And I laugh at the notion of things being assigned a male or female identify in the language.
Old English had genders in nouns. So do all Romance languages (and many non-Romance languages like German). English does as well but to a much smaller degree: for example, steward vs. stewardess are essentially the same noun but written differently based on the gender. A large amount of the gender specific nouns in English have been purged by the feminist movement: fireman vs firefighter, policeman vs. police officer, etc. Spanish is better than most languages that specify gender in that the gender of a noun is almost always determined by its spelling: la guerra, el mundo, las calles, etc. In reality, paying attention to the gender is a trivial act in Spanish. When I studied German I wanted to burn my dictionaries due to the arbitrariness of genders.