"Grammatical gender does not refer to biological sex" I'm quite aware of that, especially after an unfortunate encounter that never happened with a table. She

"Grammatical gender does not refer to biological sex" I'm quite aware of that, especially after an unfortunate encounter that never happened with a table. She claimed to be French but it turned out to be German. That all sounds a bit crap in English. I don't really know how "gender" for nouns feels or works in languages that emphasise it. We do ascribe gender to some nouns in English, such as boats/ships: "she". Why on earth is petra feminine? I've been to Petra (capital P) and it is an incredible place.