@Lynnski I actually don’t recall seeing or hearing the expression “opposite gender” for a while.
Speaking about language, my native language is one where all nouns are gendered. When I’m used to a fact that a chair is male, but a stool is female, it doesn’t seem as important what pronoun I’m called as long as I choose one and stick with it. Mark Twain famously made fun of German language in which “a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has”. So it seems to me we may be paying so much attention to gender language because of peculiarities of English. But I agree that society views on gender play a big part in this, and I suspect that men now have it worse. It’s OK for women to wear dresses or pants, wear makeup or not, stay home with kids or not, but only one choice of each pair is considered “normal” for men.