And German still has those genders, and as you rightly said, they have nothing to do with gender identity.
The only issue here is gendered pronouns and other forms of address that rely on the gender of the person being discussed. Nobody cares whether a table is masculine or feminine, but they do care whether your parent’s sibling is a male or female because in many languages, there’s no word to eliminate that information. That’s the issue here, and the solution isn’t to rewrite the entire concept of gender in languages, but instead to introduce and popularize genderless pronouns and titles. I know I hate saying “how many uncles and aunts do you have,” especially since I know that doesn’t necessarily cover all of the person’s parents’ siblings. Give me words like “cousin” so I don’t need to separate people by gender in casual conversation unless it’s actually relevant.
And German still has those genders, and as you rightly said, they have nothing to do with gender identity.
The only issue here is gendered pronouns and other forms of address that rely on the gender of the person being discussed. Nobody cares whether a table is masculine or feminine, but they do care whether your parent’s sibling is a male or female because in many languages, there’s no word to eliminate that information. That’s the issue here, and the solution isn’t to rewrite the entire concept of gender in languages, but instead to introduce and popularize genderless pronouns and titles. I know I hate saying “how many uncles and aunts do you have,” especially since I know that doesn’t necessarily cover all of the person’s parents’ siblings. Give me words like “cousin” so I don’t need to separate people by gender in casual conversation unless it’s actually relevant.