>>13578451First of all, thanks for putting thought into an argument instead of insults!
I'm definitely with you that there's something fishy going on in the sex/gender distinction, but where we'd probably disagree is what exactly the problem is and what to do about it.
So there's both a biological and a social dimension to sex/gender: there are the biological differences which you point out, and there's the various ways people understand and relate to those biological differences. Now I don't think you can tear these two aspects apart into the neatly separated concepts of sex and gender without foreclosing all understanding of how the biological and the social are intertwined. What ends up happening is that this distinction splits the world in two and makes one part superior to the other: Money enforced the superiority of gender over sex to violent ends.
However, I don't think you can safely uphold the superiority of sex over gender either. You say that before the 20th century sex was purely a biological category and that "man" and "woman" were always biological. I would say that before the 20th century, sex was BOTH a social and a biological category, because no one felt the need to make that division. For example, the category "woman" referred both to the biological equipment, but also to woman's place in the family and how women ought to behave.
>"Would you be willing to be in a romantic relationship with a woman?"I agree with you that any pre-modern man would assume biological component of womanhood here. But he would also assume the social component: having a woman meant having someone who would be submissive, would be willing to help raise children etc. If you asked him "How about a butch lesbian?" he will say no because that's not what came to mind when you say "woman". This is why some say that lesbians aren't women.
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