Gender in the English language has been the focus of two distinct contemporary debates. Mid-20th century academics raised questions about whether English rightly may be said to possess grammatical gender

Grammatical gender

Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...

. Second wave feminism promoted general minimization of gender

Gender

Gender is a range of characteristics used to distinguish between males and females, particularly in the cases of men and women and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Depending on the context, the discriminating characteristics vary from sex to social role to gender identity...

 reference in language. In some contexts, the two debates interacted in various ways.

Old English

Old English had a system of grammatical gender similar to that of Modern German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 and French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

 (although French lacks the neuter):

• Every noun belonged to one of three grammatical gender classes (masculine, feminine, or neuter).
• Within the noun phrase, determiner
  Determiner (class)
  A determiner is a noun-modifier that expresses the reference of a noun or noun-phrase in the context, rather than attributes expressed by adjectives...
  
  s and adjectives showed gender inflection in agreement
  Agreement (linguistics)
  In languages, agreement or concord is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase. Agreement happens when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates....
  
   with the noun.
• The third person personal pronouns and Interrogative
  Interrogative word
  In linguistics, an interrogative word is a function word used for the item interrupted in an information statement. Interrogative words are sometimes called wh-words because most of English interrogative words start with wh-...
  
  /relative pronoun
  Relative pronoun
  A relative pronoun is a pronoun that marks a relative clause within a larger sentence. It is called a relative pronoun because it relates the relative clause to the noun that it modifies. In English, the relative pronouns are: who, whom, whose, whosever, whosesoever, which, and, in some...
  
  s were chosen according to grammatical gender.

Development of natural gender

Old English by the 11th century was beginning to replace grammatical gender with natural gender. Thirteenth-century Middle English

Middle English

Middle English is the stage in the history of the English language during the High and Late Middle Ages, or roughly during the four centuries between the late 11th and the late 15th century....

 retained grammatical gender, but was in transition to the loss of a gender system as indicated by the increasing use of the gender-neutral identifier þe (the or thee). English lost gender classes because of a general decay of inflectional endings and declensional classes by the end of the 14th century. Gender loss began in the north of England; the south-east and the south-west Midlands were the most linguistically conservative regions, and Kent retained traces of gender in the 1340s. Late 14th-century London English had almost completed the shift away from grammatical gender, and Modern English has no morphological agreement of words with grammatical gender.

Modern English

Gender is no longer an inflectional category in Modern English. A notable exception is that continents, nations, many cities, ships, airplanes, cars, and some organizations are sometimes referred to as she and are associated with her in the possessive. Old English followed the gender assignments of German for words derived from it.

The only traces of the Old English gender system are found in the pronominal system and pronoun-antecedent agreement in English that now is based generally on natural gender, with the notable exceptions.

Benjamin Whorf

Benjamin Whorf

In studying the cause of a fire which had started under the conditions just described, Whorf concluded that it was thinking of the "empty" gasoline drums as "empty" in the meaning described in the first definition above, that is as "inert," which led to a fire he investigated...

 considered grammatical gender to be a covert

Covert (linguistics)

In linguistics, a feature of a word or phrase is said to be covert if there is no surface evidence of its existence within that word or phrase. For example, many languages have covert grammatical gender in nouns, in that there is no way to tell from the form of a noun which gender it is; gender...

category in English.

There are two manifestations of gender-based pronoun selection in English:

• The third person singular personal pronouns he/him, she/her, and it (as well as their possessive forms his, her(s), and its, and their reflexive and intensive forms himself, herself, and itself) are chosen according to the natural gender of the antecedent with some notable exceptions.
• The relative pronouns who and which are chosen according to the personal or animate (vs. impersonal or inanimate) status of the antecedent.

The resulting system can be summarized as follows: