Non-binary option for characters, please?

[Iscah]

My simple understanding of how the terms work is that when you need to differentiate between a person's biological sex and mental gender, you use those terms and they have separate meanings. But in other contexts, where you don't need that distinction, they can mean the same thing. Possibly because "gender" is seen as a more 'polite' word than "sex".

I have a 1964 Oxford dictionary (it's wonderful for looking up the obscure words the game likes to throw at us) and it defines gender as: "grammatical classification (or one of the two, or three, classes) of objects roughly corresponding to the two sexes & sexlessness (masculine, feminine & neuter; see also common(1), epicene), (of nouns and pronouns) property of belonging to such class, (of adj.) appropriate form for accompanying a noun of any such class; (joc.) sex."

Meanwhile, the definition of sex is "being male or female or hermaphrodite" (plus a lot of phrase examples I won't type out, but that's the core of it).

So at that point in time, gender is a grammatical concept, equateable to but not primarily used with the same meaning as sex (except as a 'jocular' term - "mirthful or humorous" by the same dictionary's definition!). Which makes sense for things like gendered nouns, which have a gender but not a sex.

It also makes sense that once you need to be able to define someone's mental perception of their sex as separate to their physical form, that grammatical concept of gender can be repurposed for that meaning. "This person's gender is feminine, she should be referred to with female pronouns." (Don't quote me on that, I'm just guessing. It's too late at night here to keep researching.)