Some languages do have classes of nouns (which might be called genders of nouns) which are partly based on sex and partly based on other distinctions:
Post #12 wasn’t meant so much as a reply to you, Andy, as a general comment about this thread. Languages are a mess. It’s hard to make any sort of overall statement about languages.
Agreed. The more I learn about languages the fewer generalities I can find (other than “languages do a lot of different things, in more different ways than I’d expect”).
The way I’ve heard it is “here”.
To my mother, all dogs take a male pronoun, and all cats a female one.
Your mother as well as any other German speaker.
It’s used quite often when you know of a specific person but not their gender details. For example, “Frank said his cousin was coming into town next week and they need a place to stay.” or “Amy’s boss Sam was really mean to her last week. They really should watch it or Amy’s going to quit soon!”.
For people who profess grammatical discomfort with the singular they, I’ll note that we use it with great frequency on internet forums where we know the handle but not any identifying details of the people we’re interacting with. For example, it would be quite natural for me to say “doreen should edit their post” because I don’t want to assume gender. For genderqueer people you’re interacting in real life, just assume they’re an internet friend, only IRL and the grammar challenges disappear.
Because gender in a grammar sense means “class of word” (not limited to humans or necessarily linked to sex), gender in a sociological sense means “preconceptions based on perceived sex”, and different societies/cultures/languages have different classifications for people.
Exactly, which is why English is very gender neutral relative to most languages, especially the Romance ones (and Germanic, thanks Normans and the great U shift!) I’ve noticed even its pronoun usage is morphing to “they” instead of “he or she” in many instances, especially in the workplace. For example, it’s more common to hear “To the person who cleaned up the kitchen, they really did a good job” or “If anyone has a problem with the new expense report, they can see me for help”.
The “he or she” construct almost seems to sound archaic in professional and college settings these days. I’ve wondered if that’s the result of the past couple of decades of greatly increased gender diversity in those locations, and the convenience of just using the shorter “they” in English speech to be more inclusive.
But that’s neither hir nor they’re as far as mainstream English is concerned.
Admit it, Derleth, you’ve been waiting for the perfect opportunity to spring that, haven’t you?
It’s hard to shed a tir for a pronoun so ill-conceived that no monolingual speaker of English has any way of figuring out how to pronounce it. I can’t say I fir for the language, but I hope something clirer can be found.
It may be historical - I don’t kerr. 
And the “masculine/feminine” divide isn’t the only possible one for grammatical gender: Ojibwe has an “animate/inanimate” divide, Navajo has a continuum of animacy (Human > Infant/Big Animal > Medium-sized Animal > Small Animal > Natural Force > Abstraction), and Russian has a rather more complicated system, because of course.
English has lost all of its purely grammatical gender, so we don’t have a word for “little girl” (Mädchen) which is grammatically neuter, as the Germans do, and as we Anglophones likely would had English kept closer to the basal linguistic form of Old English*, so it’s hard for people who only speak English to grasp the distinction between grammatical gender and natural gender. It isn’t strictly true that natural gender has no bearing on grammatical gender (in Spanish, mujer (woman) is feminine and hombre (man) is masculine, as one would expect) but it’s good to keep the distinction between grammatical and natural gender in mind, especially when someone’s telling you that a table is quite masculine indeed! 
*(Or not. Language evolves in odd ways, sometimes, and I’m sure words can change genders over time.)
I thought it up pretty much on the spot, as a matter of fact.
As a Bengali speaker myself I can say that this is true for the most part but there are some exceptions.
For example, if you say “He/she is beautiful,” in Bengali, the pronoun is genderless but the adjective “beautiful” is gendered.
The Waali language of northern Ghana is mostly genderless. There is a single pronoun for he/she/it and another for they. There are separate words for man and woman, but a single word for child. If you want to say boy you have to say child-man, girl is child-woman.
Their society, on the other hand, generally follows traditional gender roles.
