When I grew up, the 2 words were synonyms.
You had to have grown up in idiot land if you didn’t understand the distinction between gender and sexuality.
I doubt that: perhaps in colloquial/vernacular language, which often conflates the meaning of separate terms, rendering them vague and/or ambiguous. Street slang is not Standard English.
Many languages actually have more than the three genders of Standard English. All Homo sapiens have two sexes.
When I was a boy, I received a wallet for Christmas. The identity card inside had a space for “Name:”; “Address:”; “Sex:” - not gender. No one I knew ever referred to boy or girl - man or woman - as being of a gender. That came much more recently.
Likewise, biology professors at university in the not-too-distant past would never refer to sex as gender. They knew well that biological sexuality was distinct from any cultural concept of gender.
This is yet another example of leftist ideology subverting society through controlling the language. It is a corollary to Moral Relativism. This is not happening by random chance: Most academics - including those who write and edit dictionaries - are confirmed leftists. They are deliberately altering the language to promote a leftist ideology.
Gone with the Wind speaks of Scarlett O’Hara being “unsexed.” This is not referring to her being androgynous or asexual, but of not acting like an accepted member of her sex: a feminine woman. Though the feminine - not the sexual - was the concern here, the linguistic term for the feminine was emphatically not used.
C. S. Lewis brilliantly uses the two concepts in counterpoint in his Space Trilogy. He was a scholar of literature and language. At one point, he asserts that God the Father is supremely masculine, but not biologically male.
See 46.
You mean "gender" and "sex"?
I guess you didn't study Latin. Or French, or Spanish, or German, or Italian, or pretty much any language other than English ...