I like this approach because it is quite disruptive to the framework that you describe, wherein sex and gender can be simplified by understanding them as completely separate, and sex framed as a simple binary. To be clear, this isn’t me saying you’re wrong; I like the phrase “all models are wrong, some are useful”. I also think that the model you describe is also one that I sometimes find useful in talking about this stuff, even if I think it’s an oversimplification. I like things that disrupt this simplicity because I’m a big nerd who also happens to be a scientist in a different side of the life sciences — I used to think of science as something we could apply to the world to get the unruly chaos of life to obey our understanding. Increasingly, I think that we could do with being a bit more humble and realising how many of the things we think we’ve solved actually have hidden layers of complexity. I think this is very cool and exciting, because I am a massive nerd.
This is somewhat of a tangent to your point, but this is a really cool article that looks over how human biological sex is more complex than most realise: https://scatter.wordpress.com/2022/01/30/sex-as-a-social-construct/
I like this approach because it is quite disruptive to the framework that you describe, wherein sex and gender can be simplified by understanding them as completely separate, and sex framed as a simple binary. To be clear, this isn’t me saying you’re wrong; I like the phrase “all models are wrong, some are useful”. I also think that the model you describe is also one that I sometimes find useful in talking about this stuff, even if I think it’s an oversimplification. I like things that disrupt this simplicity because I’m a big nerd who also happens to be a scientist in a different side of the life sciences — I used to think of science as something we could apply to the world to get the unruly chaos of life to obey our understanding. Increasingly, I think that we could do with being a bit more humble and realising how many of the things we think we’ve solved actually have hidden layers of complexity. I think this is very cool and exciting, because I am a massive nerd.