&gt; The first thing you need to do is realize that grammatical gender has nothing to do with actual gender or lack thereof.<p>And, more fully, realize that none of these four things are different axis of variation: grammatical gender, biological sex, socially-ascribed gender, personal gender identity.<p>Most importantly, the first two things are different <i>kinds</i> of things from each other and the last two things (the last two are closely related, and there is very good reason to try to align them; alignment between grammatical gender and gender identity can be important <i>instrumentally</i> to that goal, however, especially in contexts where there is an established expectation of alignment between socially-ascribed gender and grammatical gender, since then a divergence between gender identity and grammatical gender used communicates and reinforces the divergence between ascribed gender and gender identity.)