Its use when referring to animals. Many languages have features of grammatical gender in general which has a specially humanizing effect on discussions about animals, even when their biological gender has nothing to do with it.
That exerts a lot of ideology on communication, which has far-reaching effects. Simple examples:
- a human can only be talked about in the context of his gender; - humans are talked about differently than any other object. Human-centricity is just the most basic example of that.
You could come up with many examples, and that's just how we refer to objects without the context of their unique identifications. Then there's the whole nouns-verbs model of language, which has a far bigger effect on how we see the world and reason about it.
No. Male and female anything fall under the first two. For example, when we talk about our dog, we say "He's a good boy". People use he or she for animals too.
> Not long ago even children were "it"s, I believe.
We use it for 'gender neutral'. For example, when my sister was pregnant, everyone used 'it' to refer to the baby. "I can't wait for it to be born". "I wonder what it's gender will be". Once people discovered the gender, we used he or she.
> - a human can only be talked about in the context of his gender;
This is simply not true. Ask anyone with a dog or a cat.
It's so funny how people with agendas are. Languages with gendered everything like spanish is attacked for gendering everything. And languages with a sensible gender system is attacked for not gendering everything. Seems like there are too many useless people with too much time on their hands.
Whether the language used to describe this idea is important remains to be seen. Saphir-Worth's linguistic hypothesis has not been proven and is probably false as the afte many ways to have a reasonably complete map of the world in many languages.
Do you agree that the English language imposes an opinion about what's important and what kind of categories of objects there are in the world? That's what I'm saying. English is just an example. The principle of looking at human language as a tool is the same for all languages, so if it's your native tongue don't be offended.
To restate what I said, why are there these three top-most categories -- he, she, it? Is that ideal? How cognisant are we of the effects of this choice?