I remember gender from French class, where nouns would have a gender. Lots of times, that would mean adding an e to a noun.
I was taught in grade school that, in the English language, gender is a term that applies only to PROnouns and there are three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter. When Linda Ronstadt recorded a song titled, “Poor, poor, pitiful me” which contained the line, “He was a credit to his gender” is when I began to notice a trend to use the term gender rather than sex to refer to male or female, the current madness seemed to proceed from that and it really is madness.