For a bit of context: I generally consider gender to be the social/cultural angle on males/females and sex to be the chromosome/physical body angle. (I can get into atypical chromosomes later if anyone wants).

General thoughts

I more or less am indifferent about the idea of gender. I think on one hand, some people are very firm about “This is how men should act, and this is how women should act,” in a traditional sense, while others, in a more modern sense can be equally inflexible in a different way. Ex: “If you exhibit these traditionally feminine or masculine behaviours you should change your gender identity to match them.”

I don’t particularly empathize with either outlook as I feel that any person should do what 1) Makes sense in any individual situation, and 2) Should do what makes sense within their personal tendencies and abilities. For me personally, most talk about gender identity feels unrelatable in its entirety.

That said, by default I recognize “male/female” as sex, and will default to that when talking to someone. If they have an ambiguous look about them or specifically request it, I’ll address them differently. Even if it doesn’t particularly mean anything to me, or can be counter-intuitive to my world-view, I will try to be considerate because I realize it means something to them.

Regarding why we have gender stereotypes, and what genuine differences there are between the male and female sex: I think that because of typical physical differences in the sexes (pregnancy, breastfeeding, muscle mass, height, eyesight and so on) we’ve had a pragmatic division of responsibilities and specialization that tended to make sense along those lines in most cultures. (And it’s likely that this has been a two-way evolutionary balance).

While I think some of the most clear-cut " on average" differences in men and women are in their bodies, the least clear are mental. In a very general sense it’s difficult to evaluate even hard physical things like brain shape/patterns and to be able to claim that culture/social upbringing within a society hasn’t affected those things in some ways. While I’m amenable to there being some differences in the mind, it’s difficult to say what adult brains without the influence of culture (and thus concepts of gender) would look like.

Essentially, my view is that there are some inherent average differences between the sexes that lead to some different, on average behaviours, but that those differences aren’t so strong that we should be heavy-handed about telling people, particularly in a modern non-tribal society, how they should act, or how they should identify. We should let individuals do as they please without having to concern themselves about the idea of being a man or a woman in any way.

I understand a lot of people probably don’t emphatize with my views, but that’s more or less what I think.