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Notes -
Gender Politics and the Language
If this Quora answer is correct, out of Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages, only English and Afrikaans lack grammatical gender.
So for example: "Tall [Name] went to visit their jolly friend." the only thing which in English changes depending on whether [Name] is a man, woman, or something else, is the pronoun "their", the rest of sentence is gender neutral. But in other GRS languages in order for the sentence to be grammatical, one needs to know both the gender of [Name] and the gender their friend. [Name]'s gender could alter the declension of the adjective "tall" and conjugation of the verb "went".
Thus in the English version of some video game, in which the gender of the protagonist is choosable, the only thing changed (if gender has no story or gameplay impact, as it usually doesn't) are the pronouns with which the game addresses the player character. It so makes sense that Americans reduce gender identity to pronouns, as in writing this is the only way to tell NoahM and NoahF apart.
First generation of transsexuality rights advocates posed no problem even to highly gendered languages. A man wants to be considered a woman, or vice versa? Just treat them as their prefered gender, for the purposes of grammar. But the second generation, which desires to transcend the gender binary, does. Some GRS languages lack neuter altogether, or reserve it for inanimate objects, and using for humans is considered dehumanizing.
It is here where the latest news from France comes in. The progression for "inklusive Sprasche" was "Male Form of the Noun (Congressman)"->"Male Form, with note that it also applies to women (Congressman, which for the purposes of this law means every member of congress)"->"Male and Female Form (Congressman and Congresswoman)"->"Abbreviated Combination of Male and Female Forms (Congress.wo.man or Congress:wo:man or Congress/wo/man)". English has the luxury of "Congressperson" or "Congresspeople" but in other languages in which every noun has a gender, and the male and female forms differ in ways more complex than "-man" and "-woman", it is difficult to create a single word which unambiguously refers to humans of all genders.
Reading closely it seems Macron and his former teacher consider Male-Form-As-Neutral a sensible rule for French; the governing body of language of Laplace, Liouville, and love agreeing with them.
France brings to my mind centralization, dirigisme, standarisation, in contrast to the Anglo localism, free-market, and customary units. In language, this dichotomy means that French has the aforementioned Académie Française, with English lacking an entity prescribing rules and proscribing errors. Thus while the state you can never be force you to write "act:o:r:ess:" (not absolutely sure how this works), your employer possibly could. While in France the state will not currently force you to write "cher·e·s lecteur·rice·s", a march through the institutions could affect the composition of Académie leading to it flipping to the reformist faction and changing that.
The French conservatives have the benefit, which their fellow travelers across the pond do not have, namely that they can point to foreigners (Americans) as ultimately being behind this perceived disruption of their assabiyah (totally genderless language being more likely to be thought up by speakers of nearly genderless English, than by heavily gendered French). American being a culture which French progressives are traditionally not very fond of (and especially so after the Iraq war), so the American connection is an albatross around their necks.
In Slovak, the language where there is grammatical in a sense that really changes the structure, the "gender sensitive language" morphed into using both genders in a speech. It is very similar to English's actor and actress except for every occasion - so we now have "colleague and colleaguess" or "policemen and policewomen" and so forth.
This of course is a terrible solution, it sounds incredibly alien. First, nobody speaks like that in real life. Nobody says - "Hmm, I wonder how many doctors and doctresses work in that hospital" or "If you have a problem call waiter or waitress" etc. Second, as you mention it is already thing of a past. I have already seen "dear colleagues and colleaguesses and nonbinary persons" in an email. It becomes real dumb real fast - instead of focusing on aspect that binds us (we work in the same company) now you have to make it about sex and sexual orientation of everybody. You literally take something unifying (we are all colleagues) and make it a divisive category where everybody falls into a different box. It is absolute fail.
But in a sense I see this all as a huge win, it shows how foreign this wokeness is to many cultures. There are people profusely trying to import these concepts without any rhyme or reason. Genders are no problem in Slovak language, they are somewhat arbitrary and divorced from sex. As somebody said, girl in Slovak is dievča and it is neuter. Knife is nôž and it is masculine as is flower or kvet. And rifle or puška is feminine as is let's say crow or vrana. Generic masculinum for professions is just another of those arbitrary things and up until five seconds ago nobody cared. And in fact bringing actual sex of people into the language also brings weirdness and creepiness. If you ask for a waiter, you used to get a man or a women - waiter is a word for profession and it was not about sex or whatnot. Now if you ask for waiter do you specifically want a man or what? It is just weird and feels like mindfuck. Which I think may be a purpose of the whole excercise.
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In Spanish, the grammatical gender of the subject does change adjectives, but not verbs.
This grammatical gender does not strictly track human gender, or sex, or whatever. It usually does for living things, including people: el abuelo vs. la abuela, or el toro vs. la vaca. But it also has to pick a gender for neutral, inanimate objects. El lápiz, la mano, el vestido. There’s no sense in mapping these to the human male/female binary.
So I don’t think quora is making the statement you think it is. “Grammatical gender” means allowing those declensions and/or conjugations. This includes languages which assign male and female creatures to the same category. It’s not inherently an obstacle to any particular gender politics.
The same is true for Latin and French, so I suspect it is true for all Romance languages. Verb conjugations are based on number and person only.
I assume this is correct Spanish, but when I was studying French in the 1990's, it wasn't correct French - words for living things maintained their grammatical gender regardless of the referent. So it was always le chat even if the cat in question was known to be female. This meant that almost all occupation words had male and female versions, because people wanted grammatical gender of humans to track sex. So Monsieur le proffeseur/Madame la professeuse and such like because Madame le professeur feels off.
This came to a head at some point in the 1990's (I think when Edith Cresson was Prime Minister) because the Academie Francaise insisted in Madame le ministre for female cabinet ministers, everyone who didn't have a baton up their derriere about grammatical gender felt this was wrong, and the female ministers in question felt that coming up with a neologism like ministrice would be diminishing their status. I am not sure how the row was resolved because I gave up foreign languages as soon as I could.
I do remember that masculine-as-generic (and particularly ils as the 3rd person plural for mixed groups) was uncontroversially correct French in a way that it never was in English (with singular "they" drifting in and out of fashion since time immemorial).
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This sounds German, not French?
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