I would wager that it's English's neuter that has actually caused the political strife over gendered language today. The tendency to see all non-living nouns as neuter has made it so that the gender of masculine and feminine nouns has become associated more closely with the actual sex of the object being described. Accordingly, it becomes natural for some to assume that if a masculine word is used about something (e.g. God) then it implies that the object is male, even though grammatically that is not necessarily the case. I've heard people with other languages object that this is not an issue in their language, and I think it's because these other languages do not treat all non-living objects as neuter. For example, the German pronoun man ("one") is seen as avoiding such a problem because it is different from the word Mann ("man"). But really man is still masculine grammatically. The real reason it is not thought of by some as offensive is simply because in German it's common for non-sexed/non-living objects to be masculine or feminine grammatically.
Nope. We have the exact same problem in German, where we have all these gendered nouns. Incidentally, English hasn't completely forgotten those genders, even though they are no longer part of the grammar. There are lots of things you think of as male or female (so use "she" or "he"), usually (or at least in the examples I'm currently thinking of) the same as the French grammatical gender, which is often opposite the German one. So the moon is often a "she", the sun a "he" (German does it the other way around),
We have a equal opportunity Calculus class -- it's fully integrated.
