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Good_Burning_Plastic comments on Stupid Questions May 2015 - Less Wrong
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I'm not aware of the word "gender" being commonly applied to non-human animals for any concept, other than grammatical gender. You might be thinking of the concept usually referred to as "sex".
If you want to follow that distinction, then I agree that "gender" doesn't point to anything real aside from what is commonly pointed to by the word "sex". Heck when "gender" first became used in its non-grammatical meaning, it was a euphemism for "sex" since the latter had acquired a meaning (as [Edit: an act]) that made it not necessarily SFW.
A pedantic correction: "gender" appears to have had that non-grammatical meaning since the 15th century (and has also had an NSFW meaning as a verb since even earlier) but (if the OED is to be trusted, which usually it is) it's true that "gender" became widely used to mean males/females collectively in the 20th century because "sex" was too distracting. (It wasn't "sex" as a verb, though, but "sex" as a noun meaning "copulation".)