad TRAs seem to a large extent to be English monoglots and not to understand how other languages work in this respect. I mean, how upset can you get over pronouns in French, given that they seem to agree with the object rather than the subject a lot of the time?
(A guy in a Gaelic class I went to did ask how the language dealt with trans people. I fixed him with a threatening glare and said "just don't go there." Maybe fortunately, covid closed the class down a week later.)
