Sex/gender words - English vs Romance languages

[IamAporcupine]

I am getting all muddled up with words. Maybe other bilingual posters can tell me if this happnes in their language too?

In English:
Sex: male/female (of any species), and in particular, for humans, boy/girl and man/woman.
Gender (when used 'correctly' and not instead of the word sex, as in 'gender scan'): masculine/femenine

Now in my native language (Spanish)
Sexo: macho/hembra, and then for humans: hombre/mujer
(although I did have an interesting discussion yesterday with a vegan who was calling cows (vacas) 'women bovine'...)

Genero: masculino/femenino

So far so good.

But we do say 'sexo femenino' and 'sexo masculino' (direct translations would be 'femenine sex' and 'masculine sex') when referring to women and men, respectively. As expected, the discussion re the meaning of the word woman gets even more confusing.

Also, because the language is so gendered (eg we have femenine/masculine objects too), we have gender agreement rules, where articles, pronouns and adjectives match the gender of the noun. For inanimate objects, this is just a gramatical convention. For animate ones, it becomes obvious that we are in fact referring to the sex of the animal/person (eg la vaca lechera ), yet we still call this gender.

In addition, because of the above, you do use gendered words (mainly adjectives) when talking directly to the person. Which also makes the discussion about pronouns more difficult.

Can anyone relate to this?

Thank you, IamAporcupine , that's interesting.

And just so you know, when I said "I can't think of any occasion where you would use a gendered pronoun (or gendered anything) when talking directly to anyone" I meant in Danish. I can imagine that in Spanish it could be a problem. Thank you for the example of how it might come up.

Gender (thank goodness for a convo on the real meaning of the word!) is fascinating - in modern English we don't really bother with it, which must make learning it a relief. One less thing to worry about. Well apart from the spelling and the giant vocabulary, that is. Having to learn and renember the gender of every freaking inanimate object AND agree the adjectives is a huge brain drain if your language doesn't do it!

Remember, remember
The specific gender
Of every inanimate thing

Just got to think of an ending now