Would that be a common usage, and mind providing the cite?
I realize I come to these from a Spanish POV, but the extension of gender to mean sex is something I’ve experienced firsthand in English, and the usage of both terms when referring to sex appears to vary a lot by location.
Are muerte and gente supposed to end in -a now?
Sorry, I meant do you have a cite for the assertion that grammatical gender has nothing to do with biological sex.
It may be worth noting that ancient Roman grammarians had a very sophisticated understanding of grammar, comparable to modern understanding, and ancient Sanskrit grammarians even more so.
In Sanskrit the words for gender used by the ancient grammarians are पुंलिङ्ग puṃliṅga, स्त्रीलिङ्ग strīliṅga, and नपुंसकलिङ्ग napuṃsakaliṅga, which clearly and explicitly mean male sex, female sex, and neither. Puṃliṅga and strīliṅga can also mean the male and female sexual organs, and napuṃsakaliṅga can also mean eunuch or hermaphrodite.
In Latin, the word for ‘gender’ is ‘genus’, which primarily means ‘type or kind’, but there were extensive debates even in the ancient Roman world as to whether masculine or feminine gender were related to male and female sex.
See this scholarly paper
Genus quid est? Roman Scholars on Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex [PDF]
From the summary:
At this point, simply read this thread. While there is conflation of grammatical gender and biological sex in some languages, it is not a general characteristic.
Good point — I tried to squeeze too much into that sentence. It seems a class of abstract-nouns-from-verbs developed as a special case of “inanimate,” and also neuter (inanimate) plurals (with a similar, but collective, sense). Only later were all these thought of as sharing the quality “femininity” — and that was because of an urge to neatly agree with a certain demonstrative pronoun.
In other words, it was the PRONOUNS/ARTICLES (all meaning roughly “this,” “that,” or “the”) that first organized themselves into neat classes resembling modern “masculine,” “feminine,” (and “neuter”), and speakers felt compelled to complete the organization of nouns, to harmonize with them!
(Traces of the DIFFERENT* demonstrative pronouns for animate and inanimate are still in some IE languages, e.g. Greek with *ho, he, * and to. *not just like “el” and “la,” but truly different words).
Couldn’t you say that there’s traces of that in English, too, in “who” vs. “that”?
English grammar has been getting steadily simpler over the centuries.
In Old English (Anglo-Saxon) all nouns had the three standard IE genders - masculine, feminine, and neuter. Nouns were inflected in five cases. Adjectives agreed with nouns in case, number and gender. Verbs had conjugations. First and second person personal pronouns had dual forms as well as singular and plural. Etc.
Middle English (from the Norman conquest to about 1500) became steadily much simpler, and modern English has continued that process.
According to who? 
Makes me think of this bit illustrating the absurdity of German’s gender-based nouns:
**Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print – I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:
Gretchen: Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
Wilhelm: She has gone to the kitchen.
Gretchen: Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?
Wilhelm: It has gone to the opera.**
– “The Awful German Language,” by Mark Twain
In Algonquian languages, the “genders” are animate and inanimate. Basically one gender for people and animals, and the other for everything else.
In Dravidian languages, they have masculine, feminine, and neuter, but masculine and feminine are only for men and women. Everything else is neuter.
Indo-European and Semitic are the only families that assign so-called masculine and feminine to objects. Most language families get by without any grammatical genders or other morphological noun classes at all.
On the other hand, markings for semantic gender to denote male and female beings exist pretty much anywhere, but they do not trigger morphological agreements the way grammatical gender does. In English, the -ess ending of “waitress” is purely semantic, because no other words have to match it, except “she.” But then “she” can just as well be used for an accountant or scientist or women in any occupation regardless of marking on nouns. Apart from he, she, and it, English has no trace of its original grammatical gender, so the gendered pronouns are grammatically orphaned and can only serve semantic purposes.
