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When I first learned English in school (almost 40 years ago) I was told that very young babies were grammatically neuter. Now I never hear anyone using “it” for a baby. Has English changed in the last decades, or was my teacher wrong?

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I was loudly corrected on this subject (that is, I had used "it," and he asserted that I was wrong) by a drill instructor in Marine Corps basic training a little more than a decade ago.

I'm not quite sure how much credence to give his opinion considering that his expertise was in pain, misery, and shooting guns rather than linguistics and grammar, but he certainly had strong beliefs on the subject, and I wasn't going to try to convince him otherwise.

It can be considered an insult to get the sex of a baby wrong because males are generally considered more valuable than females. It's socially better the refer to an infant as inanimate than to mistakenly refer to a male child using the female gender. That said, as soon as one knows the correct sex (often indicated by the colour of cloth used in swaddling or clothing, or other markers like design patterns of trucks or ponies, as appropriate) it's important to start using the corresponding grammatical gender otherwise the early indoctrination lacks the enforcement required for a lifetime of identity with arbitrary social constructs like masculinity and femininity.

It's not a grammar rule, it's a social rule.

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