English stands out among Indo-European languages because it does not have gendered nouns, a feature it lost between the 11th and 13th centuries. About a quarter of the world’s languages, including most of the ones in our language tree, assign an intrinsic gender to nouns. Usually there are two choices, such as masculine and feminine or animate and inanimate. Sometimes there are more than two genders, such as masculine-feminine-neutral or human-animal-inanimate. The split can even be countable-uncountable or rational-irrational.

Though the assigned gender of any noun often seems arbitrary–in French, war is feminine–I’m intrigued by societies that may expect their citizens to think about things being countable or irrational.

Thinking about things being masculine or feminine is pretty natural, though, unless you’re a moon jelly polyp, dividing yourself into boy and girl baby jellies willy-nilly. And when your language includes grammatical gender, the article, pronoun, adverb, adjective, and verb you use may be modified to agree with the gender of the noun, so if you don’t use the right one, you will sound like an idiot, or a child, or, some would say, an American.

In French, feather duster and candlestick are masculine, while clock and teapot are feminine, so Beauty and the Beast got those characters 50% right. German is the same, though some varieties of timing devices can be masculine, feminine, or neutral.

Horse is masculine in French, so if you say, The horse is old, the other parts of the sentence use masculine forms. But what if you say, My horse, Ellie, is old? My online translator kept all the masculinity for that one as well as for My female horse is old, but it could be wrong. I know that Spanish uses gato and gata for male and female cat respectively.

Yes, the Internet can be wrong.

So what’s the point? A lot of the world’s people are thinking about gender every time they talk, whereas in the US it’s Extremely Uncool to even mention it. Ok, maybe just here on the Left Coast. I hear Facebook has 71 gender options in the UK, but only 50 in the US, so is gender an even more sensitive topic in the UK? Google just has male, female, and other, that last one chosen by about 1% of users.

Thank goodness we don’t have to learn grammar to go with each one. They/their/them seems to be acceptable for most non-binary options.

Switching to curmudgeon mode, when I was growing up we had straight, gay, and bi people, the difference being not what gender you are but rather what gender attracts you. There must have been some trans people, but–sadly?–I don’t remember them. There was always a huge range of libido for all categories, but libido level didn’t lead people to question their own gender.

English-speaking people with non-binary gender choices seem keen to be recognized by specific language, and say they feel unsafe otherwise. I wonder if people whose native languages use grammatical gender feel the same way. Might being referred to as him or her seem as arbitrary, and hence unimportant, as any noun gender assignment? Or the opposite: Maybe there a movement to rename M/F grammar classes lark and raven.