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Notes -
When I was a kid, I still had French and Latin textbooks that said that "gender" was a technical term in linguistics and genders were groups of things that used the same pronouns, noun declensions, verb conjugations etc. In English, grammatical gender is only relevant to pronouns. But in languages where grammatical gender is a bigger deal, it is obviously a separate concept from biological sex or the social roles around it that managed to acquire the name "gender" in English in the 2nd-wave feminist era. (At least in correct French as promoted by the Academie Francaise, grammatical gender is a property of the noun and does not change based on the biological sex of the referent, hence "Madame le Ministre" as the honorific for a female government minister).
Googling suggests that the technical grammatical sense was the only meaning of "gender" in English in the first half of the 20th century. Resources on both sides of the political fence seem to agree that the modern use begins with notorious genital mutilator and paedophile enabler John Money in the 1950's, so depending on how you define Money's views (I don't recommend going there) there is a pretty strong case that the trans movement was using the term before the feminists were.
I wonder if part of the acceptance of the modern use of "gender" is that educated English-speakers are less likely to be familiar with the grammatical meaning because formal grammar (and particularly formal French or Latin grammar) is no longer taught in schools.
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