“In the journals of the American Physiological Society, gender was first introduced into a title in 1982, whereas sex had been used since the early 1920s. It was not until the mid-1990s that use of the term gender began to exceed use of the term sex in APS titles, and today gender more the doubles that of sex (Table 1).“
Sexologist John Money is often regarded as the first to introduce a distinction between biological sex and gender identity/role in 1955, although Madison Bentley had already defined gender as the "socialized obverse of sex" a decade earlier.
The modern academic sense of the word, in the context of social roles of men and women, dates at least back to 1945, and was popularized and developed by the feminist movement from the 1970s onwards
So there is a starting point of the separating of the words.
I still think it’s very flawed as the fact the separation of gender wasn’t really necessary other than to say you act different than you should