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the problem, first of all, is that words do not simply “mean things”
“even when we would like them to, from which we can infer that words are mean things” (thank you unnamed friend for this banger)
@hikari I'm totally on board with that.
Sentences mean things, paragraphs means things, documents and books mean things, but words on their own receive meaning either by their interaction with other words, or by situational context (which is often just interaction with implied words).
Also, this is what I mean when I say "a dress is just a word." Even though it's not a word at all, it is part of the figurative "vocabulary" from which gender expression is constructed, rather than being a piece of gender expression in itself.