My own intuition, which I don’t really believe that strongly and would like to find an alternative for, is that grammatical gender is simply left over from prehistoric cultures that had an animist worldview. Everything actually had gender in these cultures because it was believed that spirits of one sort or another resided in all objects. (The calling a boat “she” example a commenter brought up is kind of a holdover of this — boats are so enduring and possessing of distinct, almost personality-like qualities that this primitive urge within us comes forth even today.)

We still have gender in English with pronouns and posessive pronouns, even with inanimate objects. Now, we know that a boat really isn’t male or female, so it should be a neuter gender, but we always refer to a boat or ship in the feminine: “She’s a good boat, and she’ll always bring you back to port safely.” Animals do have gender, but if we don’t know the gender of a specific individual we use the neuter: “The bear went back to its den” but “The bear charged us because she thought we were a danger to her cubs.”

Perhaps wisely (unlike me), the Good Doctor did not tread on the dangerous ground of Politically Correct Speech, and the abominations it dropped on the language in an attempt to rid English of the use of masculine words and the use of masculine terms when gender is not specified (inherited from Latin as I recall), replacing them with gender-neutral concoctions such as “chairperson” (Hey, isn’t “son” a masculine word, too? What do they propose to use instead of “person?” Perdaughter? Perchild? “Mr. Chairperchild, I move that we appoint a woman, I mean, a perchild of the feminine gender, as Chairperchild of the Committee for the Perpetuation of Language Correction.”). Now, I’m as enlighted as any other middle-of-the-road Philistine, but whenever I saw “Madame Chairwoman” I was sorely tempted to drop the “i” out of the word, just to tweak the Devil’s tail. :-Þ