As colibri noted, Spanish does have gendered pronouns (el/ella, nosotros/nosotras etc). Maybe what you were getting at was something that English people often find confusing with Spanish, French etc: that possessive pronouns and (some) possessive adjectives are gendered, but they agree with the gender of the object, rather than the gender of the owner.
So whereas in English we would say “that house is his” for a man’s and “that house is hers” for a woman’s, in Spanish it would always be “esa casa es la suya”, or “ese coche es el suyo”, no matter whether it was a man’s or a woman’s. Likewise you’d say “vuestra cabeza”, but “vuestros ojos” to either a man or a woman. French is similar, so both “son” and “sa” mean both “his” or “hers”, depending on the gender of the noun, not the owner.
What seems to have happened with English is that the use of the suffixes for gender dropped completely (apart from him, his,her, hers … well they are probably not suffixes any more. ) Other gender based grammer for non-gender things was dropped due to the confusion over the different languages. Do we use the latin declensions or the french ??.. well hang it, don’t use any.
What happened with high german was that the gender thing got removed from most declensions, but add/strengthened in the word “the”. One would think this was due to the impossibily large list of gender exceptions due to imports and mixing of accents , different words from different languages, and declension tables being imported and overlayed too. To avoid confusion, they made the gender explicit before each noun with grammar for “the”/“a”… Evidence… where its important to have gender in the declension is in the 2nd declension… So that a servant is a male servant or a female servant…and so its only the 2nd declension with gender in it. Suggesting that the confusion resulting from not having gender in the other declensions is balanced, perhaps by grammar experts deciding to do so, by explicit gender in the article words for the non-named 2nd (“accusitive declension”) nouns.
Johanna writes:
> . . . Indo-European and Semitic are the only families that assign so-called masculine and feminine to objects. . .
To nitpick, Semitic isn’t a family. It’s one branch of the Afroasiatic language family, and some non-Semitic languages within the Afroasiatic family assign so-called masculine and feminine to objects. And before someone nitpicks what I wrote, I’ve noticed that sometimes it’s spelled “Afroasiatic” and sometimes it’s spelled “Afro-Asiatic”:
Well, “who” is from the basic interrogative/relative pronoun *kwo-.
I was referring to two different demonstrative pronouns:
-
PIE *so, *seh (Greek ho “he, that” and he “she, that”), which gave us English the.
-
PIE tod (Greek to* “it, that”), which gave us English that.
So, you’re right, there are traces in English, but in the and that, not who and that.
(English *he *and she are from yet another PIE pronoun, the deictic *ki- (“this,” “here”).
Actually, for a native speaker not translating from English, 99% of the time it would be ésa es su casa or ése es su coche. The only time your examples would be used as translated would be for something along the lines of “no, no, that one is not her house; that other one is” (no, no, ésa no es su casa; esa otra casa es la suya). And if you’re using vuestros for a man, the 16th century wants you back.
And please, I realize hunting down the tildes can be a pain, but in a case when we’re talking about Spanish grammar, it really should have been él/ella. El is an article. Or just avoid that particular pair.
If I was you, I wouldn’t go there. 
I wasn’t referring to the interrogative pronoun. I meant the sense in which it’s almost interchangeable with “that”, like in “I’m looking for the man who shot my pa”.
That’s a relative pronoun.
Actually, reading more carefully, the OED tends (somewhat ambiguously) to support your view that the modern use of “gender” for sex is recent.
Under the heading “gender” we have:
3. Sex. Now only jocular.
[This is where we see the early examples from the 14th to 19th centuries.]
b. In modern (esp. feminist) use, a euphemism for the sex of a human being, often intended to emphasize the social and cultural, as opposed to the biological, distinctions between the sexes.
[Here, the earliest example is from Alex Comfort’s Sex in Society (1963), referring to both gender and sex: “The gender role learned by the age of two years is for most individuals almost irreversible, even if it runs counter to the physical sex of the subject.”]