Question: I've been taught that a *child* is gender-neutral noun. But in the textbook on linguistics I've been reading, the noun is used as feminine. For example, a sentence in the book goes like this:

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> The child must also learn many aspects of grammar from her specific linguistic environment.
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> 
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Is there an explanation for the use of the pronoun *her* instead of *its*?

Answer: 
English doesn’t have “grammatical” gender at all, not even for *he*, *she*, or *it*. The “gender” *he*, *she*, and *it* refer to the actual, real-world gender of the antecedent, not its grammatical gender. In general, one would use the word *she* for *child* because this particular child is female.

Even in cases such as this, where there is no actual person (or there are several people, in a mix of genders, and the text is referring to any one), the language still refers to the hypothetical “example person” as a person, with a gender. The pronouns used, therefore, reflect the gender of the example person. Again, this is not grammatical gender.

In the past, as a matter of convention, “the example person” was always male, and thus *he* was used as a pronoun for the example person. More recently, the example person will sometimes be written as female, that is, with *she*. Some authors will also use both roughly equally (though they can only switch when introducing a new example person; for clarity, any person who is supposed to be some consistent example individual could not switch genders).

The reason for this is simple: by having the example person consistently be male, you give the impression that all of the people involved are male. It has not always been clear when male was chosen by convention, or because the individual under discussion actually is expected to be male. Switching to female does not fix the ambiguity, but at least it makes things more even: by having *everything* use male examples, it gives the impression that men do *everything*.

Finally, *it* is not gender-neutral, it is the gender-specific pronoun for the neuter gender, that is, the gender of inanimate objects. It is almost-always inappropriate, if not exceedingly offensive, to refer to a person with *it* as it implies that he or she is not a person, or not even a living thing.
The word *child* is indeed gender-neutral. In fact, really English as a whole doesn't have grammatical gender. All that matters is the gender of the actual person that it is referring to.

If the child being referred to is a boy, then you use *he*. If the child is a girl, you use *she*.

If the writer is not really referring to a specific child (as in this example), then you have a problem. Traditionally, writers used the male *he*. In modern English, that implies that all children are male unless otherwise specified, which smacks of sexism. Some use the wordy *he or she*. Others use just *she*, as a sort of corrective to centuries of assuming maleness. Still others borrow *they* to refer to a single generic person.

Of course, it's also possible to rewrite the sentence in the plural.