Yes but 'sex being on a spectrum' was when I was 14 in 1972 and knowing trans people is from a couple of years ago but you have conveniently put the two at the same time, are you a Journalist?
Nobody will convince me that humans aren't on some spectrum between male to female and the clincher was when a baby nephew came into the fold that we looked after nearly daily.
From a baby he was different, very gentle and he would always go for stereotype female toys no matter how many times we would lead him with stereotype male toys & behaviour, anyway, he is the family member that is transgender. We all tried so hard to take female traits out of him with no luck and it wasn't a surprise when he eventually announced it.
You are mistaking sex and gender. You are aware that it's stereotyping - you used the word yourself.
"Female traits" would be things like ovaries, fallopian tubes, certain aspects of pelvis shape. Arguably things like breast size, some aspects of skull shape, relative density of body hair.
Things like preference in toys is a gender trait, not a sexual one. There are no "female toys" other than sex toys specifically designed for women and that's clearly not what you meant. You stated yourself that they are "stereotype female toys", not "female toys". So you're aware that they are gendered, not sexed, and that there's a difference between the two. Yet for some reason you're ignoring what you know and claiming that sex and gender are the same thing when they're so obviously not. Doing so serves no purpose other than imposing sexist stereotyping even more strongly that it was at any point in the past.
I'll pick Mary Somerville as an example...
She was born in 1780 in Scotland. She had a strong talent for maths and a great interest in it. Also pretty much every aspect of science (which wasn't called science at the time, but the idea existed even though the word didn't) and much else besides, but especially maths. In those days, especially amongst the upper classes, maths was considered a masculine area of knowledge. Sometimes extremely strongly so. Her parents tried to stop her learning maths because they thought it was a serious risk to her sanity, health and even her life. Other people disagreed and tutored her, in one case at considerable risk to himself. When she reached adulthood and had her own money, things became easier. She did what would now be called networking, developing a social/professional connection with various mathematicians, scientists and engineers. All of whom were men. They were rational people - they knew that it was very unusual for a woman to work in those areas but they didn't conclude that it was wrong solely because it was unusual. Those fields were very masculine, which simply means they were very strongly associated with male people. At that time, in that place. Gender is a statistical term, not a biological one, and is usually just a matter of fashion. So her areas of intellectual interest were very masculine, which was unusual but didn't make her wrong. Nor did it make her a failure as a woman, or even unfeminine in other ways.
However, pretending that sex and gender are the same thing would require believing that she was exactly that - a failure as a woman because she was male in the head. It would mean requiring her to say she was a man in order to be allowed to have "male" interests. It's just not right. People were more enlightened about sex and gender in early 19th century Britain. We shouldn't be trying to make that worse today than it was then, to impose stereotyping more rigidly.
