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You have to understand that the whole issue surrounding misgendering is hard to grasp when you live in a language where everything has a random gender. It’s hard to find it important when you use the feminine for a table and the masculine for a desk. The whole thing doesn’t really carry weight. Amusingly I think people make it such a big deal in English because it actually matters so little.

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I think perhaps the difference is that while in English it's people that have gender, in German it's the words that have gender rather than the things that the words refer to. Each of these words might refer to the same thing:

* Mench (masculine): human being

* Person (feminine): person

* Geisel (feminine): hostage

* Mädchen (neuter): girl

The pronoun used to refer back to a noun is often the one that matches the gender of the noun rather than the gender of the person that the noun refers to.

(French also has the feminine noun "personne", which I think you can refer back to with the feminine pronoun "elle".)

I'm French and I have yet to meet someone who consciensiously distinguish between a thing and the word designing it. It's just that we are used to things having randomly assigned gender. That's how it is. A bit like how native English speakers are used to English pronunciation being divorced from how words are written.

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