IMO the gender part just became the term because female and male pronouns happen to be separated by many of these systems.

What if nouns were categorised in Welsh (a "gendered" language) by their feline (femme) or canine (masc) traits, or some other arbitrary distinction that was lost over centuries of linguistic shift to align with Anglo-Saxon sexual hierarchies?

It seems small, but subverting the idea of "binary gender" in languages is one of the ways we can give people the language to describe sexuality and gender as a spectrum.

Any linguist chads who know more about why we use "gender" and "masc vs femme" and what people are saying about this in a world where that binary isnt useful anymore?