Also: I was merely using “other side” to refer to my friends who hold a differing opinion. It’s an interesting debate, not a war.
Gender can refer to two different things:
“Ascribed gender”: what bucket (or buckets) of the set labelled “genders” by society does society at large (or, in certain contexts, some defined subset of society other than you yourself) put you in.
“Gender identity”: what bucket (or buckets) of the set labelled “gender” do you yourself feel you belong in.
There is no objective set of traits defining boundaries of gender buckets, no objectively correct number of gender buckets, and no objective need for their to be any set of buckets labelled “gender”. It is all path-dependent social construction that varies by social context and individual.
(“race“ works the same way as “gender” here.)
In the sense that “‘race’ can be substituted for ‘gender’ without loss of accuracy in the description in GP”, not “the dynamics of the degree of social acceptance of divergence between ascribed race and racial identity are identical to those for gender.”