IMO the gender part just became the term because female and male pronouns happen to be separated by many of these systems.
What if nouns were categorised in Welsh (a “gendered” language) by their feline (femme) or canine (masc) traits, or some other arbitrary distinction that was lost over centuries of linguistic shift to align with Anglo-Saxon sexual hierarchies?
It seems small, but subverting the idea of “binary gender” in languages is one of the ways we can give people the language to describe sexuality and gender as a spectrum.
Any linguist chads who know more about why we use “gender” and “masc vs femme” and what people are saying about this in a world where that binary isnt useful anymore?
Grammatical gender can also refer to arbitrary noun classes like animate is one grammatical gender vs. inanimate is another. This is pure speculation but it makes me wonder if the name of “grammatical gender” is based solely on the extant noun classes in Romance languages.
As an aside, English historically was a language with three noun classes (masc/fem/neuter), but this has fallen out of use as the language almost completely (some exceptions might be pronouns and metaphorically gendered “she” for ships) lost its noun classes a long time ago, and now, even many of the few remnants of gendered terms that actually have to do with people’s gender (e.g. waiter/waitress => server) are falling out as well.
Edit: Altered last sentence in response to @huf@hexbear.net to properly distinguish two separate phenomena
i dont think gender neutral is what you wanted there, english has just lost its noun classes except for the crumbling remnants that are the pronouns. but all that happened in like 900CE-1100CE? so, not very recently. the situation was already the same in chaucer’s english, and it hasnt moved much since.