[filiphorvat]

>Is there as much of a gender "confusion" (for lack of a better word) in parts of the world that use languages that have gendered nouns?

As someone who speaks a Slavic language with masculine, feminine and neuter genders (Croatian), I've never heard of anyone identifying as non-binary in my language. It'd be extremely difficult because all adjectives and verbs in some tenses change based on the gender of the person in question. Singular they wouldn't work because it's already used to formally refer to someone (similar to German Sie). You'd have to rethink half of the language to not gender someone, which no one is going to do for such a niche problem.

One thing I see Anglophones do when talking about other languages is confuse neuter gender for gender neutral, which equates to calling someone an "it".

>...English doesn't use gendered nouns so maybe we have less deeply entrenched ideas about gender and what is masculine or what is feminine...

That's another thing Anglophones get wrong. At least in my language, when not talking about people, 99% of the time the gender is determined by the ending (suffix?) of the word it's referring to, not some mystical gender role we imbue that object with. When using the word human, the rest of the sentence refers to them as male, whereas if you're using the word person, it'd be female even if you're using them to talk about the same guy.

One other thing is, when referring to a mixed group of people, you use a masculine form of plural, same as "latinos". It REALLY doesn't matter and it only bothers people who don't speak gendered languages.

[graeme]

> It REALLY doesn't matter and it only bothers people who don't speak gendered languages.

May depend on place and culture. I recall my French teacher in 4th grade got snide about this while explaining that even a single man in a group will turn the group masculine. She was francophone.

This certainly bothers anglos much much more though.

[peoplefromibiza]

It doesn't turn the group masculine, it turns the word used to the masculine plural, which is the generic word for a group of people.

But if you take sciences, for example, it's plural feminine in French and Italian.

If you put a masculine discipline in the group, for example "law" which is masculine in Italian (il diritto), the group of disciplines is still referred to as feminine "le scienze"

It's a matter of gender of the plural word, it has nothing to do with biological sex.

[graeme]

Thanks! Good points. I half wonder if my teacher’s grievance didn’t come from living in a majority anglo culture.

[dhosek]

I remember when I realized this learning Spanish that it made me a little sad that I could only ever be part of ellos and not ellas.

[not2b]

At least in Quebec, objection to the use of the masculine form of the plural at some universities led to renaming organizations, to say for example students (female) and students (male). For an example see

https://sogeecom.org/

"Société générale des étudiantes et étudiants du Collège de Maisonneuve"

[names_are_hard]

> One other thing is, when referring to a mixed group of people, you use a masculine form of plural, same as "latinos". It REALLY doesn't matter and it only bothers people who don't speak gendered languages.

This is the traditional rule in Hebrew as well and it most certainly bothers people. Lately I've seen a lot of writing and occasionally even speech that attempts to be gender neutral by using the Hebrew equivalent of "he/she" or "he or she" and sometimes "she or he". Hebrew has a lot more gender than English, so it's pervasive.

For example, at work I might get an email that starts: Dear employees (female suffix) and employees (male suffix)...

P.S. This trend is often associated with a certain popular feminist politician and has been the subject of jokes in political comedy, eg: https://youtu.be/cu3E9Nf_Z6w

[umanwizard]

> For example, at work I might get an email that starts: Dear employees (female suffix) and employees (male suffix)...

This sort of thing is also very common in Spanish, French, and German (at least).

[ravishi]

That resonates a lot with my observations as a native brazilian portuguese speaker. The gender of a thing has to do with how the word ends (o for male, a for female, e and r are a bit more tricky).

Yet we have imported the whole gender neutral language agenda. I find it interesting, because the changes to the language would be way more drastic.