This was such a great read. I am not a linguist, let alone a philologist, but I had this thought.
The modern use of "gender" to mean social aspects of sex (or sex) and the historical use of "gender" to mean sex are still actively used. In a very real sense, these are exclusive and oppositional categories, so any ambiguous use of "gender" in contemporary English should be interpreted as auto-antonymal use. That is, depending on what the speaker means, their meaning could be interpreted in exactly the opposite way.
Auto-antonyms are rare in English, but the obvious ones (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym#Examples) do not cause confusion. I would suggest that outside of specific professional settings—philosophy, biology, medicine, linguistics—"gender" is almost exclusively an auto-antonym. Perhaps this contributes to the nearly impossible discourse on the subject.
The modern use of "gender" to mean social aspects of sex (or sex) and the historical use of "gender" to mean sex are still actively used. In a very real sense, these are exclusive and oppositional categories, so any ambiguous use of "gender" in contemporary English should be interpreted as auto-antonymal use. That is, depending on what the speaker means, their meaning could be interpreted in exactly the opposite way.
Auto-antonyms are rare in English, but the obvious ones (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym#Examples) do not cause confusion. I would suggest that outside of specific professional settings—philosophy, biology, medicine, linguistics—"gender" is almost exclusively an auto-antonym. Perhaps this contributes to the nearly impossible discourse on the subject.