Jimmy Higgins said:
Is it? My tomboy / firecracker daughter is mistaken for a boy at times (she doesn't like that), and it is based almost exclusively on her behavior, very energetic and not quiet / refined. Heck, she's been decked out in pink and a skirt and gets called a boy!
Yes, it is. And you are now making the same mistake. The properties used to assess whether a person is a boy need not be the same as the properties that 'boy' refers to, or the properties the term 'boy', by its meaning, attributes when used. The point is that your daughte is not a boy, and the people who mistake her for a boy at times would not classify her as a boy if they had all of the relevant information at their disposal. They would be ready to realize they are mistaken, even if they are speaking NW-English.
Jimmy Higgins said:
In one case at the zoo, we got to the lions and she was roaring and bouncy. The guy next to her says to their own smaller child, 'look at that boy...' She replied, "I'm a girl". The father was taken aback, "But you were roaring..." His entire estimation of my daughter's gender was based on her behavior.
His estimation was about whether your child was a girl or a boy. Is that 'gender'? (I ask because 'gender' seems to be a word of confusion).
That aside, your example illustrates the mistake in Rhea's (and now your) reasoning very well: notice that he used a behavior - roaring - as a means to ascertain whether a person was a boy or a girl, but his assessment was
erroneous, and it would be a mistake to think on the basis of examples like that that the term 'boy' refers to children who roar, or is about whether a child roars. Rather, some people use roaring behavior as an indirect means of ascertaining whether a child is a boy, though they are willing to modify their assessment on the basis of more evidence.
By the way, as one can tell from Metaphor's posts, he is aware of the fact that humans generally can nearly always correctly ascertain the sex of a person without ever looking at the genitals. There is no point in arguing otherwise. What he is saying is that pronouns traditionally refer to sex, not to gender.