Spanish is a gendered language: nouns, adjectives, articles and some pronouns are either masculine or feminine. When is not linked to sex, the gender of a word is arbitrary. The gender of a word doens't reflect on what society deems as masculinity and femininity either. For example, the noun mesa (the Spanish word for table) is femenine, but that doesn't mean Spanish speakers think tables are inherently feminine. Hopefully I'm making sense here. I know from talking with English speakers learning Spanish that gender is something they find confusing (gender related mistakes are pretty common among them).

Anyway, all this introduction was to say that I grew up thinking about gender as something purely grammatical. I started hearing about gender as related to feminism sometime about mid 2000's and early 2010's (I can't recall an exact date). Though, likely it was started to be used this way earlier than that, just not as widespread. I didn't think much about it at the beginning. After all, there are many Spanish neologisms derived from English.

However, this past year I have become more and more frustrated with the non grammatical meaning of the word, and the way is conflated with biological sex and how TRA say sexism exist because femininity is underappreciated. That is why I'm trying not to use it when talking in the sub. I'm afraid I don't know what would be the best way to replace gender, though. I've been using sex stereotypes and sex roles, but I realize sex role could be interpreted as reproductive roles (e.g. women are the ones who get pregnant) besides what society expect from each sex (e.g. women should be the ones washing the dishes). I wish I had better answers, but sociology is not my fort.