I’m not unsympathetic to the French attitude here. While I truly love my native tongue, it has to be admitted that English spelling is a mess, and importing English words into various other languages that have their own phonetic logic and structures can in my opinion diminish a language. We tend to take in foreign words whenever and don’t have an official language authority to police the English language, and that is fine, but I don’t see why other countries can’t regulate their own languages.
If English spelling is unphonetic, French is even more so. I believe that Benjamin Franklin tried to devise a way of writing English that was more phonetic than the “standard” of his time. Apparently Chaucer’s dialect of London English was written in a more phonetic manner than modern English, too, although we wouldn’t recognize all the letter uses (e.g. “y” for “long e” in all cases).
I’m not bothered too much by loanwords if there isn’t a native word that is not quite as descriptive. At least English isn’t like Japanese, which has a separate syllabic alphabet for foreign loanwords (katakana) along with a duplicate one for native words (hiragana) and the Han character set (kanji) on top of all that; three parallel writing systems.
Our present form of English is greatly influenced by French, interestingly enough, and results from the Battle of Hastings and the Norman invasion of England.
While the standard complaint is that English is hard to learn because of spelling and pronunciation, having to worry about gender in all aspects of a language makes all the Romance languages more difficult to learn than English, IMO.
But it IS a constant reaffirmation that as long as you need to worry about a French word being masculine or feminine, “transgender words” will have a hard time being accepted!