I'm not an expert. But I believe it is something to do with information redundancy.

If you mishear a word but surrounding words must match gender and number, you may reconstruct the misheard word.

As a native spanish speaker, I don't think of the actual sexuality of objects, it's just a characteristic of the word that should match other words in the sentence. For example the word screen (pantalla) is femenine, and the word monitor (monitor) is masculine. So when I see my monitor I don't think of an actual female or male object. But the nouns should match adjectives gender, so if someone says "broken monitor" (monitor roto) or "broken screen" (pantalla rota) I have this kind of redundancy if I misheard a word.

But I'm not an expert of linguistics. Don't quote me.