you agree that "gender" as distinct from "sex" doesn't correspond to anything
Nope. I think it corresponds to different things in different contexts. (So the rest of your paragraph is addressing an irrelevant strawman.)
This is looking like a distinction without a difference.
The word "big" corresponds to different things in different contexts. (A big baby. A big skyscraper. A big problem.) Is "big" meaningless?
The majority of the population can be divided neatly into two fairly well defined groups according to anatomy, chromosomes, etc. We call that "sex". There are social and psychological differences that mostly go along with sex, but diverge in some cases. We call those "gender". In both cases, exactly which features we care about most will vary, which may change how some unusual peop...
There are some long lists of false beliefs that programmers hold. isn't because programmers are especially likely to be more wrong than anyone else, it's just that programming offers a better opportunity than most people get to find out how incomplete their model of the world is.
I'm posting about this here, not just because this information has a decent chance of being both entertaining and useful, but because LWers try to figure things out from relatively simple principles-- who knows what simplifying assumptions might be tripping us up?
The classic (and I think the first) was about names. There have been a few more lists created since then.
Time. And time zones. Crowd-sourced time errors.
Addresses. Possibly more about addresses. I haven't compared the lists.
Gender. This is so short I assume it's seriously incomplete.
Networks. Weirdly, there is no list of falsehoods programmers believe about html (or at least a fast search didn't turn anything up). Don't trust the words in the url.
Distributed computing Build systems.
Poem about character conversion.
I got started on the subject because of this about testing your code, which was posted by Andrew Ducker.