In Spain's Spanish we ended up with "new" feminine forms for professionals. Now it's commonplace but some of them sounded pretty strange back then. For instanc

In Spain's Spanish we ended up with "new" feminine forms for professionals. Now it's commonplace but some of them sounded pretty strange back then. For instance you talked about female doctors using "la médico". It's perfectly natural to change that to "la médica", yet you referred to the guard as "el/la guardia" and we still do, we don't talk about a masculine "el guardio". Here's the funny thing: we had/have "juez" for judge, and albeit is was ordinarily masculine it's not an obvious masculine form according to phonological conventions, so "el/la juez" was common and sounded very right. Then female judges started to prefer the new form "jueza" that sounded awful (it still does), but we ended up adopting it because it's their prerogative anyway, who can argue about that? It's interesting to compare this with the deprecation in English of the term actress. Well, in Spanish the non-sexist attitude is to preserve the feminine forms (actriz for actress) and to come up with new explicit ones, exactly the opposite that is. So nope, there isn't a universal sociolinguistics that you can extract from the use of contemporary English and I don't understand how come anybody might expect such a thing.