Grammatical Gender

Everything from the symbols that form alphabets and words to the association of the same sound or written word with different concepts is a manifestation of how language is not something with intrinsic word-concept associations, but something invented by beings for communication.  It is not necessary to know words in order to think or grasp the laws of logic; an arbitrary social construct used to achieve the one primary goal of conveying thoughts and concepts from one person to another.  Still, irrational people might allow themselves to be tossed to and fro by emotional and social connection with words instead of looking past words to reason and concepts themselves.

One way some languages can trap people in such irrelevant or secondary things--again, only because they allow themselves to be irrational no matter how strong their social conditioning is--is grammatical gender.  On its own, grammatical gender is the pointless but not necessarily sexist association of some words for mostly non-living things like houses or cups with "masculine" or "feminine" phrasing.  Not present in languages like English, this linguistic phenomenon is yet another wholly arbitrary side of language.  Grammatical gender, however, could be mistakenly treated as evidence or proof (as if it is in any way relevant to the hopelessly doomed attempt to philosophically "support" gender stereotypes) that there are nonphysical differences between men and women in personality, intellect, priorities, and desires.

Languages such as Spanish do contain grammatical gender, but only as a random way of grouping nouns that is, of course, pointless and arbitrary, not to mention potentially misleading.  It would be like if someone called some random nouns theistic when they have no actual ideological connections to theism specifically and some random nouns atheistic when they have nothing to do with philosophical atheism or with the belief in or truth of any particular worldview.  Why the hell would anyone want or need to do this?  There is no practical or abstract reasoning do this besides sheer arbitrary preferences.  Tables do not have a gender, just as books, vehicles, and countries do not.

Neither, as I have extensively addressed, is it even logically possible for someone's gender, their genitalia or chromosomes, to prove or even suggest that they have certain moral standing, intellectual traits, personality traits, talents, motivations, or longings--because there is no metaphysical connection between these things that means the latter is tied to the former, which is in turn because it does not logically follow from having a body with a particular appearance or function that one has specific psychological traits.  In fact, it is true by logical necessity that one man's or woman's personality (and motivations, and so on) are not one way just because the personality of another man or woman is.

That this issue, the metaphysics and epistemology of gender, is not related to the phrase grammatical gender shows just how pathetically as arbitrary words really are: that there are words referring to things other than male or female humans/animals termed with the word "gender" reflects an almost asinine use of the word.  No, it is not automatically sexist to refer to grammatical gender as long as one recognizes the difference between words for random linguistic categories and the psychological traits that gender stereotypes falsely assign to men and women rather than individual people.  As is obvious to any thoroughly rational person who contemplates the matter, though, it is objectively unnecessary and pointless at best for people to construct languages to have grammatical gender, and at worst it is completely irrational for some people to actually believe that certain non-living things could possibly be something that nonexistent male or female personality traits make people gravitate towards.