(I'm new here and this is my first new discussion, so I'm not sure if I've put this in the right category. Mods please feel free to move if necessary / others let me know if I did it wrong.)

So a little background first, I'm some kind of genderqueer/genderfluid/pangender/something, and in trying to put a name to whatever I am over the years, I have long run into conceptual problems with the way the concept of gender is used and overloaded (in the technical sense of applying more than one meaning to a term) in the general discourse, both in trans-inclusive and trans-exclusive communities.

Most of the trans-exclusive communities, your usual cisheteronormative generally right-wing folks, just straight up equate sex with gender, and I don't think I really need to argue much against that view here, I hope, since it's just factually wrong. Gender is defined as something different from sex; if you just want to talk just about sex, we have the word "sex" for that (and even "sex" is a complex thing in need of disambiguation: do you mean chromosomes, hormones, primary sex characteristics, secondary, ...? because those don't all always line up and none of them are strictly binary), and the word "gender" means something else. But what else exactly does it mean?

In trans-exclusive radical feminist communities, and in some parts of academia and elsewhere, they tend to use the word "gender" in the original sense with which it was defined apart from sex, by John Money in 1950, as a social construct. In that sense, gender is something like money (no pun intended). There is nothing intrinsic to gold coins or seashells or any other token of currency that makes it "really" money, something that could be found via an empirical investigation of the currency itself. Something is only money to someone, and in saying that it is money to them, we're really saying something about them, not about the currency: we're saying they accept it in trade. If people have an argument over whether something "really is" money, they're really just expressing their differing policies on accepting it in trade: if Tumamate the Chumash tells Cortez the Spaniard that the shells for which the Chumash tribe are named "are money", and Cortez "disagrees", Tumamate is just signalling the fact that his people accept them in trade, Cortez is just signalling the fact that he does not accept them in trade.

Likewise with things like rank and title, or membership in a social clique: people may argue over whether someone is "really" a geek or is "just" a nerd, or dork, or whatever, but there are no objective empirical criteria for inclusion in those social categories, and saying someone's "not a real geek" is merely signalling non-acceptance of them in that category, not actually stating any (even purported) fact about the world. "Gender" in this sense is like that: genders like "man" and "woman", distinguished from sexes like "male" and "female", are social categories into which people can be recognized, but there is no objective reality imparted by that recognition, someone's gender just consists entirely in their being accepted as that gender. "Gender identity", in this sense of the word gender, means the social category that a person thinks of themselves in terms as, and wants others to think of them as, and disagreement about whether someone who identifies as a man or a woman "really is" one is like disagreement about whether someone who identifies as a nerd or a geek "really is" one: there is no reality to it, you're just saying you reject their self-image and don't see them that way. So people aiming to be gendered a particular way, in this sense, have to perform the role and do the presentation well enough to get other people to accept them into the category they want to be seen as, in order to "really be" that gender, because the acceptance is the entirety of the reality of it.

But in a lot of trans-inclusive communities, "gender" has come to mean something else, though it seems almost nobody distinguishes this other sense from the above sense, and arguments between e.g. transwomen and TERFs seem to stem largely from conflation of these two different senses. This newer sense is "gender" as meaning a psychological property of how you feel about the sex of your body, e.g. if you would not feel comfortable with a male body and would feel comfortable with a female body then your "gender" is "woman", if vice versa it's "man". I think that this is a very important property to keep track of, and that it needs to be separated from the above sociological property. It's important to me personally because I really don't give a damn about the sociological property above, I don't care what pronouns people call me by, I wear whatever I like without regard to how it gets me gendered by other people, but I have definite feelings about what I would like my body to be like. But perhaps for a clearer illustration than weird little old me: there are women who wear "men's" clothes and do "manly" things but have clearly feminine physiques and are recognized as woman because of them, basically tomboys. It's easy to imagine a person (and I've met some such people) born with a male body who wants to be that: still dress like a man and do manly thing, but to have a clearly female body.

I've been proposing for a while now that that last property should get a new name different from "gender", and I propose "bearing". Part of that is because gender dysphoria and euphoria are all about this property, the psychological feeling of (dis)comfort in a particular kind of body, and the root "-phor" means "to bear". (And similarly, rather than "transgender", "cisgender", etc, as values for this property, we could use "transphoric", "cisphoric", etc: "bearing across", "bearing to the same side", etc.) Also because "bearing" makes a nice navigational metaphor with "orientation": if you imagine an abstract space of sex characteristics, and a person moving about in that space, their orientation is where in that space they're facing (the type of sex they're looking at), while their bearing is where in that space they're heading (the type of sex they're aiming to be). But also, perhaps as a transitional compromise, we could just disambiguate the word "gender" between all three of these things with qualifiers: "psychological gender" for bearing, "sociological gender" for the original sense of the word, and if we really have to, "physical gender" for sex. The important part, though, is just that we keep these three different things separate: enough people already are getting out the message that the physical and sociological are separate, but I think it would do a lot of good for everyone if we could also keep the sociological and psychological separate.

(I hope I don't need to add this caveat that of course all three may have strong influences on each other, but that's besides the point that they come apart and are not one and the same thing).