Japanese gets close. There are gendered pronouns, but pronouns (esp. third person) in Japanese aren’t as common, and not all of them are gendered. It’s probably more common to hear some variation of “that person”, the person’s name, or just omitting the subject/object entirely, than any pronouns similar to our he/she/they.
However, Japanese has a lot of words that have implicit or explicit gender, such as a lot of professions or titles with 女 (woman) tacked on somewhere making it a female version (most of this being borrowed from Chinese).
More to the point, it’s a known translation problem that Japanese is so good at unintentionally talking around gender sometimes that translators have to just pick one if there are no official sources detailing what it was supposed to be. I think there have even been cases where translators assumed one and then a sequel made the gender clear and they were stuck in a hard spot, but this was more common a couple decades ago when translators tended to have less contact with the creators.
Note that Japanese is a pretty gendered language to speak, though. It’s easy to talk about someone without mentioning their gender. It’s somewhat more common (especially in fiction) for people to speak or word things in a way that makes their gender really obvious. Japanese has very commonly used gendered first person pronouns of all things. Very subtle things in casual speech can be revealing, such as omitting the copula from a sentence being quite feminine.
It is misleading to say that Japanese has gendered pronouns. There are some eg first person pronouns that a woman would not use but a man would, or that only a social superior would use, or only an old person would, etc., and you could tell a speaker’s sex and so forth by the manner of his or her speech, but this is not due to grammatical gender.
Except that Japanese does have grammatical gender! Sort of. There are dozens of noun classes reflected in counter words: machines are in one category, people in another, thin, flat objects in another, long, thin objects in another, small animals in one, big animals in a different one…
And of course there are words for men vs women, male relatives vs female relatives, etc., but what there isn’t is an Indo-European he/she/it grammatical gender.
The thread isn’t about grammatical gender though, it’s about languages where you’re often gender ambiguous by default when talking about people. Grammatical gender is part of that, but common words that betray gender are as well. You’re correct that strictly speaking I was incorrect in calling them “gendered first person pronouns” but I didn’t know how else to refer to it (“first person pronouns that betray gender”?)
And there are third person gendered pronouns, technically. 彼女 and 彼, though in practice you’re probably more likely to hear them meaning “girlfriend” and “boyfriend”.
This is probably a good place to mention “The Tale of the Fishwife and Its Sad Fate”
Hungarian likewise (from the same Finno-Ugric family). My Hungarian grandmother frequently muddled up English gendered pronouns (him/her etc).
I was always impressed and slightly sceptical with the way every single character (except Dollar Bill) not just immediately accepted this but never stumbled and used a gendered pronoun accidentally, but then it’s a television show, not reality.
Sorry, being dense here. Are you saying that the various counters make a sort of grammatical gender? 
How does counting bottles differently than cans make a grammatical gender? Or am I missing your point?
I’m not sure I agree with the “technically” qualifier. As you state, the terms are used in both senses, as “girlfriend” and “boyfriend” and to refer to males and females in general, although not as frequently as in English. It these terms were never used in the latter case then I could see calling them “technically.”
What DPRK means by “counters” is what’s usually called “classifiers” in linguistics. In languages with classifiers, when you say to a listener that there are X of something, you (for instance) have to insert a classifier to tell what sort of object it is that you’re telling the listener that there are X of. (The following three examples are just an example of what’s done with classifiers.) So in a language with classifiers, to say that there are five cows, you have to say something like “five [animal classifier] cows”. To say that there are twelve pencils, you have to say something like “twelve [long thin object classifier] pencil”. To say that there are eighteen cars, you have to say something like “eighteen [mechanical object classifier] cars”. The range of different classifiers differs in each language with classifiers, and the order of number/classifier/object differs too. This is very strange to anyone who’s never encountered a language with classifiers before, I realize. Here’s a couple of Wikipedia entries you might want to read to understand this:
The point is that classifiers break nouns up into classes just like genders break nouns up into classes. The classes that classifiers break nouns up into sometimes includes having separate classifiers for male and female objects. As I said earlier, languages are a mess. If you haven’t looked at lots of languages, you don’t realize how diverse and contradictory the ways are that languages split up their